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https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
2018-04-12
Tim Urban
<div><div><p>Hey readers! Quick note before we jump in:</p>
<p>This is a post about something I’ve been wanting to write about forever: careers. Society tells us a lot of things about what we should want in a career and what the possibilities are—which is weird because I’m pretty sure society knows very little about any of this. When it comes to careers, society is like your great uncle who traps you at holidays and goes on a 15-minute mostly incoherent unsolicited advice monologue, and you tune out almost the whole time because it’s super clear he has very little idea what he’s talking about and that everything he says is like 45 years outdated. Society is like that great uncle, and conventional wisdom is like his rant. Except in this case, instead of tuning it out, we pay rapt attention to every word, and then we make major career decisions based on what he says. Kind of a weird thing for us to do.</p>
<p>This post isn’t me giving you career advice really—it’s a framework that I think can help you make career decisions that actually reflect who you are, what you want, and what our rapidly changing career landscape looks like today. You’re not a pro at this, but you’re certainly more qualified to figure out what’s best for you than our collective un-self-aware great uncle. For those of you yet to start your career who aren’t sure what you want to do with their lives, or those of you currently in the middle of your career who aren’t sure you’re on the right path, I hope this post can help you press the reset button on your thought process and get some clarity.</p>
<p>Finally, it feels very good to put this post up. It’s been way, way too long. The last year has been pretty frustrating for me and anyone who likes Wait But Why—a lot of build-up of ideas with none of the satisfying release of those ideas on the blog (most of my last year has been spent working on another, way longer post). I’m hoping this WBW Dark Ages era is nearing its end, because I miss hanging out here. Thanks, as always, to the small group of ridiculously generous, ridiculously patient patrons who have stuck with us through such a slow period.</p>
<p>– Tim</p>
<p><em><strong>PDF:</strong> If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can <a href="https://gum.co/wbw-career-path">buy it here</a>.</em></p>
<p>_______</p>
<h5><strong>Your Life Path So Far</strong></h5>
<p>For most of us, childhood is kind of like a river, and we’re kind of like tadpoles.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/river-2.png"></a></p>
<p>We didn’t choose the river. We just woke up out of nowhere and found ourselves on some path set for us by our parents, by society, and by circumstances. We’re told the rules of the river and the way we should swim and what our goals should be. Our job isn’t to think about our path—it’s to succeed on the path we’ve been placed on, based on the way success has been defined for us.</p>
<p>For many of us—and I suspect for a large portion of Wait But Why readers—our childhood river then feeds into a pond, called college.<a href="#footnote-1-6721">1</a> We may have some say in which particular pond we landed in, but in the end, most college ponds aren’t really that different from one another.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/pond-1.png"></a></p>
<p>In the pond, we have a bit more breathing room and some leeway to branch out into more specific interests. We start to ponder, looking out at the pond’s shores—out there where the real world starts and where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives. This usually brings some mixed feelings.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Looking-at-shore-2.png"></a></p>
<p>And then, 22 years after waking up in a rushing river, we’re kicked out of the pond and told by the world to go make something of our lives.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/shore-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>There are a few problems here. One is that at that moment, you’re kind of skill-less and knowledge-less and a lot of other things-less:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/shore-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>But before you can even address your general uselessness, there’s an even bigger issue—your pre-set path ended. Kids in school are kind of like employees of a company where someone else is the CEO. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you. And you’ve spent your whole life becoming a pro student, leaving you with zero experience as the CEO of anything. Up to now, you’ve only been in charge of the micro decisions—”How do I succeed at my job as a student?”—and now you’re suddenly holding the keys to the macro cockpit as well, tasked with answering stressful macro questions like “Who am I?” and “What are the important things in life?” and “What are my options for paths and which one should I choose and how do I even make a path?” When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us, leaving us standing there holding our respective dicks, with no idea how to do this.</p>
<p>Then time happens. And we end up on a path. And that path becomes our life’s story.</p>
<p>At the end of our life, when we look back at how things went, we can see our life’s path in its entirety, from an aerial view.</p>
<p>When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.</p>
<p>So this is a post about path-making. Let’s take a 30-minute pre-deathbed pause to look down at the path we’re on, and ahead at where that path seems to be going, and make sure it makes sense.</p>
<p><strong>The Cook and the Chef—Revisited</strong></p>
<p>In the past, <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">I’ve written about</a> the critical distinction between “reasoning from first principles” and “reasoning by analogy”—or what I called being a “chef” vs. being a “cook.” Since writing the post, I notice this distinction everywhere, and I’ve thought about it roughly 2 million times in my own life.</p>
<p>The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning—reasoning by analogy—happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it, with maybe a little personal tweak here and there—kind of like a cook following an already written recipe.</p>
<p>A pure verbatim recipe-copying cook and a pure independently inventive chef are the two extreme ends of what is, of course, a spectrum. But for any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.</p>
<p>Being a chef takes a tremendous amount of time and energy—which makes sense, because you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re trying to invent it for the first time. Puzzling your way to a conclusion feels like navigating a mysterious forest while blindfolded and always involves a whole lot of failure, in the form of trial and error. Being a cook is far easier and more straightforward and less icky. In most situations, being a chef is a terrible waste of time, and comes with a high opportunity cost, since time on Earth is immensely scarce. Right now, I’m wearing J. Crew jeans and a plain t-shirt and a hoodie and Allbirds shoes, because I’m trying to conform. Throughout my life, I’ve looked around at people who seem kind of like me and I’ve bought a bunch of clothes that look like what they wear. And this makes sense—because clothes aren’t important to me, and they’re not how I choose to express my individuality. So in my case, fashion is a perfect part of life to use a reasoning shortcut and be a cook.<a href="#footnote-2-6721">2</a>
</p><p>But then there are those parts of life that are really really deeply important—like where you choose to live, or the kinds of friends you choose to make, or whether you want to get married and to whom, or whether you want to have kids and how you want to raise them, or how you set your lifestyle priorities.</p>
<p>Career-path-carving is definitely one of those really really deeply important things. Let’s spell out the obvious reasons why:</p>
<p><strong>Time. </strong>For most of us, a career (including ancillary career time, like time spent commuting and thinking about your work) will eat up somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours. At the moment, a long human life runs at about 750,000 hours. When you subtract childhood (~175,000 hours) and the portion of your adult life you’ll spend sleeping, eating, exercising, and otherwise taking care of the human pet you live in, along with errands and general life upkeep (~325,000 hours), you’re left with 250,000 “meaningful adult hours.”<a href="#footnote-3-6721">3</a> So a typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time—not something to be a cook about.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Pie-Chart.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>Quality of Life. </strong>Your career has a major effect on all the non-career hours as well. For those of us not already wealthy through past earnings, marriage, or inheritance, a career doubles as our means of support. The particulars of your career also often play a big role in determining where you live, how flexible your life is, the kinds of things you’re able to do in your free time, and sometimes even in who you end up marrying.</p>
<p><strong>Impact. </strong>On top of your career being the way you spend much of your time and the means of support for the rest of your time, your career triples as your primary mode of impact-making. Every human life touches thousands of other lives in thousands of different ways, and all of those lives you alter then go on to touch thousands of lives of their own. We can’t test this, but I’m pretty sure that you can select any 80-year-old alive today, go back in time 80 years, find them as an infant, throw the infant in the trash, and then come back to the present day and find a countless number of things changed. All lives make a large impact on the world and on the future—but the <em>kind</em> of impact you end up making is largely within your control, depending on the values you live by and the places you direct your energy. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.</p>
<p><strong>Identity. </strong>In our childhoods, people ask us about our career plans by asking us what we want to <em>be</em> when we grow up. When we grow up, we tell people about our careers by telling them what we <em>are. </em>We don’t say, “I practice law”—we say, “I am a lawyer.” This is probably an unhealthy way to think about careers, but the way many societies are right now, a person’s career quadruples as the person’s primary identity. Which is kind of a big thing.</p>
<p>So yeah—your career path isn’t like my shitty sweatshirt. It’s really really deeply important, putting it squarely in “Definitely absolutely make sure to be a chef about it” territory.</p>
<p><strong>Your Career Map</strong></p>
<p>Which brings us to you. I don’t know exactly what your deal is. But there’s a good chance you’re somewhere in one of the blue regions—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Life-path.png"></a></p>
<p>—which means your career path is a work in progress.<a href="#footnote-4-6721">4</a>
</p><p>Whether you’re yet to start your career or well into it, somewhere in the back of your mind (or maybe in the very front of it) is a “Career Plans” map.</p>
<p>We can group map holders into three broad categories—each of which is well-represented in the river, in the pond, standing on the shore, and at every stage of adult life.</p>
<p>One group of people will look at the map and see a big, stressful question mark.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/map1.png"></a></p>
<p>These are people who feel indecisive about their career path. They’ve been told to follow their passion, but they don’t feel especially passionate about anything. They’ve been told to let their strengths guide them, but they’re not sure what they’re best at. They may have felt they had answers in the past, but they’ve changed and they’re no longer sure who they are or where they’re going.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>Other people will see a nice clear arrow representing a direction they feel confident is right—but find their legs walking in a different direction. They’re living with one of the most common sources of human misery, a career path they know in their heart is wrong.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/map2.png"></a></p>
<p>The lucky ones feel they know where they want to go and believe they’re marching in that direction.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/map3.png"></a></p>
<p>But even these people should pause and ask themselves, “Who actually drew this arrow? Was it really me?” The answer can get confusing.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure all of these people would benefit from a moment of career path reflection.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>The Okay But Why Do You Think You Can Help Me With My Career Reflection You Draw Stick Figures for a Living Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>Extremely fair question. One thing I always ask myself as I pick topics to write about is, “Am I qualified to write about this?” Here are the reasons I decided to take on this topic:</p>
<p>1) I have spent most of the last 20 years in a perpetual state of analyzing my own career path.</p>
<p>2) My path has taken a lot of turns—from wanting to be a movie star when I was 7 to wanting to be the president when I was 17 to wanting to write film scores when I was 22 to wanting to be an entrepreneur when I was 24 to wanting to write musicals when I was 29 to most recently wanting to be a writer-ish guy.</p>
<p>3) After being pretty all over the place about my career path for most of my life, I actually love my job now. That’s always subject to change, but being able to look at the decision-making processes that led me to confusing or frustrating places, side by side with the decisions that led me to a more fulfilling place, has offered me some wisdom on where people tend to go wrong.</p>
<p>4) On top of having my own story to look at, I’ve had a front-row seat for the stories of my dozen or so closest friends. My friends seem to share my career path obsessiveness, so between observing their paths and talking with them about those paths again and again along the way, I’ve broadened my views on the topic, which helps me to distinguish between the lessons that are my-life specific and those that are more universal.</p>
<p>5) Finally, this isn’t a post about which careers are better or worse than others or which career values are more or less meaningful—there are lots of social scientists and self-help authors out there with good data on that, and I’m not one of them. It’s instead a framework that I think can help a career-path reflector better see their own situation, and what really matters to them, clearly and honestly. This framework has worked really well for me, so I think it can probably be helpful for other people too.</p>
</div>
<p>Now that you’ve taken a fresh look at your Career Plans map, along with whatever arrow may or may not be on it, put it down and out of sight. We’ll come back to it at the end of the post. It’s time now for a deep dive—let’s think about this from scratch. From first principles.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">cook-chef post</a>, I designed a simple framework for how a chef makes major career choices. At its core is a simple Venn diagram.</p>
<p>The first part of the diagram is the Want Box, which contains all the careers you find desirable.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Want-Box.png"></a></p>
<p>The second part of the diagram is the Reality Box. The Reality Box is for the set of all careers that are realistic to potentially achieve—based on a comparison, in each case, between your level of potential in an area and the general difficulty of achieving success in that area.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Reality-Box.png"></a></p>
<p>The overlapping area contains your optimal career path choices—the set of arrows you should consider drawing on your Career Map. We can call it the Option Pool.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/venn.png"></a></p>
<p>This is straightforward enough. But actually filling in these boxes accurately is way harder than it looks. For the diagram to work, it has to be as close to the truth as possible, and to get there, we have to lift up the hood of our subconscious and head down. Let’s start with the Want Box.</p>
<p><strong>Deep Analysis, Part 1: Your Want Box</strong></p>
<p>The hard thing about the Want Box is that you want a bunch of different things—or, rather, there are a bunch of different sides of you, and each of them wants—and fears—its own stuff. And since some motivations have conflicting interests with others, you cannot, by definition, have everything you want. Going for one thing you want means, by definition, not going for others, and sometimes, it’ll specifically mean going directly <em>against</em> others. The Want Box is a game of compromise.</p>
<p><strong>The Yearning Octopus</strong></p>
<p>To do a proper Want Box audit, you need to think about what you yearn for in a career and then unpack the shit out of it. Luckily, we have someone here who can help us. The Yearning Octopus.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Octopus-1.png"></a></p>
<p>We each have our own personal Yearning Octopus<a href="#footnote-5-6721">5</a> in our heads. The particulars of each person’s Yearning Octopus will vary, but people also aren’t all that different from each other, and I bet many of us feel very similar yearnings and fears (especially given that I find that Wait But Why readers tend to have a lot in common).</p>
<p>The first thing to think about is that there are totally distinct yearning <em>worlds</em>—each living on one tentacle. These tentacles often do not get along with each other.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Octopus-2a.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Octopus-2B.png"></a></p>
<p>It gets worse. Each tentacle is made up of a bunch of different individual yearnings and their accompanying fears—and <em>these </em>often massively conflict with each other too.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Octopus-3-segmented-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Let’s take a closer look at each tentacle to see what’s going on.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/personal-tentacle.png"></a></p>
<p>The Personal Yearnings tentacle is probably the hardest one to generalize here—it’s pretty particular to each of us. It’s a reflection of our specific personality and our values, and it bears the burden of probably the most complex and challenging human need: fulfillment. It’s also in the shit dealing with not only our current selves, but a bunch of our past selves too. The dreams of 7-year-old you and the idealized identity of 12-year-old you and the secret hopes of 17-year-old you and the evolving passions of your current self are all somewhere on the personal tentacle, each throwing their own little fit about getting what they want, and each fully ready to make you feel horrible about yourself with their disappointment and disgust if you fail them. On top of that, your fear of death sometimes emerges on the personal tentacle, all needy about you leaving your mark and achieving greatness and all that. The personal tentacle is why you don’t find very many billionaires content to spend the rest of their life sipping cocktails on the beach—it’s a highly needy tentacle.</p>
<p>And yet, the personal tentacle is also one that often ends up somewhat neglected. Because in many cases, it’s the ickiest set of yearnings to really <em>go</em> for; because the fears of this tentacle aren’t scary in an immediate way—they creep in out of the background over time; and because the personal tentacle is always at risk of getting bowled over early in your career by the powerful animal emotions of the other tentacles. This neglect can leave a person with major regrets later on once the dust settles. An unfulfilled Personal Yearnings tentacle is often the explanation, for example, behind a very successful, very unhappy person—who may believe they got successful in the wrong field.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/social-tentacle.png"></a></p>
<p>The Social Yearnings tentacle is probably our most primitive, animal side, with its core drive stemming back to our tribal evolutionary past. On the tentacle are a number of odd creatures.</p>
<p>As we’ve discussed <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">before</a> on this blog, we all have a Social Survival Mammoth living in our heads who’s earth-shatteringly obsessed with what other people think of us. This means he craves acceptance and inclusion and being well-liked, while likewise being petrified of embarrassment, negative judgment, and disapproval. He really really really wants to be in the in-group and he really really really doesn’t want to be in the outgroup. He’s <a href="https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Mammoth1.png">quite cute</a> though.</p>
<p>Then there’s your ego, who’s a similar character but even more needy. Your ego doesn’t just want to be accepted; it wants to be admired, desired, and fawned upon—ideally, on a mass scale. More upsetting to it than being disliked is being ignored. It wants to be relevant and important and widely known.</p>
<p>There are other characters milling about as well. Somewhere else on the social tentacle is a little judge with a little gavel who gets very butthurt if it thinks people aren’t judging you fairly—if you’re not appropriately appreciated. It’s very important to the judge that people are aware of exactly how smart and talented you think you are. The judge is also big on holding grudges—which is the reason a lot of people are driven more than anything by a desire to <em>show</em> that person or those people who never believed in them.</p>
<p>Finally, some of us may find a loving little dog on our social tentacle who wants more than anything in the world to please its owner, and who just cannot bear the thought of disappointing them. The one problem with this adorable creature is that its owner isn’t you. It’s a person with so much psychological power over you that, if you’re not careful, you may dedicate your whole career to trying to please them and make them proud. (It’s probably a parent.)</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/lifestyle-tentacle.png"></a></p>
<p>The Lifestyle Yearnings tentacle mostly just wants Tuesday to be a good day. But like, a really pleasant, enjoyable day—with plenty of free time and self-care and relaxation and luxuries.</p>
<p>It’s also concerned with your life in the big picture being as great as possible—as far as your lifestyle tentacle is concerned, you should be able to do what you want to do in life, when and how you want to do it, with the people you like most. Life should be full of fun times and rich experiences, but it should also roll by smoothly, without too much hard work and as few bumps in the road as possible.</p>
<p>The issue is, even if you place a high priority on your lifestyle yearnings, it’s pretty difficult to keep the whole tentacle happy at the same time. The part of the tentacle that just wants to sit around and relax will hold you back from sweating to build the kind of career that offers long-term flexibility and the kind of wealth that can make life luxurious and cushy and full of toys. The part of the tentacle that only feels comfortable when the future feels predictable will reject the exact kinds of paths that may generate the long-term freedom another part of the tentacle longs for. The side of you that wants a stress-free life doesn’t get along very well with the side of you that thirsts to be hang gliding off a cliff in Namibia like Richard Branson.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/moral-tentacle-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The Moral Yearnings tentacle thinks the rest of the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus are a real pack of dicks—each one more self-involved and self-indulgent than the next. The parts of you on the moral tentacle look around and see a big world that needs so much fixing; they see billions of people no less worthy than you of a good life who just happened to be born into inferior circumstances; they see an uncertain future ahead that hangs in the balance between utopia and dystopia for life on Earth—a future we can actually push in the right direction if we could only get our other tentacles out of our way. While the other tentacles fantasize about what you would do with your life if you had a billion dollars in the bank, the moral tentacle fantasizes about the kind of impact you could make if you had a billion dollars to <em>deploy</em>.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the other tentacles of your Yearning Octopus find the moral tentacle to be insufferable. They also can’t begin to understand philanthropy for philanthropy’s sake—they think, “Other people aren’t me, so why would I spend my time and energy working to help them?”—but they <em>can </em>understand philanthropy for their own motive’s sake. While the moral and lifestyle tentacles tend to be in direct conflict, others may sometimes find common ground—the social tentacle can get very into philanthropy if it’ll happen to win you respect and admiration from a highly regarded social group, and some people’s personal tentacle may find the meaning or self-worth it so craves in a philanthropic endeavor.</p>
<p>That’s why, when you do something philanthropic—or anything altruistic, really—there are a few separate things going on in your head. The part of you <em>determined </em>to get proper public credit for the deed lives on your social tentacle; the part of you that thinks “God I’m a good person” lives on your personal tentacle; and the part of you that really loves seeing the person or group you helped be better off lives on your moral tentacle. Likewise, <em>not </em>doing anything for others can hurt you on multiple tentacles—the moral tentacle because it feels guilty and sad, the social tentacle because this may cause others to judge you as a selfish or greedy person, and the personal tentacle because it may lower your self-esteem.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/practical-tentacle.png"></a></p>
<p>Your Practical Yearnings tentacle thinks all of this is fine and great—but it would also like to point out that it’s March 31st and your rent is due tomorrow, and the funny thing about that is that it logged into your bank account and saw that the number of dollars in it is actually less than the number of dollars that your landlord will need from you sometime in the next 34 hours. And yeah it knows that you deposited that check on Thursday and that it’s supposed to clear tomorrow morning, but your practical tentacle also could have sworn that just last month, all the tentacles promised that they’d make some sacrifices in order to build up at least a little bank account cushion so that simply paying the rent wouldn’t have to be really fucking stressful every month. Your practical tentacle also can’t help but notice that your social tentacle offered to buy a round of drinks for all nine people you went to the bar with last Saturday so those people would think of you as a classy, generous person, and that your lifestyle tentacle chose to rent what sure seems like a pretty nice-ass apartment for someone now living check to check, and that the updates have gotten real quiet from your friend about that bagel delivery service he started six months ago that your moral tentacle happily invested $2,500 in to help it get off the ground, and oh also that meanwhile your personal tentacle has everyone sweating their dick off working at two comedy-writing internships simultaneously that somehow manage to bring in less money combined than you made dressing up as an Egyptian enchantress to wait tables at Jekyll &amp; Hyde sophomore year of college.</p>
<p>At its basic level, your practical tentacle wants to make sure you can eat food and wear clothes and buy the medicine you need and not live outside. It doesn’t really care how these things happen—it just wants them to happen. But then everyone else on the octopus makes your practical tentacle’s life super hard by being fucky about things. Every time your income goes up, your lifestyle tentacle decides to raise the bar on what it wants and expects, leaving your practical tentacle continually in the shit trying to cover it all so you don’t have to run up your credit card debt. Your personal tentacle has all of these weird needs that take up a lot of time and more often than not aren’t exactly big money-makers. And while your practical tentacle would be totally down to just ask your rich uncle for money to help out, your social tentacle outlawed asking others for money because “it’s not a good look,” with your personal tentacle chiming in that “yeah, we’re better than that.”</p>
<p>So that’s the situation. You’ve got this Yearning Octopus in your head with five tentacles (or however many yours has), each with their own agenda, that often conflict with each other. Then there are the distinct individual yearnings on each tentacle, often in conflict amongst themselves. And if that weren’t enough, you sometimes have furious internal conflict inside a <em>single</em> yearning. Like when your desire to pursue your passion can’t figure out what it’s most passionate about.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Passion-argument.png"></a></p>
<p>Or when you want so badly to be respected, but then you remember that a career that wins the undying respect of one segment of society will always receive shrugs from other segments and even contemptuous eye rolls from other segments still.</p>
<p>Or when you decide to satisfy your urge to help others, before realizing that the part of you that wants to dedicate your life to helping to mitigate humanity’s greatest existential risks has palpable disdain for the part of you that would rather make a tangible positive impact on your local community—while the part of you that can’t stand the thought of the millions of today’s humans without access to clean water finds both of those other yearnings to be pretty cold and heartless.</p>
<p>So yeah, your Yearning Octopus is complicated. And no human in history has ever satisfied their entire octopus—that’s why you’ll never find it fully smiling. Human yearning is a game of choices and sacrifices and compromise.</p>
<p><strong>Dissecting the Octopus</strong></p>
<p>With that in mind, let’s return to your Want Box. When we think about our career goals and fears and hopes and dreams, our consciousness is just accessing the net output of the Yearning Octopus—which is usually made up of its loudest voices. Only by digging into our mind’s subconscious can we see what’s really going on.<a href="#footnote-6-6721">6</a>
</p><p>The cool thing is that we all have the ability to do that. The stuff in your subconscious is like stuff in the basement of a house. It’s not off-limits to us—it’s just in the basement. We can go look at it anytime—we just have to A) remember that the house has a basement, and B) actually spend the time and energy to go down there, even though going down there might suck.</p>
<p>So let’s head to the basement of your mind to look for the octopus. Unless you’re one of those people who’s really practiced at analyzing your subconscious, it might be dark in the basement, making it hard to see your octopus. The way to start turning the lights on is by identifying what your conscious mind currently knows about your yearnings and fears, and then unpacking it.</p>
<p>Like if there’s a certain career path that sounds fantastic to you, unpack that. Which tentacles in particular are yearning for that career—and which specific parts of those tentacles?</p>
<p>If you’re not currently working towards that career you supposedly yearn for, try to figure out why not. If you think it’s because you’re afraid of failing, unpack <em>that</em>. Fear of failure can emerge from any of the tentacles, so that’s not a specific enough analysis. You want to find the specific source of the fear. Is it a social tentacle fear of embarrassment, or of being judged by others as not that smart, or of appearing to be not that successful to your romantic interests? Is it a personal tentacle fear of damaging your own self-image—of confirming a suspicion about yourself that haunts you? Is it a lifestyle tentacle fear of having to downgrade your living situation, or of bringing stress and instability into a currently predictable life? Or maybe that fear of a living situation downgrade isn’t actually emerging from your lifestyle tentacle, but more so from your social tentacle—in other words, is it possible you’re indifferent about the apartment change itself but super concerned about the <em>message</em> a lifestyle downgrade sends to your friends and family? Or are there financial commitments you simply cannot back out of at the moment, and your practical tentacle is in a genuine panic about how you’ll make ends meet should this career switch take longer than expected to work out, or not work out at all? Or are a few of these combining together to generate your fear of making the leap?</p>
<p>Perhaps you don’t really think it’s fear of failure that’s stopping you, but something else. Maybe it’s a dread of the change in identity—both internally and externally—that inevitably accompanies a career move like this. Maybe it’s the heavy weight of inertia—an intense resistance to change—that seems to exist in and of itself and overpowers all of your other yearnings. In either case, you’d want to unpack the feeling and ask yourself exactly which tentacles are so opposed to an identity shift, or so driven by inertia.</p>
<p>Maybe you pine to be rich. You fantasize about a life where you make $1.2 million a year, and you feel a tremendous drive to make it happen. All five tentacles can feel a desire for wealth under certain circumstances, each for their own reasons. Unpack it.</p>
<p>As you unpack an inner drive to make money, maybe you discover that at its core, the drive is more for a sense of security than for vast wealth. That can be unpacked too. A yearning for security at its simplest is just your practical tentacle doing what your practical tentacle does. But maybe it’s not actually basic security you want as much as a guarantee of a certain level of fanciness demanded by your lifestyle or social tentacle. Or perhaps what you really want is a level of security so over-the-top secure it can no longer be called a security yearning—instead, it may be an impulse by the emotional well-being section of your lifestyle tentacle to alleviate a compulsive financial stress you were raised to forever feel, almost regardless of your actual financial situation.</p>
<p>The answers to all of these questions lie somewhere on the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus. And by asking questions like these and digging deep enough to identify the true roots of your various yearnings, you start to turn on the basement light and acquaint yourself with your octopus in all its complexity.</p>
<p>You’ll also come to understand which of your inner yearnings seem to speak the loudest in your mind and carry the most pull in your decision-making processes. Pretty quickly, a yearning hierarchy will begin to reveal itself. You’ll identify yearnings that speak loudly and get their way; yearnings that cry at the top of their lungs but get continually elbowed out of the way by higher-prioritized parts of the octopus; yearnings that seem resigned to their low-status positions in the hierarchy.</p>
<p><strong>Searching for Imposters</strong></p>
<p>We’re making good progress—but we’re just getting started. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of your Yearning Octopus, you can start doing the real work—work that takes place another level down in your subconscious, in the basement of the basement. Here, you can set up a little interrogation room and one by one, bring each yearning down into it for a cross-examination.</p>
<p>You’ll start by asking each yearning: how did you end up here, and why are you the way you are? Desires, beliefs, values, and fears don’t materialize out of nowhere. They’re either developed over time by our internal consciousness as observations and life experience pour in, or they’re implanted in us from the outside, by someone else. In other words, they’re the product of either you the chef or you the cook.</p>
<p>So the goal here in your creepy interrogation room is to tug on the faces of each of your yearnings to find out if it’s authentically you, or if it’s someone else <em>disguised </em>as you.</p>
<p>You can pull on a yearning’s face by playing the Why Game. You’ll ask your initial Why—<em>Why is this something I want?—</em>and get to some kind of Because. Then you’ll keep going. Why did that particular Because lead you to want what you now want? And when did that particular Because gain so much gravity with you? You’ll get to a deeper Because behind the Because. And if you continue with this, you’ll usually discover one of three things:</p>
<p>1) You’ll trace the Why back to its origin and reveal a long chain of authentic evolution that developed through deep independent thought. You’ll pull on their face and confirm that the skin is real.</p>
<p>2) You’ll trace the Why back to an original Because that someone else installed in you—<em>I guess the only reason I actually have this value is because my mom kind of forced it on me—</em>and you realize that you never really thought to consider whether you actually independently agree with it. You never stopped to ask yourself whether your own accumulated wisdom actually justifies the level of conviction you feel about that core belief. In a case like this, the yearning is revealed to be an imposter pretending to be an authentic yearning of yours. You pull on its face and it’s a mask that comes off, exposing the yearning’s original installer underneath.</p>
<p>3) You’ll trace the Why back and back and get kind of lost in a haze of “I guess I just know this because it’s true!” This could be an authentic you thing, or just another version of #2, in an instance where you can’t recall the moment this feeling was installed in you. Somewhere deep in you, you’ll have a hunch about which it is.</p>
<p>In a #1 scenario, you can be proud that you developed that part of you like a chef. It’s an authentic and hard-earned feeling or value.</p>
<p>In a #2 or maybe #3 scenario, you’ve discovered that you’ve been duped. You’ve let someone else sneak onto your Yearning Octopus while you weren’t looking. When it comes to that particular belief of yours, you’re a cook following someone else’s recipe—an obedient robot reciting desires and fears out of someone else’s brain.</p>
<p>There’s a chance you’re an unusually wise person whose examination reveals an octopus developed mostly by you and kept readily up to date. More likely, you’re like me and most of my friends—your interrogation room reveals some definite imposters, or at least a lot of ambiguity. Like, underneath one mask, you’ll find your mom.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-2.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-3.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-4.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-5-1.png"></a></p>
<p>You’ll pull off others to reveal the values and judgments of broader conventional wisdom, or the viewpoints of your more immediate community, or what’s considered cool by the dominant culture of your generation or the immediate culture within your closest group of friends.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-6.png"></a></p>
<p>Sometimes you’ll get to the end of a Why-Because pathway only to find the philosophy in a famous novel, or something a celebrity hero of yours once said in an interview, or a strong opinion one of your professors always repeated.</p>
<p>You might even find that some of your yearnings and fears were written by you…when you were seven years old. Like a childhood dream that was etched into the back of your consciousness as the thing you believe you <em>really </em>want, when you’re being <em>truly</em> honest.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-7.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mask-8-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The interrogation room probably won’t be that fun a time. But it’s time well spent—because you’re not your 7-year-old self, just like you’re not your parents or your friends or your generation or your society or your heroes or your past decisions or your recent circumstances. You’re Current-Age You—the only person, and the only version of yourself, who is actually qualified to want and not want the things you want and don’t want.</p>
<p>To be clear, this isn’t to say that it’s wrong to live by the words of a wise parent or a famous philosopher or friends you respect or the convictions of a younger you. Humble people are by <em>definition </em>influence-able—influences are an important and inevitable part of who each of us is. The key distinction is this:</p>
<p>Do you treat the words of your external influences as information, held and considered by an authentic inner you, that you’ve carefully decided to embrace? Or are your influences themselves actually in your brain, <em>masquerading as </em>inner you?</p>
<p>Do you want the same thing someone else you know wants because you heard them talk about it, you thought about it alongside your own life experience, and you eventually decided that, for now, you agree? Or because you heard someone talk about what they want or fear, and you thought, “I don’t know shit and that person does, so if they say X is true, I’m sure they’re right”—and then you etched those ideas into your mind, never again feeling the need to question them?</p>
<p>The former is what chefs do. The latter is what you do when you’re being an obedient robot. And a robot is what you become when at some point you get the idea in your head that someone else is more qualified to be you than you are.</p>
<p>The good news is that all humans make this mistake—and you can fix it. Just like your subconscious is right there for viewing if you want to view it—it’s also there for changing and updating and rewriting. It’s your head—you’re allowed to do with it what you want.</p>
<p>So it’s time for some evictions. Masked imposters have to go. Even mom and dad.</p>
<p>At the end of this, your octopus may look a little barren, leaving you feeling a little like you don’t know who you even are anymore. We usually think of this as a bad feeling, or even an existential crisis, but it actually means you’re doing better than most people.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/roller-coaster-1-2.png"></a></p>
<p>The drop from naive over-confidence to wise, realistic humility never feels good, but pausing the roller coaster while it’s still on that first cliff and avoiding the pain—which turns out to be a lot of people’s move—isn’t a great strategy. Wisdom isn’t correlated with knowledge, it’s correlated with being in touch with reality—it’s not how far to the right you are on the graph, it’s how close you are to the orange line. Wisdom hurts at first, but it’s the only place where actual growth happens. The irony is that the cliff-pausers of the world like to make the wiser, braver valley-dwellers or continual-climbers feel bad about themselves—because they fundamentally don’t get how knowing yourself works. They haven’t reached that stage yet.</p>
<p>Getting to know your real self is super hard and never complete. But if you’ve tumbled off the cliff, you’ve gone through a key rite of passage and progress is now possible. As you climb up the orange line, you’ll slowly but surely begin to repopulate your Yearning Octopus with your real self.</p>
<p>At the moment, it probably won’t be obvious what those missing yearnings of yours are exactly—because they’re on an even deeper floor of your subconscious. They’re in the basement of the basement of the basement—in a place called Denial Prison.</p>
<p><strong>Denial Prison</strong></p>
<p>Our brain’s Denial Prison is a place most of us don’t even know is there—it’s where we put the parts of us we repress and deny.</p>
<p>The authentic yearnings of ours that we’re in touch with—i.e. those that proved to be authentic during interrogation—were easy parts of our true selves to find in our subconscious, lying in plain sight, right below the surface of our consciousness. Even our conscious mind knows these yearnings well, because they frequently make their way upstairs into our thoughts. These are the parts of us we have a healthy relationship with.</p>
<p>But then there are the parts of you that weren’t living on your octopus where they’re supposed to be—instead, you found an imposter in their place. These lost parts of you are often incredibly hard to access, because they’ve been living deep in your subconscious, on a floor so low it’s almost not there at all. Almost.</p>
<p>Some parts of us are banished down on basement #3 because they’re extraordinarily painful for us to acknowledge or think about. Sometimes new parts of us are born only to be immediately locked up in prison as part of a denial of our own evolution—i.e. out of stubbornness. But there are other times when a part of us is in Denial Prison because someone <em>else</em> locked it up down there. In the case of your yearnings, some of them will have been put there by whatever masked intruder had been taking its place. If dad has successfully convinced you that you care deeply about having a prestigious career, he probably has also convinced you that the part of you that, deep down, really wants to be a carpenter isn’t really you and isn’t what you really want. At some point during your childhood, he threw your passion for carpentry into a dark, dank Denial Prison cell.</p>
<p>So let’s gather your courage and head down to the basement of the basement of the basement of your mind and see what we find.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/denial-prison-1-1.png"></a></p>
<p>You may pass some unpleasant characters.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/denial-prison-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Leave them for another time—right now, search for locked-away career-related yearnings. Maybe you’ll find a repressed passion to teach. Or a desire to be famous that your particular tribe has shamed you out of. Or a deep love of long blocks of free, open leisure time that your hornier, greedier teenage self kicked downstairs in favor of a raging ambition.</p>
<p>There will be certain parts of your authentic self you won’t be able to uncover in Denial Prison—it’s pretty dark down there. But be patient—now that you’ve done your audit and cleared space for them on your octopus, they may begin to emerge.</p>
<p><strong>Priority Rankings</strong></p>
<p>The other part of our Yearning Octopus audit will address the hierarchy of your yearnings. Almost as important as the yearnings themselves is the priority they’re given. The hierarchy is easy to see because it’s revealed in your actions. You may like to think a desire to do something bold is high up on your hierarchy, but if you’re not currently working on something bold, it reveals that however important boldness is to you, something else—some source of fear or inertia in you—is currently being prioritized above it.</p>
<p>It’s important to remember that a ranking of yearnings is also a ranking of fears. The octopus contains anything that could make you want or not want to pursue a certain career, and the reverse side of each yearning is its accompanying fear of the opposite. The reverse side of your yearning to be admired is a fear of embarrassment. If you flip over your desire for self-actualization, you’ll see a fear of underachieving. The other half of your craving of self-esteem is a fear of feeling shame. If your actions don’t seem to match what you believe is the internal hierarchy of your yearnings, usually it’s because you’re forgetting to think about the role your fears are playing. What looks like a determined drive for success, for example, might actually be someone running <em>away </em>from a negative self-image or trying to escape feelings like envy or under-appreciation. If your actions seem beholden to yearnings that you don’t believe you actually care that much about, you’re probably not looking closely enough at your fears.</p>
<p>With both yearnings and fears in mind, think about what your internal hierarchy might look like, and return that same important question: “Who made this order? Was it really me?”</p>
<p>For example, we’re often told to “follow our passion”—this is society saying “put your passion yearnings at the top of your hierarchy.” That’s a very specific instruction. Maybe that’s the right thing for you, but it also very well might not be. It’s something you need to independently evaluate.</p>
<p>To get this right, let’s try to do a fresh ranking, from first principles, based on who we really are, how we’ve evolved over time, and what really matters to us most, right now.</p>
<p>This isn’t about which yearnings or fears have the loudest voices or which fears are most palpable—if it were, you’d be letting your impulses take the wheel of your life. The person doing the ranking is <em>you</em>—the little center of consciousness reading this post who can observe your octopus and look at it objectively. This involves another kind of compromise. On one side, you’ll try to tap into all the wisdom you’ve accumulated throughout your life and make active decisions about values—about what you really believe is <em>important</em>. On the other side, it’s about self-acceptance and self-compassion. Sometimes you’ll have strong undeniable yearnings that you’re not super proud of—whether you like it or not, those are part of you, and when you neglect them, they may cause a continual stink and make you miserable. Creating your yearning hierarchy is a give and take between what’s important and what’s you. It’s probably a good goal to give higher priority to your more noble qualities, but it’s okay to throw a bone to some of your not-so-noble sides as well—depending on where you decide to draw the line. There’s a wisdom to knowing when to accept your not-so-noble side and when to reject it entirely.</p>
<p>To get all of this in order, we want a good system. You can play around with what works for you—I like the idea of a shelf:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/yearning-hierarchy-2.png"></a></p>
<p>This divides things into five categories. The absolutely highest priority inner drives get to go in the extra special non-negotiable bowl. The NN bowl is for yearnings <i>so </i>important to you that you want to essentially guarantee that they’ll happen—at the expense of all other yearnings, if necessary. This is why so many of history’s legends were famously single-minded—they had a very intense NN bowl yearning and it led them to world fame, often at the expense of relationships, balance, and health. The bowl is small because it should be used very sparingly—if at all. Like maybe only one thing gets it. Or <i>maybe </i>two or three. Too many things in the NN bowl cancels out its power, making that the same as having nothing in the bowl at all. </p>
<p>Your group of top shelf yearnings is mostly what will drive your career choices—but top shelf placement should also be doled out sparingly (that’s why it’s not a very large shelf). Shelf placement is as much about de-prioritizing as it is about prioritizing. You’re not just choosing which parts of you are the most important to make you happy, you’re choosing which parts of you to intentionally leave wanting or even directly opposed. No matter what your hierarchy looks like, some yearnings will be left feeling very unhappy and some fears will feel like they’re being continually assaulted. This is inevitable.</p>
<p>That’s why most yearnings should be on the middle shelf, the bottom shelf, or the trash can. The middle shelf is good for those not-so-noble qualities in you that you decide to accept. They deserve some of your attention. And they’ll often demand it—core parts of you won’t go quietly into non-prioritization, and they sometimes can really ruin your life if they’re neglected.</p>
<p>Most of the rest will end up on the bottom shelf. Putting a part of you on the bottom shelf is telling it, “I know you want these things, but for now, I’ve decided other things are more important. I promise to revisit you a little later, after I’ve gotten some more information, and if I change my mind, you’ll get a shelf upgrade then.” The best way to think of the bottom shelf is this: the more yearnings you can convince to accept a bottom shelf rating, the better the chances your top shelf and NN bowl yearnings have of getting what they want. Likewise, the fewer yearnings you put on the <em>top</em> shelf, the more likely those on the top shelf will be to thrive. Your time and energy are severely limited, so this is a zero-sum compromise. The amateur mistake is to be too liberal with the NN bowl and top shelf and too sparing with the large bottom shelf.</p>
<p>Then there’s the trash can, for the drives and fears you flat-out reject—those parts of you that fundamentally violate the person your wisest self wants to be. A good amount of inner conflict emerges from people’s trash cans, and trash can control is a major component of integrity and inner strength. But like the rest of your hierarchy decisions, your criteria for what qualifies as trash should be derived from your own deep thought, not from what others tell you is and is not trash.</p>
<p>As you go through this difficult prioritizing process—inevitably, at times, against the screaming protests of unhappily deprioritized yearnings—remember that you’re the only wise one in the room. Yearnings and fears are impatient and bad at seeing the big picture. Even a seemingly high-minded yearning, like those on the moral tentacle, can’t understand the complete picture in the way you can. Many of the people who have done wonders to make the world better got there on a path that started with selfish motives like wealth or personal fulfillment—motives their moral tentacle probably hated at first. The octopus won’t be the wise adult in the room—that’s your job.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/octopus-no-bones-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Finally, as we’ll discuss more later, this is not a permanent decision. It’s the opposite—it’s a rough draft written in light pencil. It’s a hypothesis that you’ll be able to test and then revise based on how actually living this hierarchy feels in practice.</p>
<p>Your Want Box is ready to go. Now let’s turn to your Reality Box.</p>
<p><strong>Deep Analysis, Part 2: Your Reality Box</strong></p>
<p>The Want Box deals with what you find desirable. The Reality Box deals with what’s <em>possible</em>.</p>
<p>But when we examined the Want Box, it became clear that it’s not necessarily based on what you actually want—it’s based on what you <em>think </em>you want—what you’re in the <em>habit </em>of wanting.</p>
<p>The Reality Box is the same deal. It doesn’t show you reality, it shows your best crack at what reality might be—your <em>perception </em>of reality.</p>
<p>The goal of self-reflection is to bring both of these boxes as close to accuracy as possible. We want our perceived yearnings to be a true reflection of our authentic inner selves, and we want our beliefs about what’s possible to come close to mirroring what’s actually possible. For our Want Box audit, we looked under the hood of the Want Box and found its settings—your yearnings and fears. When we open the hood of your Reality Box, we see a group of <em>beliefs</em>.</p>
<p>When it comes to your career possibilities, you’re dealing with two sets of beliefs: beliefs about the world and beliefs about your own potential. For a career option to qualify for your Reality Box, your potential in that career area has to measure up to the objective difficulty of achieving success in that area.</p>
<p>Us being us, we’re probably pretty bad at assessing either side of this comparison accurately.</p>
<p>I don’t know how you think about career path difficulty, but in my experience, people often see it like this:</p>
<p>There are traditional careers—stuff like medicine or law or teaching or a corporate ladder, etc.—and these careers have predictable, set paths. If you’re decently smart and work hard, you’ll end up in a successful, stable situation.</p>
<p>Then there are less traditional careers—the arts, entrepreneurship, non-profit work, politics, etc.—and these are wildcards. Success and stability are no guarantee, and to reach great heights, it’s either a lottery ticket game of luck, a genetic lottery game of innate talent, or some combination of the two.</p>
<p>These are perfectly reasonable assumptions—if you live in 1952. Your beliefs about the world of careers and about what it takes to succeed need just as thorough an unmasking as your yearnings did—and I suspect that behind most of them, you’ll find big, fat conventional wisdom. You might first pull off the mask of one of your beliefs and find your parents or your friends or your college career coach—but if you keep going and pull on <em>their </em>face, you’ll usually see that it’s also a mask, and conventional wisdom is there hiding behind it. A general conception, a common opinion, an oft-cited statistic<a href="#footnote-7-6721">7</a>—none of which have actually been verified by you, but all of which are treated as gospel by society.</p>
<p>Today’s world goes through dramatic changes each decade, which usually leaves conventional wisdom wildly outdated. But we’re wired for a more ancient world where almost nothing ever changed, so we all reason like cooks and treat conventional wisdom as equivalent to truth.</p>
<p>These problems then extend to how we view our own potential. When you overrate the impact of innate talent on how people fare in their careers—and you also conflate talent and skill level—it won’t leave you feeling great about your chances at many paths. Because we better understand the trajectory of traditional careers, we’re less prone to do this with them. A first-year medical student sees an experienced surgeon at work and thinks, “I can get there one day—just need to do about 20 years of hard work.” But when a young artist or entrepreneur or software engineer looks at the equivalent of the experienced surgeon in their field, they’re more likely to think, “Wow look how talented they are—I’m nowhere near that good,” and get all hopeless. There’s also the other common notion, that people who thrive in non-traditional careers had some “big break” at some point, like hitting a lucky scratch card jackpot—and I don’t know many people who want to risk their careers on scratch cards.</p>
<p>These are only a few examples of the slew of delusions and misconceptions we tend to have about how great careers happen. So let’s brainstorm how it might actually work:</p>
<p><strong>The Career Landscape</strong></p>
<p>I have no idea, mostly. And I think most people have no idea. Things are just changing too quickly.</p>
<p>But that’s kind of the key point. If you can figure out how to get a reasonably accurate picture of the real career landscape out there, you have a massive edge over everyone else, most of whom will be using conventional wisdom as their instruction booklet.</p>
<p>First, there’s the broad landscape—the set of all the jobs someone could possibly have in today’s society. My current job description is: “Writer of 8,000-to-40,000-word articles about a bunch of different topics, with cursing and stick figures, on a remarkably sporadic schedule.” Think conventional wisdom has any job openings for me with that description? The landscape today is made up of thousands of options—some 40 years old, some made possible only three months ago because of the advent of some new technology—and the way things work today, if there’s an option you want that’s not already out there, you can probably create it for yourself. Pretty stressful, but also incredibly exciting.</p>
<p>Then, there’s each specific career path. A career path is like a game board. The conventional wisdom bookshelf contains instruction booklets for only a small fraction of today’s available game boards—and those that it does have usually tell you how that game was played in the past, even though the current game board has evolved significantly into something with new kinds of opportunities and different rules and loopholes. When you consider a career path today, to make an accurate assessment of what the path looks like and what kinds of strength-weakness profiles it favors, you have to understand what that career’s current game board looks like. Otherwise, it’s like trying to evaluate your chances of being a professional basketball player based on your height and strength without realizing that, say, basketball has evolved and is now played on oversize courts that contain 10 different 7-foot hoops, and the current game favors speed over height and strength.</p>
<p>This is promising news. There are likely dozens of awesome career paths that beautifully match your natural strengths, <em>and </em>it’s likely that most other people trying to succeed on those paths are playing with an outdated rulebook and strategy guide. If you simply understand what the game board really looks like and play by modern rules, you have a huge advantage.</p>
<p><strong>Your Potential</strong></p>
<p>And this brings us to you and your particular strengths. Not only do we assess our strengths based on the wrong game boards (like in our basketball example)—even when we have the <em>right </em>game board in mind, we’re often bad at identifying the real strengths that that game calls for.</p>
<p>When assessing your chances on a certain career path, the key question is:</p>
<p><em>With enough time, could you get good enough at this game to potentially reach whatever your definition of success is in that career?</em></p>
<p>I like to view this journey to “good enough at the game to succeed” as a distance. The distance starts with where you are now—point A—and ends with you reaching your definition of success, which we can draw with a star.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A-star-1-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The length of the distance depends on where point A is (how far along you are at the current moment) and where the star is (how lofty your definition of success is).</p>
<p>So if you’re a college graduate who majored in computer science and your career goal is to be a middle-of-the-ladder engineer at Google, your distance might look like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A-star-2-1.png"></a></p>
<p>But if you’ve never done any kind of computer science before, and your career goal is to be the top engineer at Google, you’ve got a much longer road ahead:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A-star-3-1.png"></a></p>
<p>If your goal is to create the new Google, the road gets much, much longer.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A-star-4-2.png"></a></p>
<p>At this point, conventional wisdom might emerge as a voice in your head and point out that simply getting good enough at a certain skill doesn’t actually guarantee success—you might reach the star on a career path and still find that you haven’t “made it” yet.</p>
<p>That’s mostly wrong, because it’s misunderstanding the star. The star isn’t about a particular skill level—e.g. coding ability or acting skills or business savvy—it’s about the entire <em>game</em>. In traditional careers, the games tend to be more straightforward—if you want to be a top surgeon, and you get incredibly good at surgery, you’ve probably hit your star and you’ll have your career. But the game boards in less traditional careers often involve many more factors. Reaching the “I want to be a famous actor” star doesn’t simply mean getting as good at acting as Morgan Freeman, it means getting as good at the entire actor <em>game </em>as most movie stars get by the time they break through. Acting ability is only one piece of that puzzle—you also need a knack for getting yourself in front of people with power, a shrewdness for personal branding, an insane amount of optimism, a ridiculous amount of hustle and persistence, etc. If you get good enough at that <em>whole </em>game—every component of it—your chances of becoming an A-list movie star are actually pretty high. <em>That’s </em>what hitting the star means.</p>
<p>But conventional wisdom doesn’t get how non-traditional careers work—it only thinks in terms of a narrow aspect of success: talent and hard work. When career paths have game boards with much more going on, conventional wisdom just throws its hands up and calls it “luck.” To conventional wisdom, becoming a movie star requires some talent, but mostly, hitting a rare scratch ticket jackpot.</p>
<p>So how do you figure out your chances of getting to any particular star? It’s all about a simple formula:</p>
<p>Distance = Speed x Time.</p>
<p>In our case, the more apt wording might be:</p>
<p>Progress = Pace x Persistence.</p>
<p>Your outlook on any career quest depends on A) the pace at which you’ll be able to improve at playing that career’s “game” and B) the amount of time you’re willing to persist in chasing that star. Let’s talk about both of these:</p>
<p><strong>Pace</strong></p>
<p>What makes someone slower or faster at improving at a career game? I’d say it comes down to three factors:</p>
<p><strong>Your level of chefness. </strong>As we discussed earlier, chefs look at the world with fresh eyes and build conclusions based on what they observe and what they’ve experienced. Cooks arrive at conclusions by following someone else’s recipe—in the case of careers, the recipe is usually conventional wisdom. Careers are complex games that almost everyone starts off bad at—then the chefs improve rapidly through a continual loop…</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Chef-Strategy-Loop-1.png"></a></p>
<p>…while cooks improve at a snail’s pace, because their strategy is just following a recipe which itself barely changes. What’s more, in a world where career games are constantly evolving and morphing, the chef’s tactics can evolve in real time and keep up. Meanwhile, the cook’s recipe just grows more and more outdated—a problem they remain oblivious to. This is why I’m pretty convinced that at least for less traditional careers, your level of chefness is the single most important factor in determining your pace of improvement.</p>
<p><strong>Your work ethic. </strong>This one is obvious. Someone who works on their career 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, is going to move down the path almost four times faster than someone who works 20 hours a week, 40 weeks a year. Someone who chooses a balanced lifestyle will move slower than a single-minded workaholic. Someone with a propensity towards laziness or procrastination is going to lose a lot of ground to someone who’s good at putting in consistent work days. Someone who frequently breaks from work to daydream or pick up their phone is going to get less done in each work hour than someone who practices deep focus.</p>
<p><strong>Your natural abilities. </strong>Talent does matter. Smarter, more talented people will improve at a game at a faster rate than less naturally gifted people. But intelligence and talent are only two types of natural ability that come into play here. Cleverness and savvy matter too, and those qualities don’t always correlate with raw intelligence. Depending on the type of career, social skills can be critically important as well. In many careers, likable (or subtly manipulative) people have a big advantage over less likable people—and those who enjoy socializing will put in more people hours over time, and build deeper relationships, than antisocial types.</p>
<p>Other things, like existing connections, existing resources, and existing skills matter, of course, but they’re not components of pace—they’re part of the location of point A.</p>
<p><strong>Persistence</strong></p>
<p>When I say persistence, I’m referring to long-term persistence (as opposed to day-to-day work ethic). Persistence is simpler than pace. The more years you’re willing to commit to chasing a star, the farther along the road towards the star you’ll get. A car going 30 mph that quits driving after 15 minutes gets a lot less far than a car that drives 10 mph for two hours.</p>
<p>And this is why persistence is so important. Someone who has decided they’re only willing to give a dream career a shot for three years before they’ll go for their fallback plan has essentially disqualified themselves from a chance at their dreams. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are—if you’ll give up after two or three years of not breaking through, you’re unlikely to succeed. A few years is just not enough time to traverse the typically long distances it takes to get to the raddest success stars, no matter how impressive your pace.</p>
<p><strong>Your Real Strengths and W</strong><strong>eaknesses</strong></p>
<p>With our pace-times-persistence equation in mind, let’s revisit the concept of strengths and weaknesses. It’s not that “strengths and weaknesses” is a bad concept—it’s that we think about it all wrong. When we list our strengths, we tend to list our areas of existing skill more than anything else. Instead, strengths should be all about pace and persistence qualities. Originality or lack thereof should be a critical component of the discussion, making qualities like agility and humility (trademark chef traits) notable strengths, and qualities like stubbornness<a href="#footnote-8-6721">8</a> or intellectual laziness (classic cook traits) important weaknesses. The subtleties of work ethic, like a knack for deep focus or a propensity to procrastinate, should also be a major part of the discussion, as should natural abilities beyond talent, like savvy and likability. Qualities related to persistence, like resilience and determination and patience, should be thought of as promising strengths, while a social tentacle clamoring to appear successful as quickly as possible should be viewed as a bright red flag.</p>
<p>Most importantly, these items shouldn’t be discussed as a snapshot of where they are now, but rather in terms of your <em>potential for improvement</em> in each of them. If you handed 25-year-old Michael Jordan a basketball for the first time, he’d suck. But calling basketball a “weakness” of his would be getting it very wrong. Instead, you’d want to watch him practice over the next six weeks and evaluate the slope of his improvement. This lesson applies to specific skills—but most general pace and persistence qualities can <em>also</em> be worked on and improved if you focus on them.</p>
<p><strong>Filling in the Reality Box</strong></p>
<p>Your true Reality Box would literally include all career paths for which you think a highly improved version of yourself could, with an entire lifetime of effort, reach the minimum star you’d be comfortable defining as success. This would be an impossibly big list, only ruling out paths that are clearly far too long for you to traverse at your maximum possible pace on the path (like me chasing a career as an Olympic figure skater). But it’s still useful to pause for a minute and reflect on the vast extent of your full Reality Box—just acknowledging how many options are truly open to you can put you in the right mindset.<a href="#footnote-9-6721">9</a>
</p><p>So to be a bit more efficient, let’s worry about the parts of the Reality Box that might actually end up in your Option Pool (the middle of the Venn diagram where the Want and Reality Boxes overlap). To complete our Reality Box audit with that caveat, we need to evaluate:</p>
<p><strong>1) The general landscape. </strong>Take our best crack at evaluating the world’s current career landscape—the full range of options available (or create-able).</p>
<p><strong>2) Specific game boards.</strong> For any careers that sound remotely interesting, ponder what the deal might be with that career’s current game board—the parties involved, the way success seems to be happening for others recently, the most up-to-date rules of the game, the latest new loopholes that are being exploited, etc.</p>
<p><strong>3) Starting point.</strong> For those paths, evaluate your starting point, based on your current skills, resources, and connections relevant to that field.</p>
<p><strong>4) Success point.</strong> Think about end points and where on each line your star should be placed. Ask yourself what’s the minimum level of success you’d need to achieve in order to feel happy about having chosen that career path.</p>
<p><strong>5) Your pace.</strong> Make an initial estimate for what your pace of improvement might be on these various game boards, based on your current pace-related strengths and how much you think you can improve at each of them (in other words, how much your speed might be able to <em>accelerate</em>).</p>
<p><strong>6) Your level of persistence.</strong> Evaluate the amount of time you think you’ll be willing to put into each of these respective paths.</p>
<p>Now it’s just math. You take your game board and make it a line, you plot starting points and success stars that together generate the various distances in front of you, and for each, you multiply your pace by your level of persistence. If it seems like the product of your pace and persistence for a given career path might be able to measure up to the path’s total length, that career lands in your Reality Box. Of course, it’s impossible to get exact values for any of the above factors, but it’s good to at least know the equation you’re working with.</p>
<p>A from-first-principles Reality Box audit may bring some overly optimistic people down to Earth, but I suspect that for most, an audit will leave them feeling like they have a lot more options than they realized, empowering them to set their sights on a bolder direction.</p>
<p>A good Reality Box reflection warrants yet another Want Box reflection. Reframing a bunch of career paths in your mind will affect your level of yearning for some of them. One career may seem less appealing after reminding yourself that it will entail thousands of hours of networking or multiple decades of pre-success struggle. Another may seem less daunting after changing your mind about how much luck is actually involved. There will be other career paths you hadn’t considered wanting because you hadn’t considered them as real options, but some deep reflection has opened your mind to them.</p>
<p>This brings us to the end of our long, two-part deep dive. After a fairly exhausting box-auditing process, we can return to our Venn<a href="#footnote-10-6721">10</a> diagram.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/venn-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Assuming some things have changed, you have a new Option Pool to look at—a new list of options on the table that seem both desirable to your high-priority rankings and possible to achieve. We’re ready now to return to where we were before we started our analysis: the present moment. With these options in front of us, we’re ready to lift our heads up out of analysis and look forward into the future.</p>
<p><strong>Connecting the Dots into the Future</strong></p>
<p>It’s time to bring back your Career Plans map that I made you put down at the beginning of the post—the one with the arrow or the question mark. If there had been a clear arrow on your map before your audit, check out your new Option Pool. Given everything you’ve reflected upon, does your current career plan still qualify to be there? If so, congrats—you’re ahead of most of us.</p>
<p>If not, well that’s shitty news, but it’s also good news. Remember, going from a false arrow to a question mark is always major progress in life.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/roller-coaster-2-2.png"></a></p>
<p>And actually, a new question mark implies having made the key cliff jump on <em>two</em> roller coasters: getting to know yourself and getting to know the world. Major step in the right direction. Cross out the arrow and join the question mark crowd.</p>
<p>Now the question mark crowd has a tough choice. You gotta pick one of the arrows in the Option Pool.</p>
<p>It’s a tough choice—but it should be <em>way less tough </em>than it is. Here’s why:</p>
<p>Careers used to be kind of like a 40-year tunnel. You picked your tunnel, and once you were in, that was that. You worked in that profession for 40 years or so before the tunnel spit you out on the other side into your retirement.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tunnels-2.png"></a></p>
<p>The truth is, careers have probably never really functioned like 40-year-tunnels, they just seemed that way. At best, traditional careers of the past played out <em>kind </em>of like tunnels.</p>
<p>Today’s careers—especially the less traditional ones—are really really not like tunnels. But crusty old conventional wisdom has a lot of us still viewing things that way, which makes the already hard job of making big career path choices much harder.</p>
<p>When you think of your career as a tunnel, it causes an identity crisis in anyone who doesn’t feel sure of who exactly they are and who they’ll want to be decades from now—which is most sane people. It enhances the delusion that what we do for work is a synonym for who we are, making a question mark on your map seem like an existential disaster.</p>
<p>When you think of your career as a tunnel, the stakes to make the right choice seem so high that it explodes the feeling of tyranny of choice. For perfectionist types especially, this can be utterly paralyzing.</p>
<p>When you think of your career as a tunnel, you lose the courage to make a career switch, even when your soul is begging for it. It makes switching careers feel incredibly risky and embarrassing, and it suggests that someone who does so is a failure. It also makes all kinds of multi-faceted, vibrant, mid-career people feel like they’re too old to make a bold switch or start a whole new path afresh.</p>
<p>But conventional wisdom still tells many of us that careers are tunnels. As the icing on its shit cake—on top of helping us yearn for things we don’t actually want, deny yearnings that we feel deep down, fear things that aren’t dangerous, and believe things about the world and our potential that aren’t accurate—conventional wisdom tells us that careers are a tunnel to help us daunt the shit out of ourselves unnecessarily.</p>
<p>Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. Today’s people aren’t synonymous with what they do—they’re impossibly complex, rapidly changing scientists. And today’s career isn’t a tunnel, or a box, or an identity label—it’s a long series of science experiments.</p>
<p>Steve Jobs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc">compared</a> life to connecting the dots, pointing out that while it’s easy to look at your past and see how the dots connected to lead you to where you are, it’s basically impossible in life to connect the dots forwards.</p>
<p>If you look at the biographies of your heroes, you’ll see that their paths look a lot more like a long series of connected dots than a straight and predictable tunnel. If you look at yourself and your friends, you’ll probably see the same trend—according to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170420130623/https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm">data</a>, the median time a young person stays in a given job is only 3 years (older people spend a longer time on each dot, but not that much longer—10.4 years on average).</p>
<p>So seeing your career as a series of dots isn’t a mental trick to help you make decisions—it’s an accurate depiction of what’s actually happening. And seeing your career as a tunnel isn’t just unproductive—it’s delusional.</p>
<p>Likewise, you’re limited to focusing mainly on the next dot on your path—because it’s the only dot you <em>can </em>figure out. You don’t have to worry about dot #4 because you can’t anyway—you’re literally not qualified to do so.</p>
<p>By the time dot #4 rolls around, you will have learned stuff about yourself you don’t know now. You’ll also have changed from who you are now, and your Yearning Octopus will reflect those changes. You’ll know a lot more than you currently do about the career landscape and the specific game boards you’re interested in, and you’ll have become a much better game player. And of course, that landscape—and those game boards—will have themselves evolved.</p>
<p>The fantastic website <a href="https://80000hours.org/">80,000 Hours</a> (which exists to help young, talented people work through their career choices) has compiled a lot of data to back this up: data on the fact that <a href="https://80000hours.org/2015/02/we-change-more-than-we-expect-so-keep-your-options-open/">you’ll change</a>, that <a href="https://80000hours.org/2015/02/which-careers-will-be-automated/">the world will change</a>, and that <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/">you’ll only learn with time what you’re actually good at</a>. Popular psychologist Dan Gilbert also eloquently <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/gilbert/">describes</a> just how bad we are at predicting what will make us happy in the future.</p>
<p>Pretending you can figure out what dot #2 or #4 or #8 should be now is laughable. Future dots are the worry of a future, wiser you living in a future world. So let’s focus on dot #1.</p>
<p>If we’re thinking of ourselves as scientists and of society as a science lab, we should think of your current freshly revised Want-Reality Venn Diagram as nothing more than an early, rough hypothesis. Dot #1 is your chance to test it out.</p>
<p>Hypothesis testing is intuitive in the dating world. If a friend were toiling over what kind of person she wants to marry but never went out with anyone, you’d tell her, “You can’t figure this out on your couch—you’ve gotta start going on dates, and that’ll teach you what you want in a partner.” If that friend then went on a solid first date and returned home to toil for hours about whether or not this new person was The One, you’d again have to correct her. You’d say, “There’s no way you can know that from just one date! You have to get some experience dating this person to learn what you need to learn to make that decision.”</p>
<p>We can all agree that this hypothetical friend is pretty nuts and is lacking a fundamental understanding of how you find a happy relationship. So let’s not be like her when it comes to picking our career. Dot #1 is a chill situation—it’s just a first date.</p>
<p>This is awesome news—because it makes it a lot less scary to draw an arrow on your map if it’s only an arrow to dot #1 of your future. The real cause of tyranny of choice is accurately seeing the sheer number of options you have in today’s world while delusionally seeing those careers as the 40-year tunnels of yesterday’s world. That’s a lethal combo. Reframing your next major career decision as a far lower-stakes choice makes the number of options exciting, not stressful.</p>
<p>And that’s all great in theory. But now comes the hard part.</p>
<p><strong>Making Your Move</strong></p>
<p>You’ve reflected and reflected and reflected and weighed and measured and predicted and considered. You’ve chosen a dot and drawn an arrow. And now you have to actually make the move.</p>
<p>We’re super bad at this. We’re frightened people. We don’t like icky things and making a bold, real-life step is icky. If there’s any ounce of procrastination susceptibility in us, here’s where it’ll show itself.</p>
<p>The Yearning Octopus can help. As we discussed earlier, your behavior at any given point simply displays the configuration of your octopus. If you’ve decided on a life step and you can’t quite take it, it’s because the parts of you that don’t want to make a move are ranked higher in your subconscious than the parts of you that do. Your conscious mind may have tried to assign lower shelf ratings to the parts of your octopus that lean towards inertia, but your yearnings have rebelled. You’re a CEO not in control of their staff.</p>
<p>To fix this problem, think like a kindergarten teacher. In your class, a faction of the 5-year-olds is rebelling against your wishes. What do you do?</p>
<p>Go talk to the 5-year-olds that are causing the trouble. They’re unpleasant, defiant simpletons, but they can still be reasoned with. Talk to them about why you’ve ranked them lower than others in the octopus hierarchy. Describe to them the insights you gained from your Reality Box reflection. Remind them about how connecting the dots works and about the chillness of dot #1. You’re the teacher—figure it out.</p>
<p>The older I get, the clearer it becomes that our internal battle as the kindergarten teachers of our mind is like 97% of life’s struggle. The world is easy—<em>you’re </em>difficult. If you find yourself continually not executing your plans in life and your promises to yourself, you’ve uncovered your new #1 priority—becoming a better kindergarten teacher. Until you do, your life will be run by a bunch of primitive, short-sighted 5-year-olds, and your whole shit will suck. Trust me, I know.</p>
<p>If your inner analysis does call for a career leap to a new dot, I hope that at some point, you’re able to make the jump.</p>
<p><strong>After the Move</strong></p>
<p>Jumping to a new dot is a liberating feeling, usually side by side with some substantial internal havoc.</p>
<p>First of all, for a while at least, you’ll probably suck at what you’re doing on your new dot. While your wise self will know that’s exactly how it should be, your less wise selves will go into full existential meltdown mode. All of the fears you so thoughtfully deprioritized in your octopus ranking will think someone is murdering them and they’ll start trying to call 911. The yearnings you did prioritize won’t be feeling much gratification yet, and they’ll wonder if they were wrong all along about what they thought they wanted. The yearnings you didn’t prioritize will get out the guitar and start singing love songs for the greener-seeming grass you deprived them of. It won’t be much fun.</p>
<p>Even if things do go well, you’ll be quickly reminded of the fact that the Yearning Octopus is a generally unhappy creature. Core pieces of the octopus will feel neglected or even assaulted, and every day that goes by, you’ll be bearing the opportunity cost of the paths you were considering but chose not to walk down—the versions of you in parallel universes where you made other choices. You’ll think about their hypothetical advancement in the world and worry about what you may have passed up.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/opportunity-cost-2.png"></a></p>
<p>As you get wiser, you’ll learn to view a largely unhappy octopus with acceptance. You’ll let it whine and get good at tuning it out, knowing that it’s whining in the exact way you planned for it to be.</p>
<p>The whining octopus is a reminder of why pure, elated happiness is never a reasonable goal. The times you feel pure happiness are temporary, drug-induced delusions—like the honeymoon phase of a new relationship or new job or the high following a long-awaited success. Those moments are the perfect golf shots of a mediocre golfer’s outing—they’re awesome, and you should enjoy the shit out of them—but they’re not the new normal, and they never will be.</p>
<p>A better goal is contentment: the satisfying feeling that you’re currently taking the best crack you can at a good life path; that what you’re working on might prove to be a piece of an eventual puzzle you can feel really proud of. Chasing happiness is an amateur move. Feeling contentment in those times when your choices and your circumstances have combined to pull it off, and knowing you have all that you could ever ask for, is for the wise.</p>
<p>People talk about being present in the moment, but there’s also the broader concept of macro-presence: feeling broadly present in your own life. If you’re on a career dot that, when you’re being really honest with yourself, feels right, you get to stop thinking and stop planning for a while and just dig in. You’ll come back to the big picture later—for now, you can put the macro picture aside, put your head down, and dedicate all of your energy to the present. For a while, you can just <em>live</em>.</p>
<p>These moments don’t always last that long, so sink your teeth in. Put everything you’ve got into the dot you’ve chosen. As far as you know, you might be Michael Jordan holding his first basketball, so start playing.</p>
<p><strong>The Next Dot?</strong></p>
<p>At some point, your good feelings about the macro picture may sour. And when they do, you’ll have to get back into analysis mode and figure out what, in particular, is causing the restlessness.</p>
<p>Sometimes, the macro mission won’t be the problem. It’ll be that the chef in you has decided that the mission itself calls for a strategic dot jump. In these cases, jumping dots isn’t a release of persistence but the <em>stuff </em>of persistence. This is the <em>mission-enhancing</em> type of dot jump.</p>
<p>Other times, you’ll feel a darker kind of restlessness—the suspicion that you may need to change up the macro mission. When this happens, you’ll have to figure out if that feeling is emerging from the wise parts of you or simply from your restless, deprioritized yearnings. A <em>mission-changing </em>dot jump may be in order, but depending on which parts of you are asking for it, it may also be the wrong move.</p>
<p>In these moments, it’s important to consider where you tend to be on this spectrum:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/inertia-spectrum.png"></a></p>
<p>The people on the left side of this spectrum are jump-shy. The cement-footed. Their pitfall is staying way too long in the wrong things. The people on the right are jump-happy—the wing-footed—and they have the opposite pitfall: they’re quick quitters.<a href="#footnote-11-6721">11</a> (You should be especially wary of cement feet—psychologists believe that people at the end of their lives are most likely to regret living by inertia: a commonly voiced regret is <a href="https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/12/top-career-regrets/">“I wish I had quit earlier,”</a> and the most common advice of the elderly is, “<a href="https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/04/most-important-life-lesson/">Don’t stay in a job you dislike.</a>“)</p>
<p>This is why these internal frameworks are important. They give you the ability to analyze the source of your impulses. In our example, the question is whether your impulse to jump missions is the result of genuine evolution or quick-quitter bias. So think about your diagram. Is your restlessness just the expected incessant whining of an octopus still correctly configured? The weariness from a long trudge on what’s still the right path for you? Or have you learned new information about yourself or the world during the trudge that has corrected some off-base initial assumptions? Or maybe something is fundamentally evolving—some blue or yellow <em>loop </em>activity:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/venn-with-loops-small.png"></a></p>
<p>If you feel that things have genuinely changed, you may decide to zoom out even further and think about the big red loop, which deals with fundamentally changing your mission:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/venn-with-big-loop-small.png"></a></p>
<p>If a career is like connecting the dots, we should probably rank “getting wise about dot-jumping” pretty high on our to-do list. The best place to start is by looking at your own past. Studying your own past decisions, with the flashlight of hindsight and accumulated wisdom, is like an athlete studying game tape.</p>
<p>Looking at my own past, I can see a lot of dot jumps (or, while I was still in school, career plan adjustments), and some of them look pretty unwise in retrospect. But the clearer a picture I can see of my past bad decisions and the thought patterns and behavioral habits that built them, the less likely I’ll be to repeat them in the future.</p>
<p>Remembering that you’re kind of dumb is also a critical humbling exercise. The insecurity of humility doesn’t feel very good, and the burden of having to continually invent your own life map is never easy—but insecurity and difficulty are the feelings of driving your own ship. It’s when we feel too good that we run the risk of becoming overconfident, intellectually complacent, and set in our ways. It’s exactly when we think we have life all figured out that we end up losing our way.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Over the course of your life, your good and bad decisions will collaborate to forge your unique life path. Often on this blog, I’ve written about how irrational our fears can be and how badly they can hold us back. But we should probably embrace the fear of end-of-life regret.</p>
<p>I’ve thankfully never been on anything that felt like a deathbed, but it seems like there’s something about the end of life that lets people see things with clear eyes. It seems like facing death makes all of those voices in your head who aren’t actually you melt away, leaving your little authentic self standing there all alone, in reflection. I think end-of-life regrets may simply be your authentic self thinking about the parts of your life you never got to live—the parts of you that someone else kicked down into your subconscious.</p>
<p>My own psyche seems to back this up—looking back on my path so far, the mistakes that bother me most are the ones that happened because someone else took the wheel of my head and overruled the quiet, insecure voice of my authentic self—the mistakes that I knew at the time, deep down, were wrong. My goal for the future isn’t to avoid mistakes, it’s for the mistakes I do make to be my own.</p>
<p>That’s why I went through such an excruciatingly rigorous analysis in this post. I think this is one of those few topics in life that’s worth it. Other voices will never stop fiercely trying to live your life for you—you owe it to that little insecure character in the very center of your consciousness to get this right.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a>Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. That’s the only thing we use the list for—and since my posting schedule isn’t exactly…regular…this is the best way to stay up-to-date with WBW posts.</p>
<p>And if you want to download this post for printing and offline sharing, you can <a href="https://gum.co/wbw-career-path">buy it here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>For help analyzing your situation:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Some paper to write on:</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/WORKSHEET-octopus-1.pdf">Your octopus</a>. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/WORKSHEET-yearning-hierarchy-1.pdf">Your priority shelf</a>. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/WORKSHEET-A-star-1.pdf">Some path distances</a>. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/WORKSHEET-career-dot-map.pdf">Your career dot map</a>.</p>
<p><strong>For those who want to dig in even further:</strong> Alicia (WBW Manager of Lots of Things) has put together <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/WBW_Career-Path_Worksheet-v4.pdf">a more involved group of worksheets</a>.</p>
<p><strong>For further exploration:</strong></p>
<p>The site <a href="https://80000hours.org/">80,000 hours</a>—dedicated to helping young, high-potential people make big career choices—is an awesome resource. The site is run by super smart, thoughtful, forward-thinking people, and can be digested in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY5Vd4LH1J4&amp;list=PL-BRtcBm4Yj6ZpOG49cbHut0gtuCEVXfk&amp;index=2">video</a> or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/80-000-Hours-fulfilling-career-ebook/dp/B01M70QISP/">book</a> format in addition to on their site.</p>
<p>I’ve been reading <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/">Seth Godin’s blog</a> for years. Seth has a lot of wisdom in his head, and he doles it out in little bite-sized nuggets each morning on his blog (which I receive by email). A lot of Seth’s advice applies to career choices. <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/07/people-like-us-do-stuff-like-this.html">Here’s an example</a> (which I adapted into one of the cartoons in this post).</p>
<p>Eric Barker’s <a href="https://www.bakadesuyo.com/">blog</a> is full of actual data that can help with career choices, like <a href="https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2014/08/fulfilling-career/">this post</a> on what makes a career fulfilling or <a href="https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2014/02/mentor/">this one</a> on the importance of mentors.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More Wait But Why human deep dives:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html"><strong>The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again</strong></a></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>And a post about <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">getting wiser</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>And a few less self-reflect-y Wait But Why posts on:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html">Awkward social interactions</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">The history of everything</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">Colonizing Mars</a></strong></p>
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 How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

 April 11, 2018 By Tim Urban


 Hey readers! Quick note before we jump in:

 This is a post about something I’ve been wanting to write about forever: careers. Society tells us a lot of things about what we should want in a career and what the possibilities are—which is weird because I’m pretty sure society knows very little about any of this. When it comes to careers, society is like your great uncle who traps you at holidays and goes on a 15-minute mostly incoherent unsolicited advice monologue, and you tune out almost the whole time because it’s super clear he has very little idea what he’s talking about and that everything he says is like 45 years outdated. Society is like that great uncle, and conventional wisdom is like his rant. Except in this case, instead of tuning it out, we pay rapt attention to every word, and then we make major career decisions based on what he says. Kind of a weird thing for us to do.

 This post isn’t me giving you career advice really—it’s a framework that I think can help you make career decisions that actually reflect who you are, what you want, and what our rapidly changing career landscape looks like today. You’re not a pro at this, but you’re certainly more qualified to figure out what’s best for you than our collective un-self-aware great uncle. For those of you yet to start your career who aren’t sure what you want to do with their lives, or those of you currently in the middle of your career who aren’t sure you’re on the right path, I hope this post can help you press the reset button on your thought process and get some clarity.

 Finally, it feels very good to put this post up. It’s been way, way too long. The last year has been pretty frustrating for me and anyone who likes Wait But Why—a lot of build-up of ideas with none of the satisfying release of those ideas on the blog (most of my last year has been spent working on another, way longer post). I’m hoping this WBW Dark Ages era is nearing its end, because I miss hanging out here. Thanks, as always, to the small group of ridiculously generous, ridiculously patient patrons who have stuck with us through such a slow period.

 – Tim

 PDF: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.

 _______

 Your Life Path So Far

 For most of us, childhood is kind of like a river, and we’re kind of like tadpoles.

 We didn’t choose the river. We just woke up out of nowhere and found ourselves on some path set for us by our parents, by society, and by circumstances. We’re told the rules of the river and the way we should swim and what our goals should be. Our job isn’t to think about our path—it’s to succeed on the path we’ve been placed on, based on the way success has been defined for us.

 For many of us—and I suspect for a large portion of Wait But Why readers—our childhood river then feeds into a pond, called college.1 We may have some say in which particular pond we landed in, but in the end, most college ponds aren’t really that different from one another.

 In the pond, we have a bit more breathing room and some leeway to branch out into more specific interests. We start to ponder, looking out at the pond’s shores—out there where the real world starts and where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives. This usually brings some mixed feelings.

 And then, 22 years after waking up in a rushing river, we’re kicked out of the pond and told by the world to go make something of our lives.

 There are a few problems here. One is that at that moment, you’re kind of skill-less and knowledge-less and a lot of other things-less:

 But before you can even address your general uselessness, there’s an even bigger issue—your pre-set path ended. Kids in school are kind of like employees of a company where someone else is the CEO. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you. And you’ve spent your whole life becoming a pro student, leaving you with zero experience as the CEO of anything. Up to now, you’ve only been in charge of the micro decisions—”How do I succeed at my job as a student?”—and now you’re suddenly holding the keys to the macro cockpit as well, tasked with answering stressful macro questions like “Who am I?” and “What are the important things in life?” and “What are my options for paths and which one should I choose and how do I even make a path?” When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us, leaving us standing there holding our respective dicks, with no idea how to do this.

 Then time happens. And we end up on a path. And that path becomes our life’s story.

 At the end of our life, when we look back at how things went, we can see our life’s path in its entirety, from an aerial view.

 When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.

 So this is a post about path-making. Let’s take a 30-minute pre-deathbed pause to look down at the path we’re on, and ahead at where that path seems to be going, and make sure it makes sense.

 The Cook and the Chef—Revisited

 In the past, I’ve written about the critical distinction between “reasoning from first principles” and “reasoning by analogy”—or what I called being a “chef” vs. being a “cook.” Since writing the post, I notice this distinction everywhere, and I’ve thought about it roughly 2 million times in my own life.

 The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning—reasoning by analogy—happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it, with maybe a little personal tweak here and there—kind of like a cook following an already written recipe.

 A pure verbatim recipe-copying cook and a pure independently inventive chef are the two extreme ends of what is, of course, a spectrum. But for any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.

 Being a chef takes a tremendous amount of time and energy—which makes sense, because you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re trying to invent it for the first time. Puzzling your way to a conclusion feels like navigating a mysterious forest while blindfolded and always involves a whole lot of failure, in the form of trial and error. Being a cook is far easier and more straightforward and less icky. In most situations, being a chef is a terrible waste of time, and comes with a high opportunity cost, since time on Earth is immensely scarce. Right now, I’m wearing J. Crew jeans and a plain t-shirt and a hoodie and Allbirds shoes, because I’m trying to conform. Throughout my life, I’ve looked around at people who seem kind of like me and I’ve bought a bunch of clothes that look like what they wear. And this makes sense—because clothes aren’t important to me, and they’re not how I choose to express my individuality. So in my case, fashion is a perfect part of life to use a reasoning shortcut and be a cook.2

 But then there are those parts of life that are really really deeply important—like where you choose to live, or the kinds of friends you choose to make, or whether you want to get married and to whom, or whether you want to have kids and how you want to raise them, or how you set your lifestyle priorities.

 Career-path-carving is definitely one of those really really deeply important things. Let’s spell out the obvious reasons why:

 Time. For most of us, a career (including ancillary career time, like time spent commuting and thinking about your work) will eat up somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours. At the moment, a long human life runs at about 750,000 hours. When you subtract childhood (~175,000 hours) and the portion of your adult life you’ll spend sleeping, eating, exercising, and otherwise taking care of the human pet you live in, along with errands and general life upkeep (~325,000 hours), you’re left with 250,000 “meaningful adult hours.”3 So a typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time—not something to be a cook about.

 Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all the non-career hours as well. For those of us not already wealthy through past earnings, marriage, or inheritance, a career doubles as our means of support. The particulars of your career also often play a big role in determining where you live, how flexible your life is, the kinds of things you’re able to do in your free time, and sometimes even in who you end up marrying.

 Impact. On top of your career being the way you spend much of your time and the means of support for the rest of your time, your career triples as your primary mode of impact-making. Every human life touches thousands of other lives in thousands of different ways, and all of those lives you alter then go on to touch thousands of lives of their own. We can’t test this, but I’m pretty sure that you can select any 80-year-old alive today, go back in time 80 years, find them as an infant, throw the infant in the trash, and then come back to the present day and find a countless number of things changed. All lives make a large impact on the world and on the future—but the kind of impact you end up making is largely within your control, depending on the values you live by and the places you direct your energy. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.

 Identity. In our childhoods, people ask us about our career plans by asking us what we want to be when we grow up. When we grow up, we tell people about our careers by telling them what we are. We don’t say, “I practice law”—we say, “I am a lawyer.” This is probably an unhealthy way to think about careers, but the way many societies are right now, a person’s career quadruples as the person’s primary identity. Which is kind of a big thing.

 So yeah—your career path isn’t like my shitty sweatshirt. It’s really really deeply important, putting it squarely in “Definitely absolutely make sure to be a chef about it” territory.

 Your Career Map

 Which brings us to you. I don’t know exactly what your deal is. But there’s a good chance you’re somewhere in one of the blue regions—

 —which means your career path is a work in progress.4

 Whether you’re yet to start your career or well into it, somewhere in the back of your mind (or maybe in the very front of it) is a “Career Plans” map.

 We can group map holders into three broad categories—each of which is well-represented in the river, in the pond, standing on the shore, and at every stage of adult life.

 One group of people will look at the map and see a big, stressful question mark.

 These are people who feel indecisive about their career path. They’ve been told to follow their passion, but they don’t feel especially passionate about anything. They’ve been told to let their strengths guide them, but they’re not sure what they’re best at. They may have felt they had answers in the past, but they’ve changed and they’re no longer sure who they are or where they’re going.

 Other people will see a nice clear arrow representing a direction they feel confident is right—but find their legs walking in a different direction. They’re living with one of the most common sources of human misery, a career path they know in their heart is wrong.

 The lucky ones feel they know where they want to go and believe they’re marching in that direction.

 But even these people should pause and ask themselves, “Who actually drew this arrow? Was it really me?” The answer can get confusing.

 I’m pretty sure all of these people would benefit from a moment of career path reflection.

 The Okay But Why Do You Think You Can Help Me With My Career Reflection You Draw Stick Figures for a Living Blue Box

 Extremely fair question. One thing I always ask myself as I pick topics to write about is, “Am I qualified to write about this?” Here are the reasons I decided to take on this topic:

 1) I have spent most of the last 20 years in a perpetual state of analyzing my own career path.

 2) My path has taken a lot of turns—from wanting to be a movie star when I was 7 to wanting to be the president when I was 17 to wanting to write film scores when I was 22 to wanting to be an entrepreneur when I was 24 to wanting to write musicals when I was 29 to most recently wanting to be a writer-ish guy.

 3) After being pretty all over the place about my career path for most of my life, I actually love my job now. That’s always subject to change, but being able to look at the decision-making processes that led me to confusing or frustrating places, side by side with the decisions that led me to a more fulfilling place, has offered me some wisdom on where people tend to go wrong.

 4) On top of having my own story to look at, I’ve had a front-row seat for the stories of my dozen or so closest friends. My friends seem to share my career path obsessiveness, so between observing their paths and talking with them about those paths again and again along the way, I’ve broadened my views on the topic, which helps me to distinguish between the lessons that are my-life specific and those that are more universal.

 5) Finally, this isn’t a post about which careers are better or worse than others or which career values are more or less meaningful—there are lots of social scientists and self-help authors out there with good data on that, and I’m not one of them. It’s instead a framework that I think can help a career-path reflector better see their own situation, and what really matters to them, clearly and honestly. This framework has worked really well for me, so I think it can probably be helpful for other people too.

 Now that you’ve taken a fresh look at your Career Plans map, along with whatever arrow may or may not be on it, put it down and out of sight. We’ll come back to it at the end of the post. It’s time now for a deep dive—let’s think about this from scratch. From first principles.

 ___________

 In the cook-chef post, I designed a simple framework for how a chef makes major career choices. At its core is a simple Venn diagram.

 The first part of the diagram is the Want Box, which contains all the careers you find desirable.

 The second part of the diagram is the Reality Box. The Reality Box is for the set of all careers that are realistic to potentially achieve—based on a comparison, in each case, between your level of potential in an area and the general difficulty of achieving success in that area.

 The overlapping area contains your optimal career path choices—the set of arrows you should consider drawing on your Career Map. We can call it the Option Pool.

 This is straightforward enough. But actually filling in these boxes accurately is way harder than it looks. For the diagram to work, it has to be as close to the truth as possible, and to get there, we have to lift up the hood of our subconscious and head down. Let’s start with the Want Box.

 Deep Analysis, Part 1: Your Want Box

 The hard thing about the Want Box is that you want a bunch of different things—or, rather, there are a bunch of different sides of you, and each of them wants—and fears—its own stuff. And since some motivations have conflicting interests with others, you cannot, by definition, have everything you want. Going for one thing you want means, by definition, not going for others, and sometimes, it’ll specifically mean going directly against others. The Want Box is a game of compromise.

 The Yearning Octopus

 To do a proper Want Box audit, you need to think about what you yearn for in a career and then unpack the shit out of it. Luckily, we have someone here who can help us. The Yearning Octopus.

 We each have our own personal Yearning Octopus5 in our heads. The particulars of each person’s Yearning Octopus will vary, but people also aren’t all that different from each other, and I bet many of us feel very similar yearnings and fears (especially given that I find that Wait But Why readers tend to have a lot in common).

 The first thing to think about is that there are totally distinct yearning worlds—each living on one tentacle. These tentacles often do not get along with each other.

 It gets worse. Each tentacle is made up of a bunch of different individual yearnings and their accompanying fears—and these often massively conflict with each other too.

 Let’s take a closer look at each tentacle to see what’s going on.

 The Personal Yearnings tentacle is probably the hardest one to generalize here—it’s pretty particular to each of us. It’s a reflection of our specific personality and our values, and it bears the burden of probably the most complex and challenging human need: fulfillment. It’s also in the shit dealing with not only our current selves, but a bunch of our past selves too. The dreams of 7-year-old you and the idealized identity of 12-year-old you and the secret hopes of 17-year-old you and the evolving passions of your current self are all somewhere on the personal tentacle, each throwing their own little fit about getting what they want, and each fully ready to make you feel horrible about yourself with their disappointment and disgust if you fail them. On top of that, your fear of death sometimes emerges on the personal tentacle, all needy about you leaving your mark and achieving greatness and all that. The personal tentacle is why you don’t find very many billionaires content to spend the rest of their life sipping cocktails on the beach—it’s a highly needy tentacle.

 And yet, the personal tentacle is also one that often ends up somewhat neglected. Because in many cases, it’s the ickiest set of yearnings to really go for; because the fears of this tentacle aren’t scary in an immediate way—they creep in out of the background over time; and because the personal tentacle is always at risk of getting bowled over early in your career by the powerful animal emotions of the other tentacles. This neglect can leave a person with major regrets later on once the dust settles. An unfulfilled Personal Yearnings tentacle is often the explanation, for example, behind a very successful, very unhappy person—who may believe they got successful in the wrong field.

 The Social Yearnings tentacle is probably our most primitive, animal side, with its core drive stemming back to our tribal evolutionary past. On the tentacle are a number of odd creatures.

 As we’ve discussed before on this blog, we all have a Social Survival Mammoth living in our heads who’s earth-shatteringly obsessed with what other people think of us. This means he craves acceptance and inclusion and being well-liked, while likewise being petrified of embarrassment, negative judgment, and disapproval. He really really really wants to be in the in-group and he really really really doesn’t want to be in the outgroup. He’s quite cute though.

 Then there’s your ego, who’s a similar character but even more needy. Your ego doesn’t just want to be accepted; it wants to be admired, desired, and fawned upon—ideally, on a mass scale. More upsetting to it than being disliked is being ignored. It wants to be relevant and important and widely known.

 There are other characters milling about as well. Somewhere else on the social tentacle is a little judge with a little gavel who gets very butthurt if it thinks people aren’t judging you fairly—if you’re not appropriately appreciated. It’s very important to the judge that people are aware of exactly how smart and talented you think you are. The judge is also big on holding grudges—which is the reason a lot of people are driven more than anything by a desire to show that person or those people who never believed in them.

 Finally, some of us may find a loving little dog on our social tentacle who wants more than anything in the world to please its owner, and who just cannot bear the thought of disappointing them. The one problem with this adorable creature is that its owner isn’t you. It’s a person with so much psychological power over you that, if you’re not careful, you may dedicate your whole career to trying to please them and make them proud. (It’s probably a parent.)

 The Lifestyle Yearnings tentacle mostly just wants Tuesday to be a good day. But like, a really pleasant, enjoyable day—with plenty of free time and self-care and relaxation and luxuries.

 It’s also concerned with your life in the big picture being as great as possible—as far as your lifestyle tentacle is concerned, you should be able to do what you want to do in life, when and how you want to do it, with the people you like most. Life should be full of fun times and rich experiences, but it should also roll by smoothly, without too much hard work and as few bumps in the road as possible.

 The issue is, even if you place a high priority on your lifestyle yearnings, it’s pretty difficult to keep the whole tentacle happy at the same time. The part of the tentacle that just wants to sit around and relax will hold you back from sweating to build the kind of career that offers long-term flexibility and the kind of wealth that can make life luxurious and cushy and full of toys. The part of the tentacle that only feels comfortable when the future feels predictable will reject the exact kinds of paths that may generate the long-term freedom another part of the tentacle longs for. The side of you that wants a stress-free life doesn’t get along very well with the side of you that thirsts to be hang gliding off a cliff in Namibia like Richard Branson.

 The Moral Yearnings tentacle thinks the rest of the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus are a real pack of dicks—each one more self-involved and self-indulgent than the next. The parts of you on the moral tentacle look around and see a big world that needs so much fixing; they see billions of people no less worthy than you of a good life who just happened to be born into inferior circumstances; they see an uncertain future ahead that hangs in the balance between utopia and dystopia for life on Earth—a future we can actually push in the right direction if we could only get our other tentacles out of our way. While the other tentacles fantasize about what you would do with your life if you had a billion dollars in the bank, the moral tentacle fantasizes about the kind of impact you could make if you had a billion dollars to deploy.

 Needless to say, the other tentacles of your Yearning Octopus find the moral tentacle to be insufferable. They also can’t begin to understand philanthropy for philanthropy’s sake—they think, “Other people aren’t me, so why would I spend my time and energy working to help them?”—but they can understand philanthropy for their own motive’s sake. While the moral and lifestyle tentacles tend to be in direct conflict, others may sometimes find common ground—the social tentacle can get very into philanthropy if it’ll happen to win you respect and admiration from a highly regarded social group, and some people’s personal tentacle may find the meaning or self-worth it so craves in a philanthropic endeavor.

 That’s why, when you do something philanthropic—or anything altruistic, really—there are a few separate things going on in your head. The part of you determined to get proper public credit for the deed lives on your social tentacle; the part of you that thinks “God I’m a good person” lives on your personal tentacle; and the part of you that really loves seeing the person or group you helped be better off lives on your moral tentacle. Likewise, not doing anything for others can hurt you on multiple tentacles—the moral tentacle because it feels guilty and sad, the social tentacle because this may cause others to judge you as a selfish or greedy person, and the personal tentacle because it may lower your self-esteem.

 Your Practical Yearnings tentacle thinks all of this is fine and great—but it would also like to point out that it’s March 31st and your rent is due tomorrow, and the funny thing about that is that it logged into your bank account and saw that the number of dollars in it is actually less than the number of dollars that your landlord will need from you sometime in the next 34 hours. And yeah it knows that you deposited that check on Thursday and that it’s supposed to clear tomorrow morning, but your practical tentacle also could have sworn that just last month, all the tentacles promised that they’d make some sacrifices in order to build up at least a little bank account cushion so that simply paying the rent wouldn’t have to be really fucking stressful every month. Your practical tentacle also can’t help but notice that your social tentacle offered to buy a round of drinks for all nine people you went to the bar with last Saturday so those people would think of you as a classy, generous person, and that your lifestyle tentacle chose to rent what sure seems like a pretty nice-ass apartment for someone now living check to check, and that the updates have gotten real quiet from your friend about that bagel delivery service he started six months ago that your moral tentacle happily invested $2,500 in to help it get off the ground, and oh also that meanwhile your personal tentacle has everyone sweating their dick off working at two comedy-writing internships simultaneously that somehow manage to bring in less money combined than you made dressing up as an Egyptian enchantress to wait tables at Jekyll & Hyde sophomore year of college.

 At its basic level, your practical tentacle wants to make sure you can eat food and wear clothes and buy the medicine you need and not live outside. It doesn’t really care how these things happen—it just wants them to happen. But then everyone else on the octopus makes your practical tentacle’s life super hard by being fucky about things. Every time your income goes up, your lifestyle tentacle decides to raise the bar on what it wants and expects, leaving your practical tentacle continually in the shit trying to cover it all so you don’t have to run up your credit card debt. Your personal tentacle has all of these weird needs that take up a lot of time and more often than not aren’t exactly big money-makers. And while your practical tentacle would be totally down to just ask your rich uncle for money to help out, your social tentacle outlawed asking others for money because “it’s not a good look,” with your personal tentacle chiming in that “yeah, we’re better than that.”

 So that’s the situation. You’ve got this Yearning Octopus in your head with five tentacles (or however many yours has), each with their own agenda, that often conflict with each other. Then there are the distinct individual yearnings on each tentacle, often in conflict amongst themselves. And if that weren’t enough, you sometimes have furious internal conflict inside a single yearning. Like when your desire to pursue your passion can’t figure out what it’s most passionate about.

 Or when you want so badly to be respected, but then you remember that a career that wins the undying respect of one segment of society will always receive shrugs from other segments and even contemptuous eye rolls from other segments still.

 Or when you decide to satisfy your urge to help others, before realizing that the part of you that wants to dedicate your life to helping to mitigate humanity’s greatest existential risks has palpable disdain for the part of you that would rather make a tangible positive impact on your local community—while the part of you that can’t stand the thought of the millions of today’s humans without access to clean water finds both of those other yearnings to be pretty cold and heartless.

 So yeah, your Yearning Octopus is complicated. And no human in history has ever satisfied their entire octopus—that’s why you’ll never find it fully smiling. Human yearning is a game of choices and sacrifices and compromise.

 Dissecting the Octopus

 With that in mind, let’s return to your Want Box. When we think about our career goals and fears and hopes and dreams, our consciousness is just accessing the net output of the Yearning Octopus—which is usually made up of its loudest voices. Only by digging into our mind’s subconscious can we see what’s really going on.6

 The cool thing is that we all have the ability to do that. The stuff in your subconscious is like stuff in the basement of a house. It’s not off-limits to us—it’s just in the basement. We can go look at it anytime—we just have to A) remember that the house has a basement, and B) actually spend the time and energy to go down there, even though going down there might suck.

 So let’s head to the basement of your mind to look for the octopus. Unless you’re one of those people who’s really practiced at analyzing your subconscious, it might be dark in the basement, making it hard to see your octopus. The way to start turning the lights on is by identifying what your conscious mind currently knows about your yearnings and fears, and then unpacking it.

 Like if there’s a certain career path that sounds fantastic to you, unpack that. Which tentacles in particular are yearning for that career—and which specific parts of those tentacles?

 If you’re not currently working towards that career you supposedly yearn for, try to figure out why not. If you think it’s because you’re afraid of failing, unpack that. Fear of failure can emerge from any of the tentacles, so that’s not a specific enough analysis. You want to find the specific source of the fear. Is it a social tentacle fear of embarrassment, or of being judged by others as not that smart, or of appearing to be not that successful to your romantic interests? Is it a personal tentacle fear of damaging your own self-image—of confirming a suspicion about yourself that haunts you? Is it a lifestyle tentacle fear of having to downgrade your living situation, or of bringing stress and instability into a currently predictable life? Or maybe that fear of a living situation downgrade isn’t actually emerging from your lifestyle tentacle, but more so from your social tentacle—in other words, is it possible you’re indifferent about the apartment change itself but super concerned about the message a lifestyle downgrade sends to your friends and family? Or are there financial commitments you simply cannot back out of at the moment, and your practical tentacle is in a genuine panic about how you’ll make ends meet should this career switch take longer than expected to work out, or not work out at all? Or are a few of these combining together to generate your fear of making the leap?

 Perhaps you don’t really think it’s fear of failure that’s stopping you, but something else. Maybe it’s a dread of the change in identity—both internally and externally—that inevitably accompanies a career move like this. Maybe it’s the heavy weight of inertia—an intense resistance to change—that seems to exist in and of itself and overpowers all of your other yearnings. In either case, you’d want to unpack the feeling and ask yourself exactly which tentacles are so opposed to an identity shift, or so driven by inertia.

 Maybe you pine to be rich. You fantasize about a life where you make $1.2 million a year, and you feel a tremendous drive to make it happen. All five tentacles can feel a desire for wealth under certain circumstances, each for their own reasons. Unpack it.

 As you unpack an inner drive to make money, maybe you discover that at its core, the drive is more for a sense of security than for vast wealth. That can be unpacked too. A yearning for security at its simplest is just your practical tentacle doing what your practical tentacle does. But maybe it’s not actually basic security you want as much as a guarantee of a certain level of fanciness demanded by your lifestyle or social tentacle. Or perhaps what you really want is a level of security so over-the-top secure it can no longer be called a security yearning—instead, it may be an impulse by the emotional well-being section of your lifestyle tentacle to alleviate a compulsive financial stress you were raised to forever feel, almost regardless of your actual financial situation.

 The answers to all of these questions lie somewhere on the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus. And by asking questions like these and digging deep enough to identify the true roots of your various yearnings, you start to turn on the basement light and acquaint yourself with your octopus in all its complexity.

 You’ll also come to understand which of your inner yearnings seem to speak the loudest in your mind and carry the most pull in your decision-making processes. Pretty quickly, a yearning hierarchy will begin to reveal itself. You’ll identify yearnings that speak loudly and get their way; yearnings that cry at the top of their lungs but get continually elbowed out of the way by higher-prioritized parts of the octopus; yearnings that seem resigned to their low-status positions in the hierarchy.

 Searching for Imposters

 We’re making good progress—but we’re just getting started. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of your Yearning Octopus, you can start doing the real work—work that takes place another level down in your subconscious, in the basement of the basement. Here, you can set up a little interrogation room and one by one, bring each yearning down into it for a cross-examination.

 You’ll start by asking each yearning: how did you end up here, and why are you the way you are? Desires, beliefs, values, and fears don’t materialize out of nowhere. They’re either developed over time by our internal consciousness as observations and life experience pour in, or they’re implanted in us from the outside, by someone else. In other words, they’re the product of either you the chef or you the cook.

 So the goal here in your creepy interrogation room is to tug on the faces of each of your yearnings to find out if it’s authentically you, or if it’s someone else disguised as you.

 You can pull on a yearning’s face by playing the Why Game. You’ll ask your initial Why—Why is this something I want?—and get to some kind of Because. Then you’ll keep going. Why did that particular Because lead you to want what you now want? And when did that particular Because gain so much gravity with you? You’ll get to a deeper Because behind the Because. And if you continue with this, you’ll usually discover one of three things:

 1) You’ll trace the Why back to its origin and reveal a long chain of authentic evolution that developed through deep independent thought. You’ll pull on their face and confirm that the skin is real.

 2) You’ll trace the Why back to an original Because that someone else installed in you—I guess the only reason I actually have this value is because my mom kind of forced it on me—and you realize that you never really thought to consider whether you actually independently agree with it. You never stopped to ask yourself whether your own accumulated wisdom actually justifies the level of conviction you feel about that core belief. In a case like this, the yearning is revealed to be an imposter pretending to be an authentic yearning of yours. You pull on its face and it’s a mask that comes off, exposing the yearning’s original installer underneath.

 3) You’ll trace the Why back and back and get kind of lost in a haze of “I guess I just know this because it’s true!” This could be an authentic you thing, or just another version of #2, in an instance where you can’t recall the moment this feeling was installed in you. Somewhere deep in you, you’ll have a hunch about which it is.

 In a #1 scenario, you can be proud that you developed that part of you like a chef. It’s an authentic and hard-earned feeling or value.

 In a #2 or maybe #3 scenario, you’ve discovered that you’ve been duped. You’ve let someone else sneak onto your Yearning Octopus while you weren’t looking. When it comes to that particular belief of yours, you’re a cook following someone else’s recipe—an obedient robot reciting desires and fears out of someone else’s brain.

 There’s a chance you’re an unusually wise person whose examination reveals an octopus developed mostly by you and kept readily up to date. More likely, you’re like me and most of my friends—your interrogation room reveals some definite imposters, or at least a lot of ambiguity. Like, underneath one mask, you’ll find your mom.

 You’ll pull off others to reveal the values and judgments of broader conventional wisdom, or the viewpoints of your more immediate community, or what’s considered cool by the dominant culture of your generation or the immediate culture within your closest group of friends.

 Sometimes you’ll get to the end of a Why-Because pathway only to find the philosophy in a famous novel, or something a celebrity hero of yours once said in an interview, or a strong opinion one of your professors always repeated.

 You might even find that some of your yearnings and fears were written by you…when you were seven years old. Like a childhood dream that was etched into the back of your consciousness as the thing you believe you really want, when you’re being truly honest.

 The interrogation room probably won’t be that fun a time. But it’s time well spent—because you’re not your 7-year-old self, just like you’re not your parents or your friends or your generation or your society or your heroes or your past decisions or your recent circumstances. You’re Current-Age You—the only person, and the only version of yourself, who is actually qualified to want and not want the things you want and don’t want.

 To be clear, this isn’t to say that it’s wrong to live by the words of a wise parent or a famous philosopher or friends you respect or the convictions of a younger you. Humble people are by definition influence-able—influences are an important and inevitable part of who each of us is. The key distinction is this:

 Do you treat the words of your external influences as information, held and considered by an authentic inner you, that you’ve carefully decided to embrace? Or are your influences themselves actually in your brain, masquerading as inner you?

 Do you want the same thing someone else you know wants because you heard them talk about it, you thought about it alongside your own life experience, and you eventually decided that, for now, you agree? Or because you heard someone talk about what they want or fear, and you thought, “I don’t know shit and that person does, so if they say X is true, I’m sure they’re right”—and then you etched those ideas into your mind, never again feeling the need to question them?

 The former is what chefs do. The latter is what you do when you’re being an obedient robot. And a robot is what you become when at some point you get the idea in your head that someone else is more qualified to be you than you are.

 The good news is that all humans make this mistake—and you can fix it. Just like your subconscious is right there for viewing if you want to view it—it’s also there for changing and updating and rewriting. It’s your head—you’re allowed to do with it what you want.

 So it’s time for some evictions. Masked imposters have to go. Even mom and dad.

 At the end of this, your octopus may look a little barren, leaving you feeling a little like you don’t know who you even are anymore. We usually think of this as a bad feeling, or even an existential crisis, but it actually means you’re doing better than most people.

 The drop from naive over-confidence to wise, realistic humility never feels good, but pausing the roller coaster while it’s still on that first cliff and avoiding the pain—which turns out to be a lot of people’s move—isn’t a great strategy. Wisdom isn’t correlated with knowledge, it’s correlated with being in touch with reality—it’s not how far to the right you are on the graph, it’s how close you are to the orange line. Wisdom hurts at first, but it’s the only place where actual growth happens. The irony is that the cliff-pausers of the world like to make the wiser, braver valley-dwellers or continual-climbers feel bad about themselves—because they fundamentally don’t get how knowing yourself works. They haven’t reached that stage yet.

 Getting to know your real self is super hard and never complete. But if you’ve tumbled off the cliff, you’ve gone through a key rite of passage and progress is now possible. As you climb up the orange line, you’ll slowly but surely begin to repopulate your Yearning Octopus with your real self.

 At the moment, it probably won’t be obvious what those missing yearnings of yours are exactly—because they’re on an even deeper floor of your subconscious. They’re in the basement of the basement of the basement—in a place called Denial Prison.

 Denial Prison

 Our brain’s Denial Prison is a place most of us don’t even know is there—it’s where we put the parts of us we repress and deny.

 The authentic yearnings of ours that we’re in touch with—i.e. those that proved to be authentic during interrogation—were easy parts of our true selves to find in our subconscious, lying in plain sight, right below the surface of our consciousness. Even our conscious mind knows these yearnings well, because they frequently make their way upstairs into our thoughts. These are the parts of us we have a healthy relationship with.

 But then there are the parts of you that weren’t living on your octopus where they’re supposed to be—instead, you found an imposter in their place. These lost parts of you are often incredibly hard to access, because they’ve been living deep in your subconscious, on a floor so low it’s almost not there at all. Almost.

 Some parts of us are banished down on basement #3 because they’re extraordinarily painful for us to acknowledge or think about. Sometimes new parts of us are born only to be immediately locked up in prison as part of a denial of our own evolution—i.e. out of stubbornness. But there are other times when a part of us is in Denial Prison because someone else locked it up down there. In the case of your yearnings, some of them will have been put there by whatever masked intruder had been taking its place. If dad has successfully convinced you that you care deeply about having a prestigious career, he probably has also convinced you that the part of you that, deep down, really wants to be a carpenter isn’t really you and isn’t what you really want. At some point during your childhood, he threw your passion for carpentry into a dark, dank Denial Prison cell.

 So let’s gather your courage and head down to the basement of the basement of the basement of your mind and see what we find.

 You may pass some unpleasant characters.

 Leave them for another time—right now, search for locked-away career-related yearnings. Maybe you’ll find a repressed passion to teach. Or a desire to be famous that your particular tribe has shamed you out of. Or a deep love of long blocks of free, open leisure time that your hornier, greedier teenage self kicked downstairs in favor of a raging ambition.

 There will be certain parts of your authentic self you won’t be able to uncover in Denial Prison—it’s pretty dark down there. But be patient—now that you’ve done your audit and cleared space for them on your octopus, they may begin to emerge.

 Priority Rankings

 The other part of our Yearning Octopus audit will address the hierarchy of your yearnings. Almost as important as the yearnings themselves is the priority they’re given. The hierarchy is easy to see because it’s revealed in your actions. You may like to think a desire to do something bold is high up on your hierarchy, but if you’re not currently working on something bold, it reveals that however important boldness is to you, something else—some source of fear or inertia in you—is currently being prioritized above it.

 It’s important to remember that a ranking of yearnings is also a ranking of fears. The octopus contains anything that could make you want or not want to pursue a certain career, and the reverse side of each yearning is its accompanying fear of the opposite. The reverse side of your yearning to be admired is a fear of embarrassment. If you flip over your desire for self-actualization, you’ll see a fear of underachieving. The other half of your craving of self-esteem is a fear of feeling shame. If your actions don’t seem to match what you believe is the internal hierarchy of your yearnings, usually it’s because you’re forgetting to think about the role your fears are playing. What looks like a determined drive for success, for example, might actually be someone running away from a negative self-image or trying to escape feelings like envy or under-appreciation. If your actions seem beholden to yearnings that you don’t believe you actually care that much about, you’re probably not looking closely enough at your fears.

 With both yearnings and fears in mind, think about what your internal hierarchy might look like, and return that same important question: “Who made this order? Was it really me?”

 For example, we’re often told to “follow our passion”—this is society saying “put your passion yearnings at the top of your hierarchy.” That’s a very specific instruction. Maybe that’s the right thing for you, but it also very well might not be. It’s something you need to independently evaluate.

 To get this right, let’s try to do a fresh ranking, from first principles, based on who we really are, how we’ve evolved over time, and what really matters to us most, right now.

 This isn’t about which yearnings or fears have the loudest voices or which fears are most palpable—if it were, you’d be letting your impulses take the wheel of your life. The person doing the ranking is you—the little center of consciousness reading this post who can observe your octopus and look at it objectively. This involves another kind of compromise. On one side, you’ll try to tap into all the wisdom you’ve accumulated throughout your life and make active decisions about values—about what you really believe is important. On the other side, it’s about self-acceptance and self-compassion. Sometimes you’ll have strong undeniable yearnings that you’re not super proud of—whether you like it or not, those are part of you, and when you neglect them, they may cause a continual stink and make you miserable. Creating your yearning hierarchy is a give and take between what’s important and what’s you. It’s probably a good goal to give higher priority to your more noble qualities, but it’s okay to throw a bone to some of your not-so-noble sides as well—depending on where you decide to draw the line. There’s a wisdom to knowing when to accept your not-so-noble side and when to reject it entirely.

 To get all of this in order, we want a good system. You can play around with what works for you—I like the idea of a shelf:

 This divides things into five categories. The absolutely highest priority inner drives get to go in the extra special non-negotiable bowl. The NN bowl is for yearnings so important to you that you want to essentially guarantee that they’ll happen—at the expense of all other yearnings, if necessary. This is why so many of history’s legends were famously single-minded—they had a very intense NN bowl yearning and it led them to world fame, often at the expense of relationships, balance, and health. The bowl is small because it should be used very sparingly—if at all. Like maybe only one thing gets it. Or maybe two or three. Too many things in the NN bowl cancels out its power, making that the same as having nothing in the bowl at all.

 Your group of top shelf yearnings is mostly what will drive your career choices—but top shelf placement should also be doled out sparingly (that’s why it’s not a very large shelf). Shelf placement is as much about de-prioritizing as it is about prioritizing. You’re not just choosing which parts of you are the most important to make you happy, you’re choosing which parts of you to intentionally leave wanting or even directly opposed. No matter what your hierarchy looks like, some yearnings will be left feeling very unhappy and some fears will feel like they’re being continually assaulted. This is inevitable.

 That’s why most yearnings should be on the middle shelf, the bottom shelf, or the trash can. The middle shelf is good for those not-so-noble qualities in you that you decide to accept. They deserve some of your attention. And they’ll often demand it—core parts of you won’t go quietly into non-prioritization, and they sometimes can really ruin your life if they’re neglected.

 Most of the rest will end up on the bottom shelf. Putting a part of you on the bottom shelf is telling it, “I know you want these things, but for now, I’ve decided other things are more important. I promise to revisit you a little later, after I’ve gotten some more information, and if I change my mind, you’ll get a shelf upgrade then.” The best way to think of the bottom shelf is this: the more yearnings you can convince to accept a bottom shelf rating, the better the chances your top shelf and NN bowl yearnings have of getting what they want. Likewise, the fewer yearnings you put on the top shelf, the more likely those on the top shelf will be to thrive. Your time and energy are severely limited, so this is a zero-sum compromise. The amateur mistake is to be too liberal with the NN bowl and top shelf and too sparing with the large bottom shelf.

 Then there’s the trash can, for the drives and fears you flat-out reject—those parts of you that fundamentally violate the person your wisest self wants to be. A good amount of inner conflict emerges from people’s trash cans, and trash can control is a major component of integrity and inner strength. But like the rest of your hierarchy decisions, your criteria for what qualifies as trash should be derived from your own deep thought, not from what others tell you is and is not trash.

 As you go through this difficult prioritizing process—inevitably, at times, against the screaming protests of unhappily deprioritized yearnings—remember that you’re the only wise one in the room. Yearnings and fears are impatient and bad at seeing the big picture. Even a seemingly high-minded yearning, like those on the moral tentacle, can’t understand the complete picture in the way you can. Many of the people who have done wonders to make the world better got there on a path that started with selfish motives like wealth or personal fulfillment—motives their moral tentacle probably hated at first. The octopus won’t be the wise adult in the room—that’s your job.

 Finally, as we’ll discuss more later, this is not a permanent decision. It’s the opposite—it’s a rough draft written in light pencil. It’s a hypothesis that you’ll be able to test and then revise based on how actually living this hierarchy feels in practice.

 Your Want Box is ready to go. Now let’s turn to your Reality Box.

 Deep Analysis, Part 2: Your Reality Box

 The Want Box deals with what you find desirable. The Reality Box deals with what’s possible.

 But when we examined the Want Box, it became clear that it’s not necessarily based on what you actually want—it’s based on what you think you want—what you’re in the habit of wanting.

 The Reality Box is the same deal. It doesn’t show you reality, it shows your best crack at what reality might be—your perception of reality.

 The goal of self-reflection is to bring both of these boxes as close to accuracy as possible. We want our perceived yearnings to be a true reflection of our authentic inner selves, and we want our beliefs about what’s possible to come close to mirroring what’s actually possible. For our Want Box audit, we looked under the hood of the Want Box and found its settings—your yearnings and fears. When we open the hood of your Reality Box, we see a group of beliefs.

 When it comes to your career possibilities, you’re dealing with two sets of beliefs: beliefs about the world and beliefs about your own potential. For a career option to qualify for your Reality Box, your potential in that career area has to measure up to the objective difficulty of achieving success in that area.

 Us being us, we’re probably pretty bad at assessing either side of this comparison accurately.

 I don’t know how you think about career path difficulty, but in my experience, people often see it like this:

 There are traditional careers—stuff like medicine or law or teaching or a corporate ladder, etc.—and these careers have predictable, set paths. If you’re decently smart and work hard, you’ll end up in a successful, stable situation.

 Then there are less traditional careers—the arts, entrepreneurship, non-profit work, politics, etc.—and these are wildcards. Success and stability are no guarantee, and to reach great heights, it’s either a lottery ticket game of luck, a genetic lottery game of innate talent, or some combination of the two.

 These are perfectly reasonable assumptions—if you live in 1952. Your beliefs about the world of careers and about what it takes to succeed need just as thorough an unmasking as your yearnings did—and I suspect that behind most of them, you’ll find big, fat conventional wisdom. You might first pull off the mask of one of your beliefs and find your parents or your friends or your college career coach—but if you keep going and pull on their face, you’ll usually see that it’s also a mask, and conventional wisdom is there hiding behind it. A general conception, a common opinion, an oft-cited statistic7—none of which have actually been verified by you, but all of which are treated as gospel by society.

 Today’s world goes through dramatic changes each decade, which usually leaves conventional wisdom wildly outdated. But we’re wired for a more ancient world where almost nothing ever changed, so we all reason like cooks and treat conventional wisdom as equivalent to truth.

 These problems then extend to how we view our own potential. When you overrate the impact of innate talent on how people fare in their careers—and you also conflate talent and skill level—it won’t leave you feeling great about your chances at many paths. Because we better understand the trajectory of traditional careers, we’re less prone to do this with them. A first-year medical student sees an experienced surgeon at work and thinks, “I can get there one day—just need to do about 20 years of hard work.” But when a young artist or entrepreneur or software engineer looks at the equivalent of the experienced surgeon in their field, they’re more likely to think, “Wow look how talented they are—I’m nowhere near that good,” and get all hopeless. There’s also the other common notion, that people who thrive in non-traditional careers had some “big break” at some point, like hitting a lucky scratch card jackpot—and I don’t know many people who want to risk their careers on scratch cards.

 These are only a few examples of the slew of delusions and misconceptions we tend to have about how great careers happen. So let’s brainstorm how it might actually work:

 The Career Landscape

 I have no idea, mostly. And I think most people have no idea. Things are just changing too quickly.

 But that’s kind of the key point. If you can figure out how to get a reasonably accurate picture of the real career landscape out there, you have a massive edge over everyone else, most of whom will be using conventional wisdom as their instruction booklet.

 First, there’s the broad landscape—the set of all the jobs someone could possibly have in today’s society. My current job description is: “Writer of 8,000-to-40,000-word articles about a bunch of different topics, with cursing and stick figures, on a remarkably sporadic schedule.” Think conventional wisdom has any job openings for me with that description? The landscape today is made up of thousands of options—some 40 years old, some made possible only three months ago because of the advent of some new technology—and the way things work today, if there’s an option you want that’s not already out there, you can probably create it for yourself. Pretty stressful, but also incredibly exciting.

 Then, there’s each specific career path. A career path is like a game board. The conventional wisdom bookshelf contains instruction booklets for only a small fraction of today’s available game boards—and those that it does have usually tell you how that game was played in the past, even though the current game board has evolved significantly into something with new kinds of opportunities and different rules and loopholes. When you consider a career path today, to make an accurate assessment of what the path looks like and what kinds of strength-weakness profiles it favors, you have to understand what that career’s current game board looks like. Otherwise, it’s like trying to evaluate your chances of being a professional basketball player based on your height and strength without realizing that, say, basketball has evolved and is now played on oversize courts that contain 10 different 7-foot hoops, and the current game favors speed over height and strength.

 This is promising news. There are likely dozens of awesome career paths that beautifully match your natural strengths, and it’s likely that most other people trying to succeed on those paths are playing with an outdated rulebook and strategy guide. If you simply understand what the game board really looks like and play by modern rules, you have a huge advantage.

 Your Potential

 And this brings us to you and your particular strengths. Not only do we assess our strengths based on the wrong game boards (like in our basketball example)—even when we have the right game board in mind, we’re often bad at identifying the real strengths that that game calls for.

 When assessing your chances on a certain career path, the key question is:

 With enough time, could you get good enough at this game to potentially reach whatever your definition of success is in that career?

 I like to view this journey to “good enough at the game to succeed” as a distance. The distance starts with where you are now—point A—and ends with you reaching your definition of success, which we can draw with a star.

 The length of the distance depends on where point A is (how far along you are at the current moment) and where the star is (how lofty your definition of success is).

 So if you’re a college graduate who majored in computer science and your career goal is to be a middle-of-the-ladder engineer at Google, your distance might look like this:

 But if you’ve never done any kind of computer science before, and your career goal is to be the top engineer at Google, you’ve got a much longer road ahead:

 If your goal is to create the new Google, the road gets much, much longer.

 At this point, conventional wisdom might emerge as a voice in your head and point out that simply getting good enough at a certain skill doesn’t actually guarantee success—you might reach the star on a career path and still find that you haven’t “made it” yet.

 That’s mostly wrong, because it’s misunderstanding the star. The star isn’t about a particular skill level—e.g. coding ability or acting skills or business savvy—it’s about the entire game. In traditional careers, the games tend to be more straightforward—if you want to be a top surgeon, and you get incredibly good at surgery, you’ve probably hit your star and you’ll have your career. But the game boards in less traditional careers often involve many more factors. Reaching the “I want to be a famous actor” star doesn’t simply mean getting as good at acting as Morgan Freeman, it means getting as good at the entire actor game as most movie stars get by the time they break through. Acting ability is only one piece of that puzzle—you also need a knack for getting yourself in front of people with power, a shrewdness for personal branding, an insane amount of optimism, a ridiculous amount of hustle and persistence, etc. If you get good enough at that whole game—every component of it—your chances of becoming an A-list movie star are actually pretty high. That’s what hitting the star means.

 But conventional wisdom doesn’t get how non-traditional careers work—it only thinks in terms of a narrow aspect of success: talent and hard work. When career paths have game boards with much more going on, conventional wisdom just throws its hands up and calls it “luck.” To conventional wisdom, becoming a movie star requires some talent, but mostly, hitting a rare scratch ticket jackpot.

 So how do you figure out your chances of getting to any particular star? It’s all about a simple formula:

 Distance = Speed x Time.

 In our case, the more apt wording might be:

 Progress = Pace x Persistence.

 Your outlook on any career quest depends on A) the pace at which you’ll be able to improve at playing that career’s “game” and B) the amount of time you’re willing to persist in chasing that star. Let’s talk about both of these:

 Pace

 What makes someone slower or faster at improving at a career game? I’d say it comes down to three factors:

 Your level of chefness. As we discussed earlier, chefs look at the world with fresh eyes and build conclusions based on what they observe and what they’ve experienced. Cooks arrive at conclusions by following someone else’s recipe—in the case of careers, the recipe is usually conventional wisdom. Careers are complex games that almost everyone starts off bad at—then the chefs improve rapidly through a continual loop…

 …while cooks improve at a snail’s pace, because their strategy is just following a recipe which itself barely changes. What’s more, in a world where career games are constantly evolving and morphing, the chef’s tactics can evolve in real time and keep up. Meanwhile, the cook’s recipe just grows more and more outdated—a problem they remain oblivious to. This is why I’m pretty convinced that at least for less traditional careers, your level of chefness is the single most important factor in determining your pace of improvement.

 Your work ethic. This one is obvious. Someone who works on their career 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, is going to move down the path almost four times faster than someone who works 20 hours a week, 40 weeks a year. Someone who chooses a balanced lifestyle will move slower than a single-minded workaholic. Someone with a propensity towards laziness or procrastination is going to lose a lot of ground to someone who’s good at putting in consistent work days. Someone who frequently breaks from work to daydream or pick up their phone is going to get less done in each work hour than someone who practices deep focus.

 Your natural abilities. Talent does matter. Smarter, more talented people will improve at a game at a faster rate than less naturally gifted people. But intelligence and talent are only two types of natural ability that come into play here. Cleverness and savvy matter too, and those qualities don’t always correlate with raw intelligence. Depending on the type of career, social skills can be critically important as well. In many careers, likable (or subtly manipulative) people have a big advantage over less likable people—and those who enjoy socializing will put in more people hours over time, and build deeper relationships, than antisocial types.

 Other things, like existing connections, existing resources, and existing skills matter, of course, but they’re not components of pace—they’re part of the location of point A.

 Persistence

 When I say persistence, I’m referring to long-term persistence (as opposed to day-to-day work ethic). Persistence is simpler than pace. The more years you’re willing to commit to chasing a star, the farther along the road towards the star you’ll get. A car going 30 mph that quits driving after 15 minutes gets a lot less far than a car that drives 10 mph for two hours.

 And this is why persistence is so important. Someone who has decided they’re only willing to give a dream career a shot for three years before they’ll go for their fallback plan has essentially disqualified themselves from a chance at their dreams. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are—if you’ll give up after two or three years of not breaking through, you’re unlikely to succeed. A few years is just not enough time to traverse the typically long distances it takes to get to the raddest success stars, no matter how impressive your pace.

 Your Real Strengths and Weaknesses

 With our pace-times-persistence equation in mind, let’s revisit the concept of strengths and weaknesses. It’s not that “strengths and weaknesses” is a bad concept—it’s that we think about it all wrong. When we list our strengths, we tend to list our areas of existing skill more than anything else. Instead, strengths should be all about pace and persistence qualities. Originality or lack thereof should be a critical component of the discussion, making qualities like agility and humility (trademark chef traits) notable strengths, and qualities like stubbornness8 or intellectual laziness (classic cook traits) important weaknesses. The subtleties of work ethic, like a knack for deep focus or a propensity to procrastinate, should also be a major part of the discussion, as should natural abilities beyond talent, like savvy and likability. Qualities related to persistence, like resilience and determination and patience, should be thought of as promising strengths, while a social tentacle clamoring to appear successful as quickly as possible should be viewed as a bright red flag.

 Most importantly, these items shouldn’t be discussed as a snapshot of where they are now, but rather in terms of your potential for improvement in each of them. If you handed 25-year-old Michael Jordan a basketball for the first time, he’d suck. But calling basketball a “weakness” of his would be getting it very wrong. Instead, you’d want to watch him practice over the next six weeks and evaluate the slope of his improvement. This lesson applies to specific skills—but most general pace and persistence qualities can also be worked on and improved if you focus on them.

 Filling in the Reality Box

 Your true Reality Box would literally include all career paths for which you think a highly improved version of yourself could, with an entire lifetime of effort, reach the minimum star you’d be comfortable defining as success. This would be an impossibly big list, only ruling out paths that are clearly far too long for you to traverse at your maximum possible pace on the path (like me chasing a career as an Olympic figure skater). But it’s still useful to pause for a minute and reflect on the vast extent of your full Reality Box—just acknowledging how many options are truly open to you can put you in the right mindset.9

 So to be a bit more efficient, let’s worry about the parts of the Reality Box that might actually end up in your Option Pool (the middle of the Venn diagram where the Want and Reality Boxes overlap). To complete our Reality Box audit with that caveat, we need to evaluate:

 1) The general landscape. Take our best crack at evaluating the world’s current career landscape—the full range of options available (or create-able).

 2) Specific game boards. For any careers that sound remotely interesting, ponder what the deal might be with that career’s current game board—the parties involved, the way success seems to be happening for others recently, the most up-to-date rules of the game, the latest new loopholes that are being exploited, etc.

 3) Starting point. For those paths, evaluate your starting point, based on your current skills, resources, and connections relevant to that field.

 4) Success point. Think about end points and where on each line your star should be placed. Ask yourself what’s the minimum level of success you’d need to achieve in order to feel happy about having chosen that career path.

 5) Your pace. Make an initial estimate for what your pace of improvement might be on these various game boards, based on your current pace-related strengths and how much you think you can improve at each of them (in other words, how much your speed might be able to accelerate).

 6) Your level of persistence. Evaluate the amount of time you think you’ll be willing to put into each of these respective paths.

 Now it’s just math. You take your game board and make it a line, you plot starting points and success stars that together generate the various distances in front of you, and for each, you multiply your pace by your level of persistence. If it seems like the product of your pace and persistence for a given career path might be able to measure up to the path’s total length, that career lands in your Reality Box. Of course, it’s impossible to get exact values for any of the above factors, but it’s good to at least know the equation you’re working with.

 A from-first-principles Reality Box audit may bring some overly optimistic people down to Earth, but I suspect that for most, an audit will leave them feeling like they have a lot more options than they realized, empowering them to set their sights on a bolder direction.

 A good Reality Box reflection warrants yet another Want Box reflection. Reframing a bunch of career paths in your mind will affect your level of yearning for some of them. One career may seem less appealing after reminding yourself that it will entail thousands of hours of networking or multiple decades of pre-success struggle. Another may seem less daunting after changing your mind about how much luck is actually involved. There will be other career paths you hadn’t considered wanting because you hadn’t considered them as real options, but some deep reflection has opened your mind to them.

 This brings us to the end of our long, two-part deep dive. After a fairly exhausting box-auditing process, we can return to our Venn10 diagram.

 Assuming some things have changed, you have a new Option Pool to look at—a new list of options on the table that seem both desirable to your high-priority rankings and possible to achieve. We’re ready now to return to where we were before we started our analysis: the present moment. With these options in front of us, we’re ready to lift our heads up out of analysis and look forward into the future.

 Connecting the Dots into the Future

 It’s time to bring back your Career Plans map that I made you put down at the beginning of the post—the one with the arrow or the question mark. If there had been a clear arrow on your map before your audit, check out your new Option Pool. Given everything you’ve reflected upon, does your current career plan still qualify to be there? If so, congrats—you’re ahead of most of us.

 If not, well that’s shitty news, but it’s also good news. Remember, going from a false arrow to a question mark is always major progress in life.

 And actually, a new question mark implies having made the key cliff jump on two roller coasters: getting to know yourself and getting to know the world. Major step in the right direction. Cross out the arrow and join the question mark crowd.

 Now the question mark crowd has a tough choice. You gotta pick one of the arrows in the Option Pool.

 It’s a tough choice—but it should be way less tough than it is. Here’s why:

 Careers used to be kind of like a 40-year tunnel. You picked your tunnel, and once you were in, that was that. You worked in that profession for 40 years or so before the tunnel spit you out on the other side into your retirement.

 The truth is, careers have probably never really functioned like 40-year-tunnels, they just seemed that way. At best, traditional careers of the past played out kind of like tunnels.

 Today’s careers—especially the less traditional ones—are really really not like tunnels. But crusty old conventional wisdom has a lot of us still viewing things that way, which makes the already hard job of making big career path choices much harder.

 When you think of your career as a tunnel, it causes an identity crisis in anyone who doesn’t feel sure of who exactly they are and who they’ll want to be decades from now—which is most sane people. It enhances the delusion that what we do for work is a synonym for who we are, making a question mark on your map seem like an existential disaster.

 When you think of your career as a tunnel, the stakes to make the right choice seem so high that it explodes the feeling of tyranny of choice. For perfectionist types especially, this can be utterly paralyzing.

 When you think of your career as a tunnel, you lose the courage to make a career switch, even when your soul is begging for it. It makes switching careers feel incredibly risky and embarrassing, and it suggests that someone who does so is a failure. It also makes all kinds of multi-faceted, vibrant, mid-career people feel like they’re too old to make a bold switch or start a whole new path afresh.

 But conventional wisdom still tells many of us that careers are tunnels. As the icing on its shit cake—on top of helping us yearn for things we don’t actually want, deny yearnings that we feel deep down, fear things that aren’t dangerous, and believe things about the world and our potential that aren’t accurate—conventional wisdom tells us that careers are a tunnel to help us daunt the shit out of ourselves unnecessarily.

 Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. Today’s people aren’t synonymous with what they do—they’re impossibly complex, rapidly changing scientists. And today’s career isn’t a tunnel, or a box, or an identity label—it’s a long series of science experiments.

 Steve Jobs compared life to connecting the dots, pointing out that while it’s easy to look at your past and see how the dots connected to lead you to where you are, it’s basically impossible in life to connect the dots forwards.

 If you look at the biographies of your heroes, you’ll see that their paths look a lot more like a long series of connected dots than a straight and predictable tunnel. If you look at yourself and your friends, you’ll probably see the same trend—according to data, the median time a young person stays in a given job is only 3 years (older people spend a longer time on each dot, but not that much longer—10.4 years on average).

 So seeing your career as a series of dots isn’t a mental trick to help you make decisions—it’s an accurate depiction of what’s actually happening. And seeing your career as a tunnel isn’t just unproductive—it’s delusional.

 Likewise, you’re limited to focusing mainly on the next dot on your path—because it’s the only dot you can figure out. You don’t have to worry about dot #4 because you can’t anyway—you’re literally not qualified to do so.

 By the time dot #4 rolls around, you will have learned stuff about yourself you don’t know now. You’ll also have changed from who you are now, and your Yearning Octopus will reflect those changes. You’ll know a lot more than you currently do about the career landscape and the specific game boards you’re interested in, and you’ll have become a much better game player. And of course, that landscape—and those game boards—will have themselves evolved.

 The fantastic website 80,000 Hours (which exists to help young, talented people work through their career choices) has compiled a lot of data to back this up: data on the fact that you’ll change, that the world will change, and that you’ll only learn with time what you’re actually good at. Popular psychologist Dan Gilbert also eloquently describes just how bad we are at predicting what will make us happy in the future.

 Pretending you can figure out what dot #2 or #4 or #8 should be now is laughable. Future dots are the worry of a future, wiser you living in a future world. So let’s focus on dot #1.

 If we’re thinking of ourselves as scientists and of society as a science lab, we should think of your current freshly revised Want-Reality Venn Diagram as nothing more than an early, rough hypothesis. Dot #1 is your chance to test it out.

 Hypothesis testing is intuitive in the dating world. If a friend were toiling over what kind of person she wants to marry but never went out with anyone, you’d tell her, “You can’t figure this out on your couch—you’ve gotta start going on dates, and that’ll teach you what you want in a partner.” If that friend then went on a solid first date and returned home to toil for hours about whether or not this new person was The One, you’d again have to correct her. You’d say, “There’s no way you can know that from just one date! You have to get some experience dating this person to learn what you need to learn to make that decision.”

 We can all agree that this hypothetical friend is pretty nuts and is lacking a fundamental understanding of how you find a happy relationship. So let’s not be like her when it comes to picking our career. Dot #1 is a chill situation—it’s just a first date.

 This is awesome news—because it makes it a lot less scary to draw an arrow on your map if it’s only an arrow to dot #1 of your future. The real cause of tyranny of choice is accurately seeing the sheer number of options you have in today’s world while delusionally seeing those careers as the 40-year tunnels of yesterday’s world. That’s a lethal combo. Reframing your next major career decision as a far lower-stakes choice makes the number of options exciting, not stressful.

 And that’s all great in theory. But now comes the hard part.

 Making Your Move

 You’ve reflected and reflected and reflected and weighed and measured and predicted and considered. You’ve chosen a dot and drawn an arrow. And now you have to actually make the move.

 We’re super bad at this. We’re frightened people. We don’t like icky things and making a bold, real-life step is icky. If there’s any ounce of procrastination susceptibility in us, here’s where it’ll show itself.

 The Yearning Octopus can help. As we discussed earlier, your behavior at any given point simply displays the configuration of your octopus. If you’ve decided on a life step and you can’t quite take it, it’s because the parts of you that don’t want to make a move are ranked higher in your subconscious than the parts of you that do. Your conscious mind may have tried to assign lower shelf ratings to the parts of your octopus that lean towards inertia, but your yearnings have rebelled. You’re a CEO not in control of their staff.

 To fix this problem, think like a kindergarten teacher. In your class, a faction of the 5-year-olds is rebelling against your wishes. What do you do?

 Go talk to the 5-year-olds that are causing the trouble. They’re unpleasant, defiant simpletons, but they can still be reasoned with. Talk to them about why you’ve ranked them lower than others in the octopus hierarchy. Describe to them the insights you gained from your Reality Box reflection. Remind them about how connecting the dots works and about the chillness of dot #1. You’re the teacher—figure it out.

 The older I get, the clearer it becomes that our internal battle as the kindergarten teachers of our mind is like 97% of life’s struggle. The world is easy—you’re difficult. If you find yourself continually not executing your plans in life and your promises to yourself, you’ve uncovered your new #1 priority—becoming a better kindergarten teacher. Until you do, your life will be run by a bunch of primitive, short-sighted 5-year-olds, and your whole shit will suck. Trust me, I know.

 If your inner analysis does call for a career leap to a new dot, I hope that at some point, you’re able to make the jump.

 After the Move

 Jumping to a new dot is a liberating feeling, usually side by side with some substantial internal havoc.

 First of all, for a while at least, you’ll probably suck at what you’re doing on your new dot. While your wise self will know that’s exactly how it should be, your less wise selves will go into full existential meltdown mode. All of the fears you so thoughtfully deprioritized in your octopus ranking will think someone is murdering them and they’ll start trying to call 911. The yearnings you did prioritize won’t be feeling much gratification yet, and they’ll wonder if they were wrong all along about what they thought they wanted. The yearnings you didn’t prioritize will get out the guitar and start singing love songs for the greener-seeming grass you deprived them of. It won’t be much fun.

 Even if things do go well, you’ll be quickly reminded of the fact that the Yearning Octopus is a generally unhappy creature. Core pieces of the octopus will feel neglected or even assaulted, and every day that goes by, you’ll be bearing the opportunity cost of the paths you were considering but chose not to walk down—the versions of you in parallel universes where you made other choices. You’ll think about their hypothetical advancement in the world and worry about what you may have passed up.

 As you get wiser, you’ll learn to view a largely unhappy octopus with acceptance. You’ll let it whine and get good at tuning it out, knowing that it’s whining in the exact way you planned for it to be.

 The whining octopus is a reminder of why pure, elated happiness is never a reasonable goal. The times you feel pure happiness are temporary, drug-induced delusions—like the honeymoon phase of a new relationship or new job or the high following a long-awaited success. Those moments are the perfect golf shots of a mediocre golfer’s outing—they’re awesome, and you should enjoy the shit out of them—but they’re not the new normal, and they never will be.

 A better goal is contentment: the satisfying feeling that you’re currently taking the best crack you can at a good life path; that what you’re working on might prove to be a piece of an eventual puzzle you can feel really proud of. Chasing happiness is an amateur move. Feeling contentment in those times when your choices and your circumstances have combined to pull it off, and knowing you have all that you could ever ask for, is for the wise.

 People talk about being present in the moment, but there’s also the broader concept of macro-presence: feeling broadly present in your own life. If you’re on a career dot that, when you’re being really honest with yourself, feels right, you get to stop thinking and stop planning for a while and just dig in. You’ll come back to the big picture later—for now, you can put the macro picture aside, put your head down, and dedicate all of your energy to the present. For a while, you can just live.

 These moments don’t always last that long, so sink your teeth in. Put everything you’ve got into the dot you’ve chosen. As far as you know, you might be Michael Jordan holding his first basketball, so start playing.

 The Next Dot?

 At some point, your good feelings about the macro picture may sour. And when they do, you’ll have to get back into analysis mode and figure out what, in particular, is causing the restlessness.

 Sometimes, the macro mission won’t be the problem. It’ll be that the chef in you has decided that the mission itself calls for a strategic dot jump. In these cases, jumping dots isn’t a release of persistence but the stuff of persistence. This is the mission-enhancing type of dot jump.

 Other times, you’ll feel a darker kind of restlessness—the suspicion that you may need to change up the macro mission. When this happens, you’ll have to figure out if that feeling is emerging from the wise parts of you or simply from your restless, deprioritized yearnings. A mission-changing dot jump may be in order, but depending on which parts of you are asking for it, it may also be the wrong move.

 In these moments, it’s important to consider where you tend to be on this spectrum:

 The people on the left side of this spectrum are jump-shy. The cement-footed. Their pitfall is staying way too long in the wrong things. The people on the right are jump-happy—the wing-footed—and they have the opposite pitfall: they’re quick quitters.11 (You should be especially wary of cement feet—psychologists believe that people at the end of their lives are most likely to regret living by inertia: a commonly voiced regret is “I wish I had quit earlier,” and the most common advice of the elderly is, “Don’t stay in a job you dislike.“)

 This is why these internal frameworks are important. They give you the ability to analyze the source of your impulses. In our example, the question is whether your impulse to jump missions is the result of genuine evolution or quick-quitter bias. So think about your diagram. Is your restlessness just the expected incessant whining of an octopus still correctly configured? The weariness from a long trudge on what’s still the right path for you? Or have you learned new information about yourself or the world during the trudge that has corrected some off-base initial assumptions? Or maybe something is fundamentally evolving—some blue or yellow loop activity:

 If you feel that things have genuinely changed, you may decide to zoom out even further and think about the big red loop, which deals with fundamentally changing your mission:

 If a career is like connecting the dots, we should probably rank “getting wise about dot-jumping” pretty high on our to-do list. The best place to start is by looking at your own past. Studying your own past decisions, with the flashlight of hindsight and accumulated wisdom, is like an athlete studying game tape.

 Looking at my own past, I can see a lot of dot jumps (or, while I was still in school, career plan adjustments), and some of them look pretty unwise in retrospect. But the clearer a picture I can see of my past bad decisions and the thought patterns and behavioral habits that built them, the less likely I’ll be to repeat them in the future.

 Remembering that you’re kind of dumb is also a critical humbling exercise. The insecurity of humility doesn’t feel very good, and the burden of having to continually invent your own life map is never easy—but insecurity and difficulty are the feelings of driving your own ship. It’s when we feel too good that we run the risk of becoming overconfident, intellectually complacent, and set in our ways. It’s exactly when we think we have life all figured out that we end up losing our way.

 ___________

 Over the course of your life, your good and bad decisions will collaborate to forge your unique life path. Often on this blog, I’ve written about how irrational our fears can be and how badly they can hold us back. But we should probably embrace the fear of end-of-life regret.

 I’ve thankfully never been on anything that felt like a deathbed, but it seems like there’s something about the end of life that lets people see things with clear eyes. It seems like facing death makes all of those voices in your head who aren’t actually you melt away, leaving your little authentic self standing there all alone, in reflection. I think end-of-life regrets may simply be your authentic self thinking about the parts of your life you never got to live—the parts of you that someone else kicked down into your subconscious.

 My own psyche seems to back this up—looking back on my path so far, the mistakes that bother me most are the ones that happened because someone else took the wheel of my head and overruled the quiet, insecure voice of my authentic self—the mistakes that I knew at the time, deep down, were wrong. My goal for the future isn’t to avoid mistakes, it’s for the mistakes I do make to be my own.

 That’s why I went through such an excruciatingly rigorous analysis in this post. I think this is one of those few topics in life that’s worth it. Other voices will never stop fiercely trying to live your life for you—you owe it to that little insecure character in the very center of your consciousness to get this right.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. That’s the only thing we use the list for—and since my posting schedule isn’t exactly…regular…this is the best way to stay up-to-date with WBW posts.

 And if you want to download this post for printing and offline sharing, you can buy it here.

 For help analyzing your situation:

 Some paper to write on: Your octopus. Your priority shelf. Some path distances. Your career dot map.

 For those who want to dig in even further: Alicia (WBW Manager of Lots of Things) has put together a more involved group of worksheets.

 For further exploration:

 The site 80,000 hours—dedicated to helping young, high-potential people make big career choices—is an awesome resource. The site is run by super smart, thoughtful, forward-thinking people, and can be digested in video or book format in addition to on their site.

 I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s blog for years. Seth has a lot of wisdom in his head, and he doles it out in little bite-sized nuggets each morning on his blog (which I receive by email). A lot of Seth’s advice applies to career choices. Here’s an example (which I adapted into one of the cartoons in this post).

 Eric Barker’s blog is full of actual data that can help with career choices, like this post on what makes a career fulfilling or this one on the importance of mentors.

 ___________

 More Wait But Why human deep dives:

 The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again

 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

 And a post about getting wiser

 And a few less self-reflect-y Wait But Why posts on:

 Awkward social interactions

 The history of everything

 Colonizing Mars

 1. And other higher education.↩

 2. Also hoodies are cozy and Allbirds are like wearing socks all the time and jeans are magical pants you never have to actually wash unless you spill something colorful on them.↩

 3. Fun meals and exercise fall into this category.↩

 4. I personally hope my retirement is just as rich and vibrant as a career path, which means I’ll need to continue to reflect on my path in Retirement Orchard.↩

 5. You know he’s actually a Yearning Pentapus, I know he’s actually a Yearning Pentapus, and he knows he’s actually a Yearning Pentapus—but let’s just leave it alone.↩

 6. There are printouts at the bottom of the post if you’d like to work through your analysis on paper.↩

 7. Did you know that 9 out of 10 restaurants fail?!↩

 8. Stubbornness is a cook quality because it means being a cook to your previous self—i.e. treating your previous self’s opinions and methods and habits as your permanent recipe.↩

 9. Or totally paralyze you and ruin your happiness!↩

 10. John Venn really pulled something off here. A Venn diagram is the most obvious possible kind of diagram, and somehow, John Venn convinced everyone he invented it. And this is despite openly saying he didn’t invent it. Venn explains: “I began at once somewhat more steady work on the subjects and books which I should have to lecture on. I now first hit upon the diagrammatical device of representing propositions by inclusive and exclusive circles. Of course the device was not new then, but it was so obviously representative of the way in which any one, who approached the subject from the mathematical side, would attempt to visualize propositions, that it was forced upon me almost at once.”↩

 11. This spectrum, of course, is also highly relevant in relationships.↩

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Hey readers! Quick note before we jump in:
This is a post about something I’ve been wanting to write about forever: careers. Society tells us a lot of things about what we should want in a career and what the possibilities are—which is weird because I’m pretty sure society knows very little about any of this. When it comes to careers, society is like your great uncle who traps you at holidays and goes on a 15-minute mostly incoherent unsolicited advice monologue, and you tune out almost the whole time because it’s super clear he has very little idea what he’s talking about and that everything he says is like 45 years outdated. Society is like that great uncle, and conventional wisdom is like his rant. Except in this case, instead of tuning it out, we pay rapt attention to every word, and then we make major career decisions based on what he says. Kind of a weird thing for us to do.
This post isn’t me giving you career advice really—it’s a framework that I think can help you make career decisions that actually reflect who you are, what you want, and what our rapidly changing career landscape looks like today. You’re not a pro at this, but you’re certainly more qualified to figure out what’s best for you than our collective un-self-aware great uncle. For those of you yet to start your career who aren’t sure what you want to do with their lives, or those of you currently in the middle of your career who aren’t sure you’re on the right path, I hope this post can help you press the reset button on your thought process and get some clarity.
Finally, it feels very good to put this post up. It’s been way, way too long. The last year has been pretty frustrating for me and anyone who likes Wait But Why—a lot of build-up of ideas with none of the satisfying release of those ideas on the blog (most of my last year has been spent working on another, way longer post). I’m hoping this WBW Dark Ages era is nearing its end, because I miss hanging out here. Thanks, as always, to the small group of ridiculously generous, ridiculously patient patrons who have stuck with us through such a slow period.
– Tim
  PDF: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here. 
_______
 Your Life Path So Far 
For most of us, childhood is kind of like a river, and we’re kind of like tadpoles.
   
We didn’t choose the river. We just woke up out of nowhere and found ourselves on some path set for us by our parents, by society, and by circumstances. We’re told the rules of the river and the way we should swim and what our goals should be. Our job isn’t to think about our path—it’s to succeed on the path we’ve been placed on, based on the way success has been defined for us.
For many of us—and I suspect for a large portion of Wait But Why readers—our childhood river then feeds into a pond, called college.1 We may have some say in which particular pond we landed in, but in the end, most college ponds aren’t really that different from one another.
   
In the pond, we have a bit more breathing room and some leeway to branch out into more specific interests. We start to ponder, looking out at the pond’s shores—out there where the real world starts and where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives. This usually brings some mixed feelings.
   
And then, 22 years after waking up in a rushing river, we’re kicked out of the pond and told by the world to go make something of our lives.
   
There are a few problems here. One is that at that moment, you’re kind of skill-less and knowledge-less and a lot of other things-less:
   
But before you can even address your general uselessness, there’s an even bigger issue—your pre-set path ended. Kids in school are kind of like employees of a company where someone else is the CEO. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you. And you’ve spent your whole life becoming a pro student, leaving you with zero experience as the CEO of anything. Up to now, you’ve only been in charge of the micro decisions—”How do I succeed at my job as a student?”—and now you’re suddenly holding the keys to the macro cockpit as well, tasked with answering stressful macro questions like “Who am I?” and “What are the important things in life?” and “What are my options for paths and which one should I choose and how do I even make a path?” When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us, leaving us standing there holding our respective dicks, with no idea how to do this.
Then time happens. And we end up on a path. And that path becomes our life’s story.
At the end of our life, when we look back at how things went, we can see our life’s path in its entirety, from an aerial view.
When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.
So this is a post about path-making. Let’s take a 30-minute pre-deathbed pause to look down at the path we’re on, and ahead at where that path seems to be going, and make sure it makes sense.
 The Cook and the Chef—Revisited 
In the past, I’ve written about the critical distinction between “reasoning from first principles” and “reasoning by analogy”—or what I called being a “chef” vs. being a “cook.” Since writing the post, I notice this distinction everywhere, and I’ve thought about it roughly 2 million times in my own life.
The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning—reasoning by analogy—happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it, with maybe a little personal tweak here and there—kind of like a cook following an already written recipe.
A pure verbatim recipe-copying cook and a pure independently inventive chef are the two extreme ends of what is, of course, a spectrum. But for any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.
Being a chef takes a tremendous amount of time and energy—which makes sense, because you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re trying to invent it for the first time. Puzzling your way to a conclusion feels like navigating a mysterious forest while blindfolded and always involves a whole lot of failure, in the form of trial and error. Being a cook is far easier and more straightforward and less icky. In most situations, being a chef is a terrible waste of time, and comes with a high opportunity cost, since time on Earth is immensely scarce. Right now, I’m wearing J. Crew jeans and a plain t-shirt and a hoodie and Allbirds shoes, because I’m trying to conform. Throughout my life, I’ve looked around at people who seem kind of like me and I’ve bought a bunch of clothes that look like what they wear. And this makes sense—because clothes aren’t important to me, and they’re not how I choose to express my individuality. So in my case, fashion is a perfect part of life to use a reasoning shortcut and be a cook.2
 But then there are those parts of life that are really really deeply important—like where you choose to live, or the kinds of friends you choose to make, or whether you want to get married and to whom, or whether you want to have kids and how you want to raise them, or how you set your lifestyle priorities.
Career-path-carving is definitely one of those really really deeply important things. Let’s spell out the obvious reasons why:
 Time. For most of us, a career (including ancillary career time, like time spent commuting and thinking about your work) will eat up somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours. At the moment, a long human life runs at about 750,000 hours. When you subtract childhood (~175,000 hours) and the portion of your adult life you’ll spend sleeping, eating, exercising, and otherwise taking care of the human pet you live in, along with errands and general life upkeep (~325,000 hours), you’re left with 250,000 “meaningful adult hours.”3 So a typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time—not something to be a cook about.
   
 Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all the non-career hours as well. For those of us not already wealthy through past earnings, marriage, or inheritance, a career doubles as our means of support. The particulars of your career also often play a big role in determining where you live, how flexible your life is, the kinds of things you’re able to do in your free time, and sometimes even in who you end up marrying.
 Impact. On top of your career being the way you spend much of your time and the means of support for the rest of your time, your career triples as your primary mode of impact-making. Every human life touches thousands of other lives in thousands of different ways, and all of those lives you alter then go on to touch thousands of lives of their own. We can’t test this, but I’m pretty sure that you can select any 80-year-old alive today, go back in time 80 years, find them as an infant, throw the infant in the trash, and then come back to the present day and find a countless number of things changed. All lives make a large impact on the world and on the future—but the kind of impact you end up making is largely within your control, depending on the values you live by and the places you direct your energy. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.
 Identity. In our childhoods, people ask us about our career plans by asking us what we want to be when we grow up. When we grow up, we tell people about our careers by telling them what we are. We don’t say, “I practice law”—we say, “I am a lawyer.” This is probably an unhealthy way to think about careers, but the way many societies are right now, a person’s career quadruples as the person’s primary identity. Which is kind of a big thing.
So yeah—your career path isn’t like my shitty sweatshirt. It’s really really deeply important, putting it squarely in “Definitely absolutely make sure to be a chef about it” territory.
 Your Career Map 
Which brings us to you. I don’t know exactly what your deal is. But there’s a good chance you’re somewhere in one of the blue regions—
   
—which means your career path is a work in progress.4
 Whether you’re yet to start your career or well into it, somewhere in the back of your mind (or maybe in the very front of it) is a “Career Plans” map.
We can group map holders into three broad categories—each of which is well-represented in the river, in the pond, standing on the shore, and at every stage of adult life.
One group of people will look at the map and see a big, stressful question mark.
   
These are people who feel indecisive about their career path. They’ve been told to follow their passion, but they don’t feel especially passionate about anything. They’ve been told to let their strengths guide them, but they’re not sure what they’re best at. They may have felt they had answers in the past, but they’ve changed and they’re no longer sure who they are or where they’re going.  
Other people will see a nice clear arrow representing a direction they feel confident is right—but find their legs walking in a different direction. They’re living with one of the most common sources of human misery, a career path they know in their heart is wrong.
   
The lucky ones feel they know where they want to go and believe they’re marching in that direction.
   
But even these people should pause and ask themselves, “Who actually drew this arrow? Was it really me?” The answer can get confusing.
I’m pretty sure all of these people would benefit from a moment of career path reflection.
 The Okay But Why Do You Think You Can Help Me With My Career Reflection You Draw Stick Figures for a Living Blue Box 
Extremely fair question. One thing I always ask myself as I pick topics to write about is, “Am I qualified to write about this?” Here are the reasons I decided to take on this topic:
1) I have spent most of the last 20 years in a perpetual state of analyzing my own career path.
2) My path has taken a lot of turns—from wanting to be a movie star when I was 7 to wanting to be the president when I was 17 to wanting to write film scores when I was 22 to wanting to be an entrepreneur when I was 24 to wanting to write musicals when I was 29 to most recently wanting to be a writer-ish guy.
3) After being pretty all over the place about my career path for most of my life, I actually love my job now. That’s always subject to change, but being able to look at the decision-making processes that led me to confusing or frustrating places, side by side with the decisions that led me to a more fulfilling place, has offered me some wisdom on where people tend to go wrong.
4) On top of having my own story to look at, I’ve had a front-row seat for the stories of my dozen or so closest friends. My friends seem to share my career path obsessiveness, so between observing their paths and talking with them about those paths again and again along the way, I’ve broadened my views on the topic, which helps me to distinguish between the lessons that are my-life specific and those that are more universal.
5) Finally, this isn’t a post about which careers are better or worse than others or which career values are more or less meaningful—there are lots of social scientists and self-help authors out there with good data on that, and I’m not one of them. It’s instead a framework that I think can help a career-path reflector better see their own situation, and what really matters to them, clearly and honestly. This framework has worked really well for me, so I think it can probably be helpful for other people too.
Now that you’ve taken a fresh look at your Career Plans map, along with whatever arrow may or may not be on it, put it down and out of sight. We’ll come back to it at the end of the post. It’s time now for a deep dive—let’s think about this from scratch. From first principles.
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In the cook-chef post, I designed a simple framework for how a chef makes major career choices. At its core is a simple Venn diagram.
The first part of the diagram is the Want Box, which contains all the careers you find desirable.
   
The second part of the diagram is the Reality Box. The Reality Box is for the set of all careers that are realistic to potentially achieve—based on a comparison, in each case, between your level of potential in an area and the general difficulty of achieving success in that area.
   
The overlapping area contains your optimal career path choices—the set of arrows you should consider drawing on your Career Map. We can call it the Option Pool.
   
This is straightforward enough. But actually filling in these boxes accurately is way harder than it looks. For the diagram to work, it has to be as close to the truth as possible, and to get there, we have to lift up the hood of our subconscious and head down. Let’s start with the Want Box.
 Deep Analysis, Part 1: Your Want Box 
The hard thing about the Want Box is that you want a bunch of different things—or, rather, there are a bunch of different sides of you, and each of them wants—and fears—its own stuff. And since some motivations have conflicting interests with others, you cannot, by definition, have everything you want. Going for one thing you want means, by definition, not going for others, and sometimes, it’ll specifically mean going directly against others. The Want Box is a game of compromise.
 The Yearning Octopus 
To do a proper Want Box audit, you need to think about what you yearn for in a career and then unpack the shit out of it. Luckily, we have someone here who can help us. The Yearning Octopus.
   
We each have our own personal Yearning Octopus5 in our heads. The particulars of each person’s Yearning Octopus will vary, but people also aren’t all that different from each other, and I bet many of us feel very similar yearnings and fears (especially given that I find that Wait But Why readers tend to have a lot in common).
The first thing to think about is that there are totally distinct yearning worlds—each living on one tentacle. These tentacles often do not get along with each other.
   
   
It gets worse. Each tentacle is made up of a bunch of different individual yearnings and their accompanying fears—and these often massively conflict with each other too.
   
Let’s take a closer look at each tentacle to see what’s going on.
   
The Personal Yearnings tentacle is probably the hardest one to generalize here—it’s pretty particular to each of us. It’s a reflection of our specific personality and our values, and it bears the burden of probably the most complex and challenging human need: fulfillment. It’s also in the shit dealing with not only our current selves, but a bunch of our past selves too. The dreams of 7-year-old you and the idealized identity of 12-year-old you and the secret hopes of 17-year-old you and the evolving passions of your current self are all somewhere on the personal tentacle, each throwing their own little fit about getting what they want, and each fully ready to make you feel horrible about yourself with their disappointment and disgust if you fail them. On top of that, your fear of death sometimes emerges on the personal tentacle, all needy about you leaving your mark and achieving greatness and all that. The personal tentacle is why you don’t find very many billionaires content to spend the rest of their life sipping cocktails on the beach—it’s a highly needy tentacle.
And yet, the personal tentacle is also one that often ends up somewhat neglected. Because in many cases, it’s the ickiest set of yearnings to really go for; because the fears of this tentacle aren’t scary in an immediate way—they creep in out of the background over time; and because the personal tentacle is always at risk of getting bowled over early in your career by the powerful animal emotions of the other tentacles. This neglect can leave a person with major regrets later on once the dust settles. An unfulfilled Personal Yearnings tentacle is often the explanation, for example, behind a very successful, very unhappy person—who may believe they got successful in the wrong field.
   
The Social Yearnings tentacle is probably our most primitive, animal side, with its core drive stemming back to our tribal evolutionary past. On the tentacle are a number of odd creatures.
As we’ve discussed before on this blog, we all have a Social Survival Mammoth living in our heads who’s earth-shatteringly obsessed with what other people think of us. This means he craves acceptance and inclusion and being well-liked, while likewise being petrified of embarrassment, negative judgment, and disapproval. He really really really wants to be in the in-group and he really really really doesn’t want to be in the outgroup. He’s quite cute though.
Then there’s your ego, who’s a similar character but even more needy. Your ego doesn’t just want to be accepted; it wants to be admired, desired, and fawned upon—ideally, on a mass scale. More upsetting to it than being disliked is being ignored. It wants to be relevant and important and widely known.
There are other characters milling about as well. Somewhere else on the social tentacle is a little judge with a little gavel who gets very butthurt if it thinks people aren’t judging you fairly—if you’re not appropriately appreciated. It’s very important to the judge that people are aware of exactly how smart and talented you think you are. The judge is also big on holding grudges—which is the reason a lot of people are driven more than anything by a desire to show that person or those people who never believed in them.
Finally, some of us may find a loving little dog on our social tentacle who wants more than anything in the world to please its owner, and who just cannot bear the thought of disappointing them. The one problem with this adorable creature is that its owner isn’t you. It’s a person with so much psychological power over you that, if you’re not careful, you may dedicate your whole career to trying to please them and make them proud. (It’s probably a parent.)
   
The Lifestyle Yearnings tentacle mostly just wants Tuesday to be a good day. But like, a really pleasant, enjoyable day—with plenty of free time and self-care and relaxation and luxuries.
It’s also concerned with your life in the big picture being as great as possible—as far as your lifestyle tentacle is concerned, you should be able to do what you want to do in life, when and how you want to do it, with the people you like most. Life should be full of fun times and rich experiences, but it should also roll by smoothly, without too much hard work and as few bumps in the road as possible.
The issue is, even if you place a high priority on your lifestyle yearnings, it’s pretty difficult to keep the whole tentacle happy at the same time. The part of the tentacle that just wants to sit around and relax will hold you back from sweating to build the kind of career that offers long-term flexibility and the kind of wealth that can make life luxurious and cushy and full of toys. The part of the tentacle that only feels comfortable when the future feels predictable will reject the exact kinds of paths that may generate the long-term freedom another part of the tentacle longs for. The side of you that wants a stress-free life doesn’t get along very well with the side of you that thirsts to be hang gliding off a cliff in Namibia like Richard Branson.
   
The Moral Yearnings tentacle thinks the rest of the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus are a real pack of dicks—each one more self-involved and self-indulgent than the next. The parts of you on the moral tentacle look around and see a big world that needs so much fixing; they see billions of people no less worthy than you of a good life who just happened to be born into inferior circumstances; they see an uncertain future ahead that hangs in the balance between utopia and dystopia for life on Earth—a future we can actually push in the right direction if we could only get our other tentacles out of our way. While the other tentacles fantasize about what you would do with your life if you had a billion dollars in the bank, the moral tentacle fantasizes about the kind of impact you could make if you had a billion dollars to deploy.
Needless to say, the other tentacles of your Yearning Octopus find the moral tentacle to be insufferable. They also can’t begin to understand philanthropy for philanthropy’s sake—they think, “Other people aren’t me, so why would I spend my time and energy working to help them?”—but they can understand philanthropy for their own motive’s sake. While the moral and lifestyle tentacles tend to be in direct conflict, others may sometimes find common ground—the social tentacle can get very into philanthropy if it’ll happen to win you respect and admiration from a highly regarded social group, and some people’s personal tentacle may find the meaning or self-worth it so craves in a philanthropic endeavor.
That’s why, when you do something philanthropic—or anything altruistic, really—there are a few separate things going on in your head. The part of you determined to get proper public credit for the deed lives on your social tentacle; the part of you that thinks “God I’m a good person” lives on your personal tentacle; and the part of you that really loves seeing the person or group you helped be better off lives on your moral tentacle. Likewise, not doing anything for others can hurt you on multiple tentacles—the moral tentacle because it feels guilty and sad, the social tentacle because this may cause others to judge you as a selfish or greedy person, and the personal tentacle because it may lower your self-esteem.
   
Your Practical Yearnings tentacle thinks all of this is fine and great—but it would also like to point out that it’s March 31st and your rent is due tomorrow, and the funny thing about that is that it logged into your bank account and saw that the number of dollars in it is actually less than the number of dollars that your landlord will need from you sometime in the next 34 hours. And yeah it knows that you deposited that check on Thursday and that it’s supposed to clear tomorrow morning, but your practical tentacle also could have sworn that just last month, all the tentacles promised that they’d make some sacrifices in order to build up at least a little bank account cushion so that simply paying the rent wouldn’t have to be really fucking stressful every month. Your practical tentacle also can’t help but notice that your social tentacle offered to buy a round of drinks for all nine people you went to the bar with last Saturday so those people would think of you as a classy, generous person, and that your lifestyle tentacle chose to rent what sure seems like a pretty nice-ass apartment for someone now living check to check, and that the updates have gotten real quiet from your friend about that bagel delivery service he started six months ago that your moral tentacle happily invested $2,500 in to help it get off the ground, and oh also that meanwhile your personal tentacle has everyone sweating their dick off working at two comedy-writing internships simultaneously that somehow manage to bring in less money combined than you made dressing up as an Egyptian enchantress to wait tables at Jekyll &amp; Hyde sophomore year of college.
At its basic level, your practical tentacle wants to make sure you can eat food and wear clothes and buy the medicine you need and not live outside. It doesn’t really care how these things happen—it just wants them to happen. But then everyone else on the octopus makes your practical tentacle’s life super hard by being fucky about things. Every time your income goes up, your lifestyle tentacle decides to raise the bar on what it wants and expects, leaving your practical tentacle continually in the shit trying to cover it all so you don’t have to run up your credit card debt. Your personal tentacle has all of these weird needs that take up a lot of time and more often than not aren’t exactly big money-makers. And while your practical tentacle would be totally down to just ask your rich uncle for money to help out, your social tentacle outlawed asking others for money because “it’s not a good look,” with your personal tentacle chiming in that “yeah, we’re better than that.”
So that’s the situation. You’ve got this Yearning Octopus in your head with five tentacles (or however many yours has), each with their own agenda, that often conflict with each other. Then there are the distinct individual yearnings on each tentacle, often in conflict amongst themselves. And if that weren’t enough, you sometimes have furious internal conflict inside a single yearning. Like when your desire to pursue your passion can’t figure out what it’s most passionate about.
   
Or when you want so badly to be respected, but then you remember that a career that wins the undying respect of one segment of society will always receive shrugs from other segments and even contemptuous eye rolls from other segments still.
Or when you decide to satisfy your urge to help others, before realizing that the part of you that wants to dedicate your life to helping to mitigate humanity’s greatest existential risks has palpable disdain for the part of you that would rather make a tangible positive impact on your local community—while the part of you that can’t stand the thought of the millions of today’s humans without access to clean water finds both of those other yearnings to be pretty cold and heartless.
So yeah, your Yearning Octopus is complicated. And no human in history has ever satisfied their entire octopus—that’s why you’ll never find it fully smiling. Human yearning is a game of choices and sacrifices and compromise.
 Dissecting the Octopus 
With that in mind, let’s return to your Want Box. When we think about our career goals and fears and hopes and dreams, our consciousness is just accessing the net output of the Yearning Octopus—which is usually made up of its loudest voices. Only by digging into our mind’s subconscious can we see what’s really going on.6
 The cool thing is that we all have the ability to do that. The stuff in your subconscious is like stuff in the basement of a house. It’s not off-limits to us—it’s just in the basement. We can go look at it anytime—we just have to A) remember that the house has a basement, and B) actually spend the time and energy to go down there, even though going down there might suck.
So let’s head to the basement of your mind to look for the octopus. Unless you’re one of those people who’s really practiced at analyzing your subconscious, it might be dark in the basement, making it hard to see your octopus. The way to start turning the lights on is by identifying what your conscious mind currently knows about your yearnings and fears, and then unpacking it.
Like if there’s a certain career path that sounds fantastic to you, unpack that. Which tentacles in particular are yearning for that career—and which specific parts of those tentacles?
If you’re not currently working towards that career you supposedly yearn for, try to figure out why not. If you think it’s because you’re afraid of failing, unpack that. Fear of failure can emerge from any of the tentacles, so that’s not a specific enough analysis. You want to find the specific source of the fear. Is it a social tentacle fear of embarrassment, or of being judged by others as not that smart, or of appearing to be not that successful to your romantic interests? Is it a personal tentacle fear of damaging your own self-image—of confirming a suspicion about yourself that haunts you? Is it a lifestyle tentacle fear of having to downgrade your living situation, or of bringing stress and instability into a currently predictable life? Or maybe that fear of a living situation downgrade isn’t actually emerging from your lifestyle tentacle, but more so from your social tentacle—in other words, is it possible you’re indifferent about the apartment change itself but super concerned about the message a lifestyle downgrade sends to your friends and family? Or are there financial commitments you simply cannot back out of at the moment, and your practical tentacle is in a genuine panic about how you’ll make ends meet should this career switch take longer than expected to work out, or not work out at all? Or are a few of these combining together to generate your fear of making the leap?
Perhaps you don’t really think it’s fear of failure that’s stopping you, but something else. Maybe it’s a dread of the change in identity—both internally and externally—that inevitably accompanies a career move like this. Maybe it’s the heavy weight of inertia—an intense resistance to change—that seems to exist in and of itself and overpowers all of your other yearnings. In either case, you’d want to unpack the feeling and ask yourself exactly which tentacles are so opposed to an identity shift, or so driven by inertia.
Maybe you pine to be rich. You fantasize about a life where you make $1.2 million a year, and you feel a tremendous drive to make it happen. All five tentacles can feel a desire for wealth under certain circumstances, each for their own reasons. Unpack it.
As you unpack an inner drive to make money, maybe you discover that at its core, the drive is more for a sense of security than for vast wealth. That can be unpacked too. A yearning for security at its simplest is just your practical tentacle doing what your practical tentacle does. But maybe it’s not actually basic security you want as much as a guarantee of a certain level of fanciness demanded by your lifestyle or social tentacle. Or perhaps what you really want is a level of security so over-the-top secure it can no longer be called a security yearning—instead, it may be an impulse by the emotional well-being section of your lifestyle tentacle to alleviate a compulsive financial stress you were raised to forever feel, almost regardless of your actual financial situation.
The answers to all of these questions lie somewhere on the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus. And by asking questions like these and digging deep enough to identify the true roots of your various yearnings, you start to turn on the basement light and acquaint yourself with your octopus in all its complexity.
You’ll also come to understand which of your inner yearnings seem to speak the loudest in your mind and carry the most pull in your decision-making processes. Pretty quickly, a yearning hierarchy will begin to reveal itself. You’ll identify yearnings that speak loudly and get their way; yearnings that cry at the top of their lungs but get continually elbowed out of the way by higher-prioritized parts of the octopus; yearnings that seem resigned to their low-status positions in the hierarchy.
 Searching for Imposters 
We’re making good progress—but we’re just getting started. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of your Yearning Octopus, you can start doing the real work—work that takes place another level down in your subconscious, in the basement of the basement. Here, you can set up a little interrogation room and one by one, bring each yearning down into it for a cross-examination.
You’ll start by asking each yearning: how did you end up here, and why are you the way you are? Desires, beliefs, values, and fears don’t materialize out of nowhere. They’re either developed over time by our internal consciousness as observations and life experience pour in, or they’re implanted in us from the outside, by someone else. In other words, they’re the product of either you the chef or you the cook.
So the goal here in your creepy interrogation room is to tug on the faces of each of your yearnings to find out if it’s authentically you, or if it’s someone else disguised as you.
You can pull on a yearning’s face by playing the Why Game. You’ll ask your initial Why—Why is this something I want?—and get to some kind of Because. Then you’ll keep going. Why did that particular Because lead you to want what you now want? And when did that particular Because gain so much gravity with you? You’ll get to a deeper Because behind the Because. And if you continue with this, you’ll usually discover one of three things:
1) You’ll trace the Why back to its origin and reveal a long chain of authentic evolution that developed through deep independent thought. You’ll pull on their face and confirm that the skin is real.
2) You’ll trace the Why back to an original Because that someone else installed in you—I guess the only reason I actually have this value is because my mom kind of forced it on me—and you realize that you never really thought to consider whether you actually independently agree with it. You never stopped to ask yourself whether your own accumulated wisdom actually justifies the level of conviction you feel about that core belief. In a case like this, the yearning is revealed to be an imposter pretending to be an authentic yearning of yours. You pull on its face and it’s a mask that comes off, exposing the yearning’s original installer underneath.
3) You’ll trace the Why back and back and get kind of lost in a haze of “I guess I just know this because it’s true!” This could be an authentic you thing, or just another version of #2, in an instance where you can’t recall the moment this feeling was installed in you. Somewhere deep in you, you’ll have a hunch about which it is.
In a #1 scenario, you can be proud that you developed that part of you like a chef. It’s an authentic and hard-earned feeling or value.
In a #2 or maybe #3 scenario, you’ve discovered that you’ve been duped. You’ve let someone else sneak onto your Yearning Octopus while you weren’t looking. When it comes to that particular belief of yours, you’re a cook following someone else’s recipe—an obedient robot reciting desires and fears out of someone else’s brain.
There’s a chance you’re an unusually wise person whose examination reveals an octopus developed mostly by you and kept readily up to date. More likely, you’re like me and most of my friends—your interrogation room reveals some definite imposters, or at least a lot of ambiguity. Like, underneath one mask, you’ll find your mom.
   
   
   
   
   
You’ll pull off others to reveal the values and judgments of broader conventional wisdom, or the viewpoints of your more immediate community, or what’s considered cool by the dominant culture of your generation or the immediate culture within your closest group of friends.
   
Sometimes you’ll get to the end of a Why-Because pathway only to find the philosophy in a famous novel, or something a celebrity hero of yours once said in an interview, or a strong opinion one of your professors always repeated.
You might even find that some of your yearnings and fears were written by you…when you were seven years old. Like a childhood dream that was etched into the back of your consciousness as the thing you believe you really want, when you’re being truly honest.
   
   
The interrogation room probably won’t be that fun a time. But it’s time well spent—because you’re not your 7-year-old self, just like you’re not your parents or your friends or your generation or your society or your heroes or your past decisions or your recent circumstances. You’re Current-Age You—the only person, and the only version of yourself, who is actually qualified to want and not want the things you want and don’t want.
To be clear, this isn’t to say that it’s wrong to live by the words of a wise parent or a famous philosopher or friends you respect or the convictions of a younger you. Humble people are by definition influence-able—influences are an important and inevitable part of who each of us is. The key distinction is this:
Do you treat the words of your external influences as information, held and considered by an authentic inner you, that you’ve carefully decided to embrace? Or are your influences themselves actually in your brain, masquerading as inner you?
Do you want the same thing someone else you know wants because you heard them talk about it, you thought about it alongside your own life experience, and you eventually decided that, for now, you agree? Or because you heard someone talk about what they want or fear, and you thought, “I don’t know shit and that person does, so if they say X is true, I’m sure they’re right”—and then you etched those ideas into your mind, never again feeling the need to question them?
The former is what chefs do. The latter is what you do when you’re being an obedient robot. And a robot is what you become when at some point you get the idea in your head that someone else is more qualified to be you than you are.
The good news is that all humans make this mistake—and you can fix it. Just like your subconscious is right there for viewing if you want to view it—it’s also there for changing and updating and rewriting. It’s your head—you’re allowed to do with it what you want.
So it’s time for some evictions. Masked imposters have to go. Even mom and dad.
At the end of this, your octopus may look a little barren, leaving you feeling a little like you don’t know who you even are anymore. We usually think of this as a bad feeling, or even an existential crisis, but it actually means you’re doing better than most people.
   
The drop from naive over-confidence to wise, realistic humility never feels good, but pausing the roller coaster while it’s still on that first cliff and avoiding the pain—which turns out to be a lot of people’s move—isn’t a great strategy. Wisdom isn’t correlated with knowledge, it’s correlated with being in touch with reality—it’s not how far to the right you are on the graph, it’s how close you are to the orange line. Wisdom hurts at first, but it’s the only place where actual growth happens. The irony is that the cliff-pausers of the world like to make the wiser, braver valley-dwellers or continual-climbers feel bad about themselves—because they fundamentally don’t get how knowing yourself works. They haven’t reached that stage yet.
Getting to know your real self is super hard and never complete. But if you’ve tumbled off the cliff, you’ve gone through a key rite of passage and progress is now possible. As you climb up the orange line, you’ll slowly but surely begin to repopulate your Yearning Octopus with your real self.
At the moment, it probably won’t be obvious what those missing yearnings of yours are exactly—because they’re on an even deeper floor of your subconscious. They’re in the basement of the basement of the basement—in a place called Denial Prison.
 Denial Prison 
Our brain’s Denial Prison is a place most of us don’t even know is there—it’s where we put the parts of us we repress and deny.
The authentic yearnings of ours that we’re in touch with—i.e. those that proved to be authentic during interrogation—were easy parts of our true selves to find in our subconscious, lying in plain sight, right below the surface of our consciousness. Even our conscious mind knows these yearnings well, because they frequently make their way upstairs into our thoughts. These are the parts of us we have a healthy relationship with.
But then there are the parts of you that weren’t living on your octopus where they’re supposed to be—instead, you found an imposter in their place. These lost parts of you are often incredibly hard to access, because they’ve been living deep in your subconscious, on a floor so low it’s almost not there at all. Almost.
Some parts of us are banished down on basement #3 because they’re extraordinarily painful for us to acknowledge or think about. Sometimes new parts of us are born only to be immediately locked up in prison as part of a denial of our own evolution—i.e. out of stubbornness. But there are other times when a part of us is in Denial Prison because someone else locked it up down there. In the case of your yearnings, some of them will have been put there by whatever masked intruder had been taking its place. If dad has successfully convinced you that you care deeply about having a prestigious career, he probably has also convinced you that the part of you that, deep down, really wants to be a carpenter isn’t really you and isn’t what you really want. At some point during your childhood, he threw your passion for carpentry into a dark, dank Denial Prison cell.
So let’s gather your courage and head down to the basement of the basement of the basement of your mind and see what we find.
   
You may pass some unpleasant characters.
   
Leave them for another time—right now, search for locked-away career-related yearnings. Maybe you’ll find a repressed passion to teach. Or a desire to be famous that your particular tribe has shamed you out of. Or a deep love of long blocks of free, open leisure time that your hornier, greedier teenage self kicked downstairs in favor of a raging ambition.
There will be certain parts of your authentic self you won’t be able to uncover in Denial Prison—it’s pretty dark down there. But be patient—now that you’ve done your audit and cleared space for them on your octopus, they may begin to emerge.
 Priority Rankings 
The other part of our Yearning Octopus audit will address the hierarchy of your yearnings. Almost as important as the yearnings themselves is the priority they’re given. The hierarchy is easy to see because it’s revealed in your actions. You may like to think a desire to do something bold is high up on your hierarchy, but if you’re not currently working on something bold, it reveals that however important boldness is to you, something else—some source of fear or inertia in you—is currently being prioritized above it.
It’s important to remember that a ranking of yearnings is also a ranking of fears. The octopus contains anything that could make you want or not want to pursue a certain career, and the reverse side of each yearning is its accompanying fear of the opposite. The reverse side of your yearning to be admired is a fear of embarrassment. If you flip over your desire for self-actualization, you’ll see a fear of underachieving. The other half of your craving of self-esteem is a fear of feeling shame. If your actions don’t seem to match what you believe is the internal hierarchy of your yearnings, usually it’s because you’re forgetting to think about the role your fears are playing. What looks like a determined drive for success, for example, might actually be someone running away from a negative self-image or trying to escape feelings like envy or under-appreciation. If your actions seem beholden to yearnings that you don’t believe you actually care that much about, you’re probably not looking closely enough at your fears.
With both yearnings and fears in mind, think about what your internal hierarchy might look like, and return that same important question: “Who made this order? Was it really me?”
For example, we’re often told to “follow our passion”—this is society saying “put your passion yearnings at the top of your hierarchy.” That’s a very specific instruction. Maybe that’s the right thing for you, but it also very well might not be. It’s something you need to independently evaluate.
To get this right, let’s try to do a fresh ranking, from first principles, based on who we really are, how we’ve evolved over time, and what really matters to us most, right now.
This isn’t about which yearnings or fears have the loudest voices or which fears are most palpable—if it were, you’d be letting your impulses take the wheel of your life. The person doing the ranking is you—the little center of consciousness reading this post who can observe your octopus and look at it objectively. This involves another kind of compromise. On one side, you’ll try to tap into all the wisdom you’ve accumulated throughout your life and make active decisions about values—about what you really believe is important. On the other side, it’s about self-acceptance and self-compassion. Sometimes you’ll have strong undeniable yearnings that you’re not super proud of—whether you like it or not, those are part of you, and when you neglect them, they may cause a continual stink and make you miserable. Creating your yearning hierarchy is a give and take between what’s important and what’s you. It’s probably a good goal to give higher priority to your more noble qualities, but it’s okay to throw a bone to some of your not-so-noble sides as well—depending on where you decide to draw the line. There’s a wisdom to knowing when to accept your not-so-noble side and when to reject it entirely.
To get all of this in order, we want a good system. You can play around with what works for you—I like the idea of a shelf:
   
This divides things into five categories. The absolutely highest priority inner drives get to go in the extra special non-negotiable bowl. The NN bowl is for yearnings so important to you that you want to essentially guarantee that they’ll happen—at the expense of all other yearnings, if necessary. This is why so many of history’s legends were famously single-minded—they had a very intense NN bowl yearning and it led them to world fame, often at the expense of relationships, balance, and health. The bowl is small because it should be used very sparingly—if at all. Like maybe only one thing gets it. Or maybe two or three. Too many things in the NN bowl cancels out its power, making that the same as having nothing in the bowl at all. 
Your group of top shelf yearnings is mostly what will drive your career choices—but top shelf placement should also be doled out sparingly (that’s why it’s not a very large shelf). Shelf placement is as much about de-prioritizing as it is about prioritizing. You’re not just choosing which parts of you are the most important to make you happy, you’re choosing which parts of you to intentionally leave wanting or even directly opposed. No matter what your hierarchy looks like, some yearnings will be left feeling very unhappy and some fears will feel like they’re being continually assaulted. This is inevitable.
That’s why most yearnings should be on the middle shelf, the bottom shelf, or the trash can. The middle shelf is good for those not-so-noble qualities in you that you decide to accept. They deserve some of your attention. And they’ll often demand it—core parts of you won’t go quietly into non-prioritization, and they sometimes can really ruin your life if they’re neglected.
Most of the rest will end up on the bottom shelf. Putting a part of you on the bottom shelf is telling it, “I know you want these things, but for now, I’ve decided other things are more important. I promise to revisit you a little later, after I’ve gotten some more information, and if I change my mind, you’ll get a shelf upgrade then.” The best way to think of the bottom shelf is this: the more yearnings you can convince to accept a bottom shelf rating, the better the chances your top shelf and NN bowl yearnings have of getting what they want. Likewise, the fewer yearnings you put on the top shelf, the more likely those on the top shelf will be to thrive. Your time and energy are severely limited, so this is a zero-sum compromise. The amateur mistake is to be too liberal with the NN bowl and top shelf and too sparing with the large bottom shelf.
Then there’s the trash can, for the drives and fears you flat-out reject—those parts of you that fundamentally violate the person your wisest self wants to be. A good amount of inner conflict emerges from people’s trash cans, and trash can control is a major component of integrity and inner strength. But like the rest of your hierarchy decisions, your criteria for what qualifies as trash should be derived from your own deep thought, not from what others tell you is and is not trash.
As you go through this difficult prioritizing process—inevitably, at times, against the screaming protests of unhappily deprioritized yearnings—remember that you’re the only wise one in the room. Yearnings and fears are impatient and bad at seeing the big picture. Even a seemingly high-minded yearning, like those on the moral tentacle, can’t understand the complete picture in the way you can. Many of the people who have done wonders to make the world better got there on a path that started with selfish motives like wealth or personal fulfillment—motives their moral tentacle probably hated at first. The octopus won’t be the wise adult in the room—that’s your job.
   
Finally, as we’ll discuss more later, this is not a permanent decision. It’s the opposite—it’s a rough draft written in light pencil. It’s a hypothesis that you’ll be able to test and then revise based on how actually living this hierarchy feels in practice.
Your Want Box is ready to go. Now let’s turn to your Reality Box.
 Deep Analysis, Part 2: Your Reality Box 
The Want Box deals with what you find desirable. The Reality Box deals with what’s possible.
But when we examined the Want Box, it became clear that it’s not necessarily based on what you actually want—it’s based on what you think you want—what you’re in the habit of wanting.
The Reality Box is the same deal. It doesn’t show you reality, it shows your best crack at what reality might be—your perception of reality.
The goal of self-reflection is to bring both of these boxes as close to accuracy as possible. We want our perceived yearnings to be a true reflection of our authentic inner selves, and we want our beliefs about what’s possible to come close to mirroring what’s actually possible. For our Want Box audit, we looked under the hood of the Want Box and found its settings—your yearnings and fears. When we open the hood of your Reality Box, we see a group of beliefs.
When it comes to your career possibilities, you’re dealing with two sets of beliefs: beliefs about the world and beliefs about your own potential. For a career option to qualify for your Reality Box, your potential in that career area has to measure up to the objective difficulty of achieving success in that area.
Us being us, we’re probably pretty bad at assessing either side of this comparison accurately.
I don’t know how you think about career path difficulty, but in my experience, people often see it like this:
There are traditional careers—stuff like medicine or law or teaching or a corporate ladder, etc.—and these careers have predictable, set paths. If you’re decently smart and work hard, you’ll end up in a successful, stable situation.
Then there are less traditional careers—the arts, entrepreneurship, non-profit work, politics, etc.—and these are wildcards. Success and stability are no guarantee, and to reach great heights, it’s either a lottery ticket game of luck, a genetic lottery game of innate talent, or some combination of the two.
These are perfectly reasonable assumptions—if you live in 1952. Your beliefs about the world of careers and about what it takes to succeed need just as thorough an unmasking as your yearnings did—and I suspect that behind most of them, you’ll find big, fat conventional wisdom. You might first pull off the mask of one of your beliefs and find your parents or your friends or your college career coach—but if you keep going and pull on their face, you’ll usually see that it’s also a mask, and conventional wisdom is there hiding behind it. A general conception, a common opinion, an oft-cited statistic7—none of which have actually been verified by you, but all of which are treated as gospel by society.
Today’s world goes through dramatic changes each decade, which usually leaves conventional wisdom wildly outdated. But we’re wired for a more ancient world where almost nothing ever changed, so we all reason like cooks and treat conventional wisdom as equivalent to truth.
These problems then extend to how we view our own potential. When you overrate the impact of innate talent on how people fare in their careers—and you also conflate talent and skill level—it won’t leave you feeling great about your chances at many paths. Because we better understand the trajectory of traditional careers, we’re less prone to do this with them. A first-year medical student sees an experienced surgeon at work and thinks, “I can get there one day—just need to do about 20 years of hard work.” But when a young artist or entrepreneur or software engineer looks at the equivalent of the experienced surgeon in their field, they’re more likely to think, “Wow look how talented they are—I’m nowhere near that good,” and get all hopeless. There’s also the other common notion, that people who thrive in non-traditional careers had some “big break” at some point, like hitting a lucky scratch card jackpot—and I don’t know many people who want to risk their careers on scratch cards.
These are only a few examples of the slew of delusions and misconceptions we tend to have about how great careers happen. So let’s brainstorm how it might actually work:
 The Career Landscape 
I have no idea, mostly. And I think most people have no idea. Things are just changing too quickly.
But that’s kind of the key point. If you can figure out how to get a reasonably accurate picture of the real career landscape out there, you have a massive edge over everyone else, most of whom will be using conventional wisdom as their instruction booklet.
First, there’s the broad landscape—the set of all the jobs someone could possibly have in today’s society. My current job description is: “Writer of 8,000-to-40,000-word articles about a bunch of different topics, with cursing and stick figures, on a remarkably sporadic schedule.” Think conventional wisdom has any job openings for me with that description? The landscape today is made up of thousands of options—some 40 years old, some made possible only three months ago because of the advent of some new technology—and the way things work today, if there’s an option you want that’s not already out there, you can probably create it for yourself. Pretty stressful, but also incredibly exciting.
Then, there’s each specific career path. A career path is like a game board. The conventional wisdom bookshelf contains instruction booklets for only a small fraction of today’s available game boards—and those that it does have usually tell you how that game was played in the past, even though the current game board has evolved significantly into something with new kinds of opportunities and different rules and loopholes. When you consider a career path today, to make an accurate assessment of what the path looks like and what kinds of strength-weakness profiles it favors, you have to understand what that career’s current game board looks like. Otherwise, it’s like trying to evaluate your chances of being a professional basketball player based on your height and strength without realizing that, say, basketball has evolved and is now played on oversize courts that contain 10 different 7-foot hoops, and the current game favors speed over height and strength.
This is promising news. There are likely dozens of awesome career paths that beautifully match your natural strengths, and it’s likely that most other people trying to succeed on those paths are playing with an outdated rulebook and strategy guide. If you simply understand what the game board really looks like and play by modern rules, you have a huge advantage.
 Your Potential 
And this brings us to you and your particular strengths. Not only do we assess our strengths based on the wrong game boards (like in our basketball example)—even when we have the right game board in mind, we’re often bad at identifying the real strengths that that game calls for.
When assessing your chances on a certain career path, the key question is:
 With enough time, could you get good enough at this game to potentially reach whatever your definition of success is in that career? 
I like to view this journey to “good enough at the game to succeed” as a distance. The distance starts with where you are now—point A—and ends with you reaching your definition of success, which we can draw with a star.
   
The length of the distance depends on where point A is (how far along you are at the current moment) and where the star is (how lofty your definition of success is).
So if you’re a college graduate who majored in computer science and your career goal is to be a middle-of-the-ladder engineer at Google, your distance might look like this:
   
But if you’ve never done any kind of computer science before, and your career goal is to be the top engineer at Google, you’ve got a much longer road ahead:
   
If your goal is to create the new Google, the road gets much, much longer.
   
At this point, conventional wisdom might emerge as a voice in your head and point out that simply getting good enough at a certain skill doesn’t actually guarantee success—you might reach the star on a career path and still find that you haven’t “made it” yet.
That’s mostly wrong, because it’s misunderstanding the star. The star isn’t about a particular skill level—e.g. coding ability or acting skills or business savvy—it’s about the entire game. In traditional careers, the games tend to be more straightforward—if you want to be a top surgeon, and you get incredibly good at surgery, you’ve probably hit your star and you’ll have your career. But the game boards in less traditional careers often involve many more factors. Reaching the “I want to be a famous actor” star doesn’t simply mean getting as good at acting as Morgan Freeman, it means getting as good at the entire actor game as most movie stars get by the time they break through. Acting ability is only one piece of that puzzle—you also need a knack for getting yourself in front of people with power, a shrewdness for personal branding, an insane amount of optimism, a ridiculous amount of hustle and persistence, etc. If you get good enough at that whole game—every component of it—your chances of becoming an A-list movie star are actually pretty high. That’s what hitting the star means.
But conventional wisdom doesn’t get how non-traditional careers work—it only thinks in terms of a narrow aspect of success: talent and hard work. When career paths have game boards with much more going on, conventional wisdom just throws its hands up and calls it “luck.” To conventional wisdom, becoming a movie star requires some talent, but mostly, hitting a rare scratch ticket jackpot.
So how do you figure out your chances of getting to any particular star? It’s all about a simple formula:
Distance = Speed x Time.
In our case, the more apt wording might be:
Progress = Pace x Persistence.
Your outlook on any career quest depends on A) the pace at which you’ll be able to improve at playing that career’s “game” and B) the amount of time you’re willing to persist in chasing that star. Let’s talk about both of these:
 Pace 
What makes someone slower or faster at improving at a career game? I’d say it comes down to three factors:
 Your level of chefness. As we discussed earlier, chefs look at the world with fresh eyes and build conclusions based on what they observe and what they’ve experienced. Cooks arrive at conclusions by following someone else’s recipe—in the case of careers, the recipe is usually conventional wisdom. Careers are complex games that almost everyone starts off bad at—then the chefs improve rapidly through a continual loop…
   
…while cooks improve at a snail’s pace, because their strategy is just following a recipe which itself barely changes. What’s more, in a world where career games are constantly evolving and morphing, the chef’s tactics can evolve in real time and keep up. Meanwhile, the cook’s recipe just grows more and more outdated—a problem they remain oblivious to. This is why I’m pretty convinced that at least for less traditional careers, your level of chefness is the single most important factor in determining your pace of improvement.
 Your work ethic. This one is obvious. Someone who works on their career 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, is going to move down the path almost four times faster than someone who works 20 hours a week, 40 weeks a year. Someone who chooses a balanced lifestyle will move slower than a single-minded workaholic. Someone with a propensity towards laziness or procrastination is going to lose a lot of ground to someone who’s good at putting in consistent work days. Someone who frequently breaks from work to daydream or pick up their phone is going to get less done in each work hour than someone who practices deep focus.
 Your natural abilities. Talent does matter. Smarter, more talented people will improve at a game at a faster rate than less naturally gifted people. But intelligence and talent are only two types of natural ability that come into play here. Cleverness and savvy matter too, and those qualities don’t always correlate with raw intelligence. Depending on the type of career, social skills can be critically important as well. In many careers, likable (or subtly manipulative) people have a big advantage over less likable people—and those who enjoy socializing will put in more people hours over time, and build deeper relationships, than antisocial types.
Other things, like existing connections, existing resources, and existing skills matter, of course, but they’re not components of pace—they’re part of the location of point A.
 Persistence 
When I say persistence, I’m referring to long-term persistence (as opposed to day-to-day work ethic). Persistence is simpler than pace. The more years you’re willing to commit to chasing a star, the farther along the road towards the star you’ll get. A car going 30 mph that quits driving after 15 minutes gets a lot less far than a car that drives 10 mph for two hours.
And this is why persistence is so important. Someone who has decided they’re only willing to give a dream career a shot for three years before they’ll go for their fallback plan has essentially disqualified themselves from a chance at their dreams. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are—if you’ll give up after two or three years of not breaking through, you’re unlikely to succeed. A few years is just not enough time to traverse the typically long distances it takes to get to the raddest success stars, no matter how impressive your pace.
 Your Real Strengths and W eaknesses 
With our pace-times-persistence equation in mind, let’s revisit the concept of strengths and weaknesses. It’s not that “strengths and weaknesses” is a bad concept—it’s that we think about it all wrong. When we list our strengths, we tend to list our areas of existing skill more than anything else. Instead, strengths should be all about pace and persistence qualities. Originality or lack thereof should be a critical component of the discussion, making qualities like agility and humility (trademark chef traits) notable strengths, and qualities like stubbornness8 or intellectual laziness (classic cook traits) important weaknesses. The subtleties of work ethic, like a knack for deep focus or a propensity to procrastinate, should also be a major part of the discussion, as should natural abilities beyond talent, like savvy and likability. Qualities related to persistence, like resilience and determination and patience, should be thought of as promising strengths, while a social tentacle clamoring to appear successful as quickly as possible should be viewed as a bright red flag.
Most importantly, these items shouldn’t be discussed as a snapshot of where they are now, but rather in terms of your potential for improvement in each of them. If you handed 25-year-old Michael Jordan a basketball for the first time, he’d suck. But calling basketball a “weakness” of his would be getting it very wrong. Instead, you’d want to watch him practice over the next six weeks and evaluate the slope of his improvement. This lesson applies to specific skills—but most general pace and persistence qualities can also be worked on and improved if you focus on them.
 Filling in the Reality Box 
Your true Reality Box would literally include all career paths for which you think a highly improved version of yourself could, with an entire lifetime of effort, reach the minimum star you’d be comfortable defining as success. This would be an impossibly big list, only ruling out paths that are clearly far too long for you to traverse at your maximum possible pace on the path (like me chasing a career as an Olympic figure skater). But it’s still useful to pause for a minute and reflect on the vast extent of your full Reality Box—just acknowledging how many options are truly open to you can put you in the right mindset.9
 So to be a bit more efficient, let’s worry about the parts of the Reality Box that might actually end up in your Option Pool (the middle of the Venn diagram where the Want and Reality Boxes overlap). To complete our Reality Box audit with that caveat, we need to evaluate:
 1) The general landscape. Take our best crack at evaluating the world’s current career landscape—the full range of options available (or create-able).
 2) Specific game boards. For any careers that sound remotely interesting, ponder what the deal might be with that career’s current game board—the parties involved, the way success seems to be happening for others recently, the most up-to-date rules of the game, the latest new loopholes that are being exploited, etc.
 3) Starting point. For those paths, evaluate your starting point, based on your current skills, resources, and connections relevant to that field.
 4) Success point. Think about end points and where on each line your star should be placed. Ask yourself what’s the minimum level of success you’d need to achieve in order to feel happy about having chosen that career path.
 5) Your pace. Make an initial estimate for what your pace of improvement might be on these various game boards, based on your current pace-related strengths and how much you think you can improve at each of them (in other words, how much your speed might be able to accelerate).
 6) Your level of persistence. Evaluate the amount of time you think you’ll be willing to put into each of these respective paths.
Now it’s just math. You take your game board and make it a line, you plot starting points and success stars that together generate the various distances in front of you, and for each, you multiply your pace by your level of persistence. If it seems like the product of your pace and persistence for a given career path might be able to measure up to the path’s total length, that career lands in your Reality Box. Of course, it’s impossible to get exact values for any of the above factors, but it’s good to at least know the equation you’re working with.
A from-first-principles Reality Box audit may bring some overly optimistic people down to Earth, but I suspect that for most, an audit will leave them feeling like they have a lot more options than they realized, empowering them to set their sights on a bolder direction.
A good Reality Box reflection warrants yet another Want Box reflection. Reframing a bunch of career paths in your mind will affect your level of yearning for some of them. One career may seem less appealing after reminding yourself that it will entail thousands of hours of networking or multiple decades of pre-success struggle. Another may seem less daunting after changing your mind about how much luck is actually involved. There will be other career paths you hadn’t considered wanting because you hadn’t considered them as real options, but some deep reflection has opened your mind to them.
This brings us to the end of our long, two-part deep dive. After a fairly exhausting box-auditing process, we can return to our Venn10 diagram.
   
Assuming some things have changed, you have a new Option Pool to look at—a new list of options on the table that seem both desirable to your high-priority rankings and possible to achieve. We’re ready now to return to where we were before we started our analysis: the present moment. With these options in front of us, we’re ready to lift our heads up out of analysis and look forward into the future.
 Connecting the Dots into the Future 
It’s time to bring back your Career Plans map that I made you put down at the beginning of the post—the one with the arrow or the question mark. If there had been a clear arrow on your map before your audit, check out your new Option Pool. Given everything you’ve reflected upon, does your current career plan still qualify to be there? If so, congrats—you’re ahead of most of us.
If not, well that’s shitty news, but it’s also good news. Remember, going from a false arrow to a question mark is always major progress in life.
   
And actually, a new question mark implies having made the key cliff jump on two roller coasters: getting to know yourself and getting to know the world. Major step in the right direction. Cross out the arrow and join the question mark crowd.
Now the question mark crowd has a tough choice. You gotta pick one of the arrows in the Option Pool.
It’s a tough choice—but it should be way less tough than it is. Here’s why:
Careers used to be kind of like a 40-year tunnel. You picked your tunnel, and once you were in, that was that. You worked in that profession for 40 years or so before the tunnel spit you out on the other side into your retirement.
   
The truth is, careers have probably never really functioned like 40-year-tunnels, they just seemed that way. At best, traditional careers of the past played out kind of like tunnels.
Today’s careers—especially the less traditional ones—are really really not like tunnels. But crusty old conventional wisdom has a lot of us still viewing things that way, which makes the already hard job of making big career path choices much harder.
When you think of your career as a tunnel, it causes an identity crisis in anyone who doesn’t feel sure of who exactly they are and who they’ll want to be decades from now—which is most sane people. It enhances the delusion that what we do for work is a synonym for who we are, making a question mark on your map seem like an existential disaster.
When you think of your career as a tunnel, the stakes to make the right choice seem so high that it explodes the feeling of tyranny of choice. For perfectionist types especially, this can be utterly paralyzing.
When you think of your career as a tunnel, you lose the courage to make a career switch, even when your soul is begging for it. It makes switching careers feel incredibly risky and embarrassing, and it suggests that someone who does so is a failure. It also makes all kinds of multi-faceted, vibrant, mid-career people feel like they’re too old to make a bold switch or start a whole new path afresh.
But conventional wisdom still tells many of us that careers are tunnels. As the icing on its shit cake—on top of helping us yearn for things we don’t actually want, deny yearnings that we feel deep down, fear things that aren’t dangerous, and believe things about the world and our potential that aren’t accurate—conventional wisdom tells us that careers are a tunnel to help us daunt the shit out of ourselves unnecessarily.
Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. Today’s people aren’t synonymous with what they do—they’re impossibly complex, rapidly changing scientists. And today’s career isn’t a tunnel, or a box, or an identity label—it’s a long series of science experiments.
Steve Jobs compared life to connecting the dots, pointing out that while it’s easy to look at your past and see how the dots connected to lead you to where you are, it’s basically impossible in life to connect the dots forwards.
If you look at the biographies of your heroes, you’ll see that their paths look a lot more like a long series of connected dots than a straight and predictable tunnel. If you look at yourself and your friends, you’ll probably see the same trend—according to data, the median time a young person stays in a given job is only 3 years (older people spend a longer time on each dot, but not that much longer—10.4 years on average).
So seeing your career as a series of dots isn’t a mental trick to help you make decisions—it’s an accurate depiction of what’s actually happening. And seeing your career as a tunnel isn’t just unproductive—it’s delusional.
Likewise, you’re limited to focusing mainly on the next dot on your path—because it’s the only dot you can figure out. You don’t have to worry about dot #4 because you can’t anyway—you’re literally not qualified to do so.
By the time dot #4 rolls around, you will have learned stuff about yourself you don’t know now. You’ll also have changed from who you are now, and your Yearning Octopus will reflect those changes. You’ll know a lot more than you currently do about the career landscape and the specific game boards you’re interested in, and you’ll have become a much better game player. And of course, that landscape—and those game boards—will have themselves evolved.
The fantastic website 80,000 Hours (which exists to help young, talented people work through their career choices) has compiled a lot of data to back this up: data on the fact that you’ll change, that the world will change, and that you’ll only learn with time what you’re actually good at. Popular psychologist Dan Gilbert also eloquently describes just how bad we are at predicting what will make us happy in the future.
Pretending you can figure out what dot #2 or #4 or #8 should be now is laughable. Future dots are the worry of a future, wiser you living in a future world. So let’s focus on dot #1.
If we’re thinking of ourselves as scientists and of society as a science lab, we should think of your current freshly revised Want-Reality Venn Diagram as nothing more than an early, rough hypothesis. Dot #1 is your chance to test it out.
Hypothesis testing is intuitive in the dating world. If a friend were toiling over what kind of person she wants to marry but never went out with anyone, you’d tell her, “You can’t figure this out on your couch—you’ve gotta start going on dates, and that’ll teach you what you want in a partner.” If that friend then went on a solid first date and returned home to toil for hours about whether or not this new person was The One, you’d again have to correct her. You’d say, “There’s no way you can know that from just one date! You have to get some experience dating this person to learn what you need to learn to make that decision.”
We can all agree that this hypothetical friend is pretty nuts and is lacking a fundamental understanding of how you find a happy relationship. So let’s not be like her when it comes to picking our career. Dot #1 is a chill situation—it’s just a first date.
This is awesome news—because it makes it a lot less scary to draw an arrow on your map if it’s only an arrow to dot #1 of your future. The real cause of tyranny of choice is accurately seeing the sheer number of options you have in today’s world while delusionally seeing those careers as the 40-year tunnels of yesterday’s world. That’s a lethal combo. Reframing your next major career decision as a far lower-stakes choice makes the number of options exciting, not stressful.
And that’s all great in theory. But now comes the hard part.
 Making Your Move 
You’ve reflected and reflected and reflected and weighed and measured and predicted and considered. You’ve chosen a dot and drawn an arrow. And now you have to actually make the move.
We’re super bad at this. We’re frightened people. We don’t like icky things and making a bold, real-life step is icky. If there’s any ounce of procrastination susceptibility in us, here’s where it’ll show itself.
The Yearning Octopus can help. As we discussed earlier, your behavior at any given point simply displays the configuration of your octopus. If you’ve decided on a life step and you can’t quite take it, it’s because the parts of you that don’t want to make a move are ranked higher in your subconscious than the parts of you that do. Your conscious mind may have tried to assign lower shelf ratings to the parts of your octopus that lean towards inertia, but your yearnings have rebelled. You’re a CEO not in control of their staff.
To fix this problem, think like a kindergarten teacher. In your class, a faction of the 5-year-olds is rebelling against your wishes. What do you do?
Go talk to the 5-year-olds that are causing the trouble. They’re unpleasant, defiant simpletons, but they can still be reasoned with. Talk to them about why you’ve ranked them lower than others in the octopus hierarchy. Describe to them the insights you gained from your Reality Box reflection. Remind them about how connecting the dots works and about the chillness of dot #1. You’re the teacher—figure it out.
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that our internal battle as the kindergarten teachers of our mind is like 97% of life’s struggle. The world is easy—you’re difficult. If you find yourself continually not executing your plans in life and your promises to yourself, you’ve uncovered your new #1 priority—becoming a better kindergarten teacher. Until you do, your life will be run by a bunch of primitive, short-sighted 5-year-olds, and your whole shit will suck. Trust me, I know.
If your inner analysis does call for a career leap to a new dot, I hope that at some point, you’re able to make the jump.
 After the Move 
Jumping to a new dot is a liberating feeling, usually side by side with some substantial internal havoc.
First of all, for a while at least, you’ll probably suck at what you’re doing on your new dot. While your wise self will know that’s exactly how it should be, your less wise selves will go into full existential meltdown mode. All of the fears you so thoughtfully deprioritized in your octopus ranking will think someone is murdering them and they’ll start trying to call 911. The yearnings you did prioritize won’t be feeling much gratification yet, and they’ll wonder if they were wrong all along about what they thought they wanted. The yearnings you didn’t prioritize will get out the guitar and start singing love songs for the greener-seeming grass you deprived them of. It won’t be much fun.
Even if things do go well, you’ll be quickly reminded of the fact that the Yearning Octopus is a generally unhappy creature. Core pieces of the octopus will feel neglected or even assaulted, and every day that goes by, you’ll be bearing the opportunity cost of the paths you were considering but chose not to walk down—the versions of you in parallel universes where you made other choices. You’ll think about their hypothetical advancement in the world and worry about what you may have passed up.
   
As you get wiser, you’ll learn to view a largely unhappy octopus with acceptance. You’ll let it whine and get good at tuning it out, knowing that it’s whining in the exact way you planned for it to be.
The whining octopus is a reminder of why pure, elated happiness is never a reasonable goal. The times you feel pure happiness are temporary, drug-induced delusions—like the honeymoon phase of a new relationship or new job or the high following a long-awaited success. Those moments are the perfect golf shots of a mediocre golfer’s outing—they’re awesome, and you should enjoy the shit out of them—but they’re not the new normal, and they never will be.
A better goal is contentment: the satisfying feeling that you’re currently taking the best crack you can at a good life path; that what you’re working on might prove to be a piece of an eventual puzzle you can feel really proud of. Chasing happiness is an amateur move. Feeling contentment in those times when your choices and your circumstances have combined to pull it off, and knowing you have all that you could ever ask for, is for the wise.
People talk about being present in the moment, but there’s also the broader concept of macro-presence: feeling broadly present in your own life. If you’re on a career dot that, when you’re being really honest with yourself, feels right, you get to stop thinking and stop planning for a while and just dig in. You’ll come back to the big picture later—for now, you can put the macro picture aside, put your head down, and dedicate all of your energy to the present. For a while, you can just live.
These moments don’t always last that long, so sink your teeth in. Put everything you’ve got into the dot you’ve chosen. As far as you know, you might be Michael Jordan holding his first basketball, so start playing.
 The Next Dot? 
At some point, your good feelings about the macro picture may sour. And when they do, you’ll have to get back into analysis mode and figure out what, in particular, is causing the restlessness.
Sometimes, the macro mission won’t be the problem. It’ll be that the chef in you has decided that the mission itself calls for a strategic dot jump. In these cases, jumping dots isn’t a release of persistence but the stuff of persistence. This is the mission-enhancing type of dot jump.
Other times, you’ll feel a darker kind of restlessness—the suspicion that you may need to change up the macro mission. When this happens, you’ll have to figure out if that feeling is emerging from the wise parts of you or simply from your restless, deprioritized yearnings. A mission-changing dot jump may be in order, but depending on which parts of you are asking for it, it may also be the wrong move.
In these moments, it’s important to consider where you tend to be on this spectrum:
   
The people on the left side of this spectrum are jump-shy. The cement-footed. Their pitfall is staying way too long in the wrong things. The people on the right are jump-happy—the wing-footed—and they have the opposite pitfall: they’re quick quitters.11 (You should be especially wary of cement feet—psychologists believe that people at the end of their lives are most likely to regret living by inertia: a commonly voiced regret is “I wish I had quit earlier,” and the most common advice of the elderly is, “Don’t stay in a job you dislike.“)
This is why these internal frameworks are important. They give you the ability to analyze the source of your impulses. In our example, the question is whether your impulse to jump missions is the result of genuine evolution or quick-quitter bias. So think about your diagram. Is your restlessness just the expected incessant whining of an octopus still correctly configured? The weariness from a long trudge on what’s still the right path for you? Or have you learned new information about yourself or the world during the trudge that has corrected some off-base initial assumptions? Or maybe something is fundamentally evolving—some blue or yellow loop activity:
   
If you feel that things have genuinely changed, you may decide to zoom out even further and think about the big red loop, which deals with fundamentally changing your mission:
   
If a career is like connecting the dots, we should probably rank “getting wise about dot-jumping” pretty high on our to-do list. The best place to start is by looking at your own past. Studying your own past decisions, with the flashlight of hindsight and accumulated wisdom, is like an athlete studying game tape.
Looking at my own past, I can see a lot of dot jumps (or, while I was still in school, career plan adjustments), and some of them look pretty unwise in retrospect. But the clearer a picture I can see of my past bad decisions and the thought patterns and behavioral habits that built them, the less likely I’ll be to repeat them in the future.
Remembering that you’re kind of dumb is also a critical humbling exercise. The insecurity of humility doesn’t feel very good, and the burden of having to continually invent your own life map is never easy—but insecurity and difficulty are the feelings of driving your own ship. It’s when we feel too good that we run the risk of becoming overconfident, intellectually complacent, and set in our ways. It’s exactly when we think we have life all figured out that we end up losing our way.
___________
Over the course of your life, your good and bad decisions will collaborate to forge your unique life path. Often on this blog, I’ve written about how irrational our fears can be and how badly they can hold us back. But we should probably embrace the fear of end-of-life regret.
I’ve thankfully never been on anything that felt like a deathbed, but it seems like there’s something about the end of life that lets people see things with clear eyes. It seems like facing death makes all of those voices in your head who aren’t actually you melt away, leaving your little authentic self standing there all alone, in reflection. I think end-of-life regrets may simply be your authentic self thinking about the parts of your life you never got to live—the parts of you that someone else kicked down into your subconscious.
My own psyche seems to back this up—looking back on my path so far, the mistakes that bother me most are the ones that happened because someone else took the wheel of my head and overruled the quiet, insecure voice of my authentic self—the mistakes that I knew at the time, deep down, were wrong. My goal for the future isn’t to avoid mistakes, it’s for the mistakes I do make to be my own.
That’s why I went through such an excruciatingly rigorous analysis in this post. I think this is one of those few topics in life that’s worth it. Other voices will never stop fiercely trying to live your life for you—you owe it to that little insecure character in the very center of your consciousness to get this right.
___________
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. That’s the only thing we use the list for—and since my posting schedule isn’t exactly…regular…this is the best way to stay up-to-date with WBW posts.
And if you want to download this post for printing and offline sharing, you can buy it here.
 For help analyzing your situation: 
 Some paper to write on: Your octopus. Your priority shelf. Some path distances. Your career dot map.
 For those who want to dig in even further: Alicia (WBW Manager of Lots of Things) has put together a more involved group of worksheets.
 For further exploration: 
The site 80,000 hours—dedicated to helping young, high-potential people make big career choices—is an awesome resource. The site is run by super smart, thoughtful, forward-thinking people, and can be digested in video or book format in addition to on their site.
I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s blog for years. Seth has a lot of wisdom in his head, and he doles it out in little bite-sized nuggets each morning on his blog (which I receive by email). A lot of Seth’s advice applies to career choices. Here’s an example (which I adapted into one of the cartoons in this post).
Eric Barker’s blog is full of actual data that can help with career choices, like this post on what makes a career fulfilling or this one on the importance of mentors.
___________
 More Wait But Why human deep dives: 
  The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again  
  Why Procrastinators Procrastinate  
 And a post about getting wiser  
 And a few less self-reflect-y Wait But Why posts on: 
  Awkward social interactions  
  The history of everything  
  Colonizing Mars
How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html
The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again
2016-09-01
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>There’s not really any normal way to start a relationship. Some people go on a date, and then another date, and then another, and one day it’s just clear to both of them that they’re in a relationship. Some people start seeing each other, but they keep things black and white until a “So are we doing this?” conversation makes it official. Sometimes a platonic friendship forms first and tension builds under the surface until an unexpected kiss lights the friendship on fire.</p>
<p>But there’s usually some first time that this happens:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R1-girlfriend.png"></a></p>
<p>And suddenly, you’re here:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R2-on-a-cloud.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Your new relationship is with you all the time, even when you’re not together.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/R3-smiling-1.png"></a></p>
<p>You’ve left the rest of shitty humanity behind, and it feels great. Then this happens:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/R4-love-you.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R5-Unicorns.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And all the song lyrics make sense.</p>
<p>It goes on like this for a while, but as the months pass, you notice things changing. The unicorns turn into horses and then bikes and then one day, you’re not riding anything at all. The perfect person you found starts to say and do imperfect things. Some of those funny quirks you adored early on seem to be striking you as more annoying than funny. And it starts to dawn on you that you might be dating a fucking dick.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R6-angry.png"></a></p>
<p>Sometimes things go further south, as butterflies and rainbows turn into frustration and disillusionment, and the relationship that used to lift you up seems to now be boxing you in.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R7-Cage.png"></a></p>
<p>All of the negative qualities you couldn’t see in the fog of love are suddenly right in your face, like a weight that’s dragging you down.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R8-ball-and-chain.png"></a></p>
<p>A lot of relationships end right about here.</p>
<p>But maybe, having seen the dark side of your partner, you step back and take a long look at both the good and bad together. You put away both the rose-colored glasses and the shit-colored glasses and see who you’re really dating: a three-dimensional, one-of-a-kind, beautiful, piece-of-shit human being.</p>
<p>Who’s the best.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R9-best.png"></a></p>
<p>And the worst.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R10-worst.png"></a></p>
<p>And your teammate.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R11-teammate.png"></a></p>
<p>And your rock.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R12-rock.png"></a></p>
<p>And you decide you like what you’ve got.</p>
<p>And your lives go on together.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R13-beam-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>But just when things get simple, something else starts to happen:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/R14-beam-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/R15-beam-3.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/R16-beam-4.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Society, in most parts of the world, doesn’t like when a relationship lasts too long. To society, a relationship is simply a testing ground—an incubator that prepares you for The Decision. And if too many years go by in a relationship without The Decision being made, society decides that something must be wrong. To help right the wrong, society will begin to apply pressure on the couple, from all angles.</p>
<p>Some people are bigger than society. Most of us are not. For most of us, society’s rules are our rules, and as you and your person walk down your blue balance beam, you can feel the walking space melt away around you. It’s time to make The Decision.</p>
<p>Your relationship needs to be converted into Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again. Soon.</p>
<p>The typical human isn’t really equipped to make The Decision. We evolved to live short lives, during which life-altering 60-year commitments weren’t a thing. We evolved in small communities without nearly as many available options. And most of us, when presented with The Decision, have relatively little relationship experience and an incomplete understanding of our own adult selves—selves that in many cases only recently started existing.</p>
<p>But society doesn’t care. So you decide.</p>
<p>Humans have come up with four main methods to make The Decision:</p>
<p><strong>Method 1) Let the other person decide</strong></p>
<p>The easiest way to handle The Decision is to just not really handle it. You take a passive approach, as if you’re on a raft, going down a river, and you have no control over where the current leads you—you’re in the hands of momentum and inertia. Once you hit your mid-20s, you just wait until you get into your next relationship and then marry whoever that person happens to be, whenever/if-ever that person decides it’s time, regardless of how right or wrong the relationship is for you. </p>
<p><strong>Method 2) Let your primal forces battle it out</strong></p>
<p>For people determined to more actively make The Decision, the next easiest way to go is to let your emotions and primal forces figure it out. Making The Decision provides a reminder that “you” is actually a collection of voices, each weighing in from different parts of evolutionary history. Each voice has its role in the homeostasis of our normal lives, but when it’s time for something as rare and important as The Decision, there’s suddenly a brawl in your head for influence—and no one brawls harder than your primal forces. Some of the major players:</p>
<p><strong>Love</strong></p>
<p>Deep down, most people are sympathetic characters. And when you’re in a relationship for enough time, you’ll usually end up loving the person—even if you don’t like them. You know their whole story, which makes you care about them and the fact that they rely on you makes you feel a tremendous loyalty to them. This is the kind of love you feel for your family and closest friends, and it can exist in full force even after the feeling of being “in love” has faded. And for many people, this deep emotional connection makes it basically inconceivable to ever break up with their partner. This is a beautiful way to make The Decision when you’re in a strong, healthy relationship, and a tragedy when you’re not.</p>
<p><strong>Fear</strong></p>
<p>Humans specialize in making critical life decisions based on fear, and when it comes to The Decision, there’s a lot to be afraid of.</p>
<p>When a fearful person takes a look to the left side of the balance beam, they might see all kinds of things:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/fear-breakup-2.png"></a></p>
<p>The right side of the beam isn’t much better.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/fear-marriage-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Different people feel these fears at different levels of intensity, and for someone whose fear tends to run their life, it’s usually pretty simple: the particular fear that grabs them hardest by the collar ends up making The Decision.</p>
<p><strong>Ego</strong></p>
<p>Your ego, meanwhile, is busy staring down at a clipboard. Depending on what your ego values, that clipboard might display a checklist describing your ideal partner—their appearance, age, family background, intelligence, job, wealth, general personality type, etc. Or maybe the clipboard has a story written on it, one that was written long ago about how your life should go. Your ego will examine your current situation and see how it measures up to what’s written on the clipboard, and it’ll base The Decision on its findings.</p>
<p>While all of this analysis is going on, your ego sometimes also finds itself getting very hungry—for admiration, attention, and conquest. If this hunger gets too intense, it can overwhelm an ego to the point where it may sway its vote, no matter what the clipboard says.</p>
<p><strong>Sex Drive</strong></p>
<p>Your sex drive is not a complicated character. If it has a grilled cheese sandwich every day for lunch and then one day, you ask it if it would like to try the buffet, it’s going to say yes. Unless, of course, the grilled cheese is super fucking incredible.</p>
<p>So these four primal forces, along with a few others, all voice their opinion at the same time. In some people, all of the voices are in agreement about the verdict. In others, the voices disagree, but one of the voices is so loud that it drowns out the others. In both of those cases, The Decision is pretty easy.</p>
<p>But what happens when your primal forces provide no clear answer?</p>
<p><strong>Method 3) Turn to your gut</strong></p>
<p>For some reason, we have wise stomachs, and when The Decision isn’t obvious, sometimes asking your gut can do the trick.</p>
<p>Your gut relies on your intuition and asks one simple question:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/gut.png"></a></p>
<p>And what makes your gut your gut is that when it answers that question, it doesn’t deliberate—it just knows the answer: a simple yes or a simple no. The gut doesn’t deal with nuance, which makes it a good match for something big and binary, like The Decision.</p>
<p>And for a lot of people, this works.</p>
<p>But there are some people who won’t end up being passive Deciders, or emotional Deciders, or gut Deciders—who won’t turn to any primal or instinctual voice when it comes to this particular decision. They’ll get to the bottom of this in <em>spite </em>of those voices—based on experience and evidence and data and facts. They won’t be instinct-driven or fear-driven or ego-driven or sex-driven—they’ll be guided by <em>rationality</em>.</p>
<p>The brain Deciders.</p>
<p>And when it comes time for them to make The Decision, they’re in big trouble.</p>
<p><strong>Method 4) Figure it out in your brain</strong></p>
<p>The prefrontal cortex is kind of like the brain’s brain. It’s the part of you that sorts through information and makes plans and predictions and weighs evidence. It’s great at using what it learns to draw conclusions about how to act or what to do—as long as it knows the rules of the game and has access to the right information. And when it’s time for The Decision, your brain will do what it always does when confronted by a fork in the road—it’ll attempt to think and assess and analyze its way to the optimal rational answer.</p>
<p>Something as important and permanent as The Decision requires conviction, and conviction requires a source. No source of conviction, no Decision.</p>
<p>The source of the heart’s conviction is its love and care for the other person. The source of the ego’s conviction is its belief in its clipboard. Fear and sex drive derive their conviction from the obvious—fear and sex. The source of the gut’s conviction is an instinctive feeling that emerges from experience. And an inertia-y person gets their conviction from the conviction of someone else. Those sources are what allow people to make The Decision with relative ease.</p>
<p>The brain hears these voices, but it discredits their conviction in each case because the certainty emerges from what the brain sees as an irrational place. For the brain, the only respectable source of conviction is sound evidence.</p>
<p>And good luck with that.</p>
<p>If you’re typically a brain person, when it comes to The Decision, you want to try to not be you. Because the brain, for all its merits, does not do well in this situation, where the outcome is critical and evidence is hard to come by. Let’s look at how it might go:</p>
<p>Maybe you start by looking over to the marriage side of the balance beam—where you see a house.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/house.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s the house of the life you’re about to sign up for. You really enjoy your relationship, so you’re excited about what might be inside that house. But the house is also mysterious, because you don’t really know what either you or your partner will be like as a spouse or how either of you will grow or change in the future. Not much concrete evidence there.</p>
<p>So you turn and look over at the breakup side of the beam. You see a path, and a couple walking down it.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/road.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That road is whatever life you’d end up living if you were to move on from your relationship, and that’s the marriage you’d end up in. The marriage that might have been.</p>
<p>What kind of marriage would that be, and what adventures lie down that road? Maybe your life on that road would be much happier than whatever’s in that house on the other side, and maybe your current partner would end up happier somewhere else too. Or maybe you’d look back and realize that you made the biggest mistake of your life. Without knowing anything about that other path, there’s no way to compare it to the house on the other side. Again, no real evidence.</p>
<p>So you take a closer look at the one thing you have actual information about: your current relationship.</p>
<p>You decide to make a big chart where you list all the things you like and don’t like about your relationship—a relationship-assessment chart. You end up here:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Venn.png"></a></p>
<p>Fucking great—now what? All relationships—the good ones and the bad ones—have a chart that looks like that, with things in all four of those zones: blue, green, yellow, and red. And without much relationship experience or marriage expertise, you have no good way to evaluate whether your particular diagram looks as promising as you hope it does or whether there are red flags in it that you’re not seeing that will lead to major issues later. You try comparing your relationship to those that your friends are in—but it’s hard to know what really goes on in other relationships, and each one is so complicated and unique anyway that it’s mostly apples and oranges.</p>
<p>Without any way to construct an airtight argument in either direction, you’re left feeling very little conviction about the situation. Because the stakes are so high, you become paranoid about making the wrong choice, and every time you think you might have an answer, you second-guess yourself.</p>
<p>The whole thing quickly becomes a mindfuck. You try talking yourself into feeling good about marriage by reminding yourself that every relationship has flaws and that marriage is all about acceptance—but then you realize that that’s also exactly how someone sounds when they’re talking themselves into settling for the wrong person. In both of those cases, the green and red zones of the diagram provide more than enough material to construct a full “why this is a great decision” argument. Likewise, if you wanted to play devil’s advocate and look at the reasons this might <em>not</em> be the right marriage for you, the blue and yellow sections of the diagram would make it easy—whether breaking up is a wise move or a foolish one.</p>
<p>And because the diagram and its four zones allow you to so effortlessly construct whatever convincing narrative you want to about your relationship and The Decision, you worry that anything that feels like conviction is just you falling for a narrative created by fear or ego or some other deep-down motivation.</p>
<p>Unable to come to a trustworthy conclusion, the brain person becomes a Paralyzed Pre-Marriage Relationship Person. A PPMRP has three options:</p>
<p><strong>1) Procrastinate. </strong>Until you die, until your partner dies, or until your partner breaks up with you.</p>
<p><strong>2) Turn back around and succumb to one of the primal forces. </strong>Maybe if you wait for a while, your fear of being single at 36 will overpower your dedication to rationality?</p>
<p><strong>3) Come up with a decision-making litmus test that actually works.</strong></p>
<p>Assuming you don’t find the first two options ideal, let’s talk about litmus tests.</p>
<p>The “actually works” part of option 3 is important, because people often come up with decision-making litmus tests that don’t actually tell you anything. For example:</p>
<p><strong>An overly-broad, one-size-fits-all litmus test is a bad litmus test. </strong></p>
<p>Like, “If I’m still toiling over this three years in, that’s probably a sign this isn’t the right thing for me.” Or, “I’m sure if we’ve been together this long, there’s a good reason for that.” Or, “If I still have the desire to sleep with other people, it must mean my heart’s not in this.”</p>
<p>Litmus tests like those suggest that <em>everyone </em>who toils over the marriage decision should break up or that <em>every </em>couple who’s together for a long time should get married or that <em>no </em>one in a great relationship still wants to sleep with other people. Different people do things like toil or stay together or feel promiscuous—or 100 other things—for totally different reasons, so broad statements like those don’t help with anything.</p>
<p><strong>A litmus test that always yields the answer “We should get married” is a bad litmus test. </strong></p>
<p>Like, “When I picture them standing on the altar with someone else, it’s a horrible thought—that must mean it’s the right move to marry them.” Or, “When we broke up for three days last month, I missed them unbearably—and it told me all I need to know.” Or, “I care about them more than anything and really want the best for them—that’s how I know I want to be with them.”</p>
<p>All these litmus tests tell you is that you A) feel possessive, B) feel attached, and C) love the person. In <em>most</em> long<em> </em>relationships—good and bad—the people in them feel all three of these things. The only real information you learn with tests like these is that you are, in fact, in a relationship.</p>
<p><strong>A litmus test that always yields the answer “We should break up” is a bad litmus test.</strong></p>
<p>Any version of the question, “Is this person a great match for me in every important way?” or “Is this person the best person for me?”</p>
<p>No, the person isn’t a great match for you in every important way. That has never happened before in our species. Likewise, there are at least a few hundred million people in the world that match your sexual preference. Only one of them is the best possible person for you. The chances that you were ever in the same square mile as that person are tiny, and the chances that you’re currently dating them are you’re not currently dating them. Litmus tests like these either require you to have a delusional view of your partner or the world, or they’re pretty much guaranteed to yield the conclusion that you need to break up and continue your quest for The One.</p>
<p>People struggling with The Decision crave guidance, and while statements like all of these can feel like a rescue line out of the PPMRP quagmire in the form of some larger wisdom, they don’t actually tell you anything about what you should do.</p>
<p><strong>A good system for tortured brain people</strong></p>
<p>I’m not an expert on this, nor am I married—but I’ve read a lot about it, and I’ve had a front row seat for a large handful of case studies, watching friends go through The Decision and talking to them about it while it was happening. And I think if we just use common sense, we can probably figure out what a hopeless brain person can do in this situation—so let’s give it a try.</p>
<p>To me, a good system might be as simple as these two steps:</p>
<p><strong>Step 1) Find out where your gut is leaning, using thought experiments.</strong></p>
<p>The gut is a real thing. And for our purposes here, your gut is the little kid in you who just <em>wants</em> one outcome more than the other.</p>
<p>The problem for brain people is that they’re by definition <em>not </em>gut people. The gut draws its wisdom from a mysterious place the prefrontal cortex does not understand, which makes brain people suspicious of the gut’s conclusions.</p>
<p>And suspicion is fine here, since your gut’s wisdom is limited by your experience and guts are often proven wrong with time—but the gut’s opinion is still important information.</p>
<p>Gut people have good practice at communicating with their gut about important decisions. Brain people do not—and the usual gut question—”does this feel right?”—won’t work. So we need to use thought experiments to isolate the gut’s voice amongst the cacophony in your head. Exercises like these are best designed by you, for you, since only you know you. But here are some ideas:</p>
<p>One kind of thought experiment creates a simulation in your head, which acts like a fishing fly, and our goal is to try to get the gut to be fooled by the simulation for a moment and jump at the bait, revealing what it really wants.</p>
<p>Something like: “Imagine you were being arranged married by the town matchmaker and she handed you an envelope with your to-be spouse’s name written inside. You open the envelope and it’s the name of your current partner.” This image might just make your gut jump up for a second and say, “Phew!” Or maybe instead, it would deflate just a little, just for a moment. If either happens, that’s good information.</p>
<p>Another type of thought experiment tries to get at the general yes or no feeling the question “does this feel right?” is supposed to reveal, but with some real on-the-nose imagery.</p>
<p>Like: “Picture two gravestones next to each other—yours and your partners. Does that feel right?”</p>
<p>Some of the most telling thought experiments help hear what the gut’s saying by trying to remove the often deafening voice of fear from the question and seeing if that changes anything.</p>
<p>For example, to test whether a resistance to breaking up is just a dread of the actual breakup itself, you could ask: “If there were a big green button in front of me that, if pressed, would make me fully single, where everything has been worked out with getting our things from each other’s apartments, where everyone in my life already knows, and where I’m totally emotionally recovered and moving on—in fact, I have a date tonight—would I press the button?”</p>
<p>Or if the real fear is of being single for years and years and never finding a new relationship, the button could do all of those things but also include “and I’m immersed in a new relationship.”</p>
<p>A fear of eternal commitment could be sussed out with a question like, “What if The Decision weren’t between breaking up and marriage, but only between breaking up and committing to the relationship for the next five years?”</p>
<p>If thought exercises like these leave you with the feeling that your inner inner self is “pulling” for the relationship, that’s promising.</p>
<p>But it’s not enough.</p>
<p><strong>Step 2) Figure out what your deal-breakers are.</strong></p>
<p>Let’s bring back our relationship assessment chart:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Venn.png"></a></p>
<p>As we established earlier, this chart doesn’t provide much insight into how The Decision should go, because almost every relationship—the good and the bad, the healthy and the harmful, those built to last and those doomed to fail—has a chart like this, where it checks some of the right boxes and some of the wrong boxes, and also misses some of each. And yet, certain charts map out happy couples and others do not. So what’s the difference?</p>
<p>Deal-breakers.</p>
<p>Even though these charts show that there are many, many things we want from a relationship, our ability to be happy only <em>depends </em>on a small percentage of them.</p>
<p>Our relationship chart is like a happiness puzzle, and the items in the green and yellow zones are the pieces. The right question to ask about the chart isn’t, “Is this perfect for me?” or, “Will I automatically be happy if this is my chart?” The right question is, “How can I work with these pieces to figure out how to make myself and my partner happy?” If you’re a good puzzler, with some work and compromise—i.e. some adultness—you’ll probably be able to figure it out.</p>
<p><em>Unless </em>the chart is missing one of your deal-breakers.</p>
<p>Your deal-breakers are the things that, if not part of your relationship, will <em>guarantee </em>your unhappiness. They’re things that no amount of hard work or compromise or maturity can fix. Your must-haves—and your must-not-haves.</p>
<p>A deal-breaker usually comes in the format:</p>
<p>There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who is / isn’t ____.</p>
<p>There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who does / doesn’t ____.</p>
<p>There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who values / doesn’t value ____.</p>
<p>There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who treats me / doesn’t treat me ____.</p>
<p>There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who believes / doesn’t believe ____.</p>
<p>Or maybe:</p>
<p>Out of principle, I will only be with / will not be with someone who ____.</p>
<p>Most real deal-breakers will be broad—e.g. “I may be able to fall in love with a negative person, but I could never be happy with that person.” Or, “I will never be with someone who makes my self-esteem lower.” Or, “I could never be happy with someone who isn’t intellectually curious.” Or something clean-cut like, “I could never be happy with someone who refused to have children.”</p>
<p>Deal-breakers that are more specific in nature can in some cases make sense—maybe you love dogs so much that it would truly impede you from being a happy person if you ended up with someone who didn’t want to own a dog—but they should be rare.</p>
<p>The key with all of these is that there are very few. These aren’t wants—these are <em>needs</em>. Your wants are important, but remember, the only people even eligible for the deal-breaker test are those who have already passed the gut test—plenty of your wants have already been taken care of in step 1 of our system.</p>
<p>Knowing your deal-breakers can help you know the right relationship when you see it, but it can also go a long way for anyone already in a relationship, because it lends insight into one of the trickiest aspects of a relationship: compromise. A great way to be unhappy is to refuse to compromise on things you wish were true about your relationship that aren’t. But another great way to be unhappy is to be <em>too</em> willing to compromise on your deal-breakers. That’s why this is so important—deal-breakers not only help Deciders and single people figure out what should be unacceptable in a relationship, they also remind already-Decided people that most of the problems in their relationship are probably <em>non</em>-deal-breakers that it’s okay<em> </em>to chill out about. Because so many relationship problems boil down to one or both members treating non-deal-breakers like deal-breakers—or vice versa.</p>
<p>And that’s really it. This gut check / deal-breakers system suggests that the mindfuck of The Decision is actually pretty simple—if a relationship successfully makes it through both steps 1 and 2, get married. If it doesn’t, don’t.</p>
<p>At least that’s what the system says.</p>
<p>But who knows. Relationships are impossibly complicated. And making a black-and-white binary decision about something that’s anything but black-and-white is kind of an insane thing to do.</p>
<p>And of course, even if it’s the right system, it’s not actually easy because assessing step 1 and step 2 isn’t easy. Getting a reading from your gut that you can trust is no small task for someone who typically lives in their brain—and figuring out what your deal-breakers are requires a serious deep-dive into your soul.</p>
<p>But for now, at least it’s a system—and a system you can hang on to. Which is just what some of us need.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/R17-beam-5-1.png"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a>Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you liked this:</strong></p>
<p>Another Wait But Why deep dive into the quandaries of figuring out who to marry: <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html">How to Pick a Life Partner</a></strong></p>
<p>Some further issues, over in the world of single men: <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html">10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys</a></strong></p>
<p>Once you finally make The Decision, you go straight into another Decision: <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">How to Name a Baby</a></strong></p>
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 The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again

 September 1, 2016 By Tim Urban


 There’s not really any normal way to start a relationship. Some people go on a date, and then another date, and then another, and one day it’s just clear to both of them that they’re in a relationship. Some people start seeing each other, but they keep things black and white until a “So are we doing this?” conversation makes it official. Sometimes a platonic friendship forms first and tension builds under the surface until an unexpected kiss lights the friendship on fire.

 But there’s usually some first time that this happens:

 And suddenly, you’re here:

 Your new relationship is with you all the time, even when you’re not together.

 You’ve left the rest of shitty humanity behind, and it feels great. Then this happens:

 And all the song lyrics make sense.

 It goes on like this for a while, but as the months pass, you notice things changing. The unicorns turn into horses and then bikes and then one day, you’re not riding anything at all. The perfect person you found starts to say and do imperfect things. Some of those funny quirks you adored early on seem to be striking you as more annoying than funny. And it starts to dawn on you that you might be dating a fucking dick.

 Sometimes things go further south, as butterflies and rainbows turn into frustration and disillusionment, and the relationship that used to lift you up seems to now be boxing you in.

 All of the negative qualities you couldn’t see in the fog of love are suddenly right in your face, like a weight that’s dragging you down.

 A lot of relationships end right about here.

 But maybe, having seen the dark side of your partner, you step back and take a long look at both the good and bad together. You put away both the rose-colored glasses and the shit-colored glasses and see who you’re really dating: a three-dimensional, one-of-a-kind, beautiful, piece-of-shit human being.

 Who’s the best.

 And the worst.

 And your teammate.

 And your rock.

 And you decide you like what you’ve got.

 And your lives go on together.

 But just when things get simple, something else starts to happen:

 Society, in most parts of the world, doesn’t like when a relationship lasts too long. To society, a relationship is simply a testing ground—an incubator that prepares you for The Decision. And if too many years go by in a relationship without The Decision being made, society decides that something must be wrong. To help right the wrong, society will begin to apply pressure on the couple, from all angles.

 Some people are bigger than society. Most of us are not. For most of us, society’s rules are our rules, and as you and your person walk down your blue balance beam, you can feel the walking space melt away around you. It’s time to make The Decision.

 Your relationship needs to be converted into Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again. Soon.

 The typical human isn’t really equipped to make The Decision. We evolved to live short lives, during which life-altering 60-year commitments weren’t a thing. We evolved in small communities without nearly as many available options. And most of us, when presented with The Decision, have relatively little relationship experience and an incomplete understanding of our own adult selves—selves that in many cases only recently started existing.

 But society doesn’t care. So you decide.

 Humans have come up with four main methods to make The Decision:

 Method 1) Let the other person decide

 The easiest way to handle The Decision is to just not really handle it. You take a passive approach, as if you’re on a raft, going down a river, and you have no control over where the current leads you—you’re in the hands of momentum and inertia. Once you hit your mid-20s, you just wait until you get into your next relationship and then marry whoever that person happens to be, whenever/if-ever that person decides it’s time, regardless of how right or wrong the relationship is for you.

 Method 2) Let your primal forces battle it out

 For people determined to more actively make The Decision, the next easiest way to go is to let your emotions and primal forces figure it out. Making The Decision provides a reminder that “you” is actually a collection of voices, each weighing in from different parts of evolutionary history. Each voice has its role in the homeostasis of our normal lives, but when it’s time for something as rare and important as The Decision, there’s suddenly a brawl in your head for influence—and no one brawls harder than your primal forces. Some of the major players:

 Love

 Deep down, most people are sympathetic characters. And when you’re in a relationship for enough time, you’ll usually end up loving the person—even if you don’t like them. You know their whole story, which makes you care about them and the fact that they rely on you makes you feel a tremendous loyalty to them. This is the kind of love you feel for your family and closest friends, and it can exist in full force even after the feeling of being “in love” has faded. And for many people, this deep emotional connection makes it basically inconceivable to ever break up with their partner. This is a beautiful way to make The Decision when you’re in a strong, healthy relationship, and a tragedy when you’re not.

 Fear

 Humans specialize in making critical life decisions based on fear, and when it comes to The Decision, there’s a lot to be afraid of.

 When a fearful person takes a look to the left side of the balance beam, they might see all kinds of things:

 The right side of the beam isn’t much better.

 Different people feel these fears at different levels of intensity, and for someone whose fear tends to run their life, it’s usually pretty simple: the particular fear that grabs them hardest by the collar ends up making The Decision.

 Ego

 Your ego, meanwhile, is busy staring down at a clipboard. Depending on what your ego values, that clipboard might display a checklist describing your ideal partner—their appearance, age, family background, intelligence, job, wealth, general personality type, etc. Or maybe the clipboard has a story written on it, one that was written long ago about how your life should go. Your ego will examine your current situation and see how it measures up to what’s written on the clipboard, and it’ll base The Decision on its findings.

 While all of this analysis is going on, your ego sometimes also finds itself getting very hungry—for admiration, attention, and conquest. If this hunger gets too intense, it can overwhelm an ego to the point where it may sway its vote, no matter what the clipboard says.

 Sex Drive

 Your sex drive is not a complicated character. If it has a grilled cheese sandwich every day for lunch and then one day, you ask it if it would like to try the buffet, it’s going to say yes. Unless, of course, the grilled cheese is super fucking incredible.

 So these four primal forces, along with a few others, all voice their opinion at the same time. In some people, all of the voices are in agreement about the verdict. In others, the voices disagree, but one of the voices is so loud that it drowns out the others. In both of those cases, The Decision is pretty easy.

 But what happens when your primal forces provide no clear answer?

 Method 3) Turn to your gut

 For some reason, we have wise stomachs, and when The Decision isn’t obvious, sometimes asking your gut can do the trick.

 Your gut relies on your intuition and asks one simple question:

 And what makes your gut your gut is that when it answers that question, it doesn’t deliberate—it just knows the answer: a simple yes or a simple no. The gut doesn’t deal with nuance, which makes it a good match for something big and binary, like The Decision.

 And for a lot of people, this works.

 But there are some people who won’t end up being passive Deciders, or emotional Deciders, or gut Deciders—who won’t turn to any primal or instinctual voice when it comes to this particular decision. They’ll get to the bottom of this in spite of those voices—based on experience and evidence and data and facts. They won’t be instinct-driven or fear-driven or ego-driven or sex-driven—they’ll be guided by rationality.

 The brain Deciders.

 And when it comes time for them to make The Decision, they’re in big trouble.

 Method 4) Figure it out in your brain

 The prefrontal cortex is kind of like the brain’s brain. It’s the part of you that sorts through information and makes plans and predictions and weighs evidence. It’s great at using what it learns to draw conclusions about how to act or what to do—as long as it knows the rules of the game and has access to the right information. And when it’s time for The Decision, your brain will do what it always does when confronted by a fork in the road—it’ll attempt to think and assess and analyze its way to the optimal rational answer.

 Something as important and permanent as The Decision requires conviction, and conviction requires a source. No source of conviction, no Decision.

 The source of the heart’s conviction is its love and care for the other person. The source of the ego’s conviction is its belief in its clipboard. Fear and sex drive derive their conviction from the obvious—fear and sex. The source of the gut’s conviction is an instinctive feeling that emerges from experience. And an inertia-y person gets their conviction from the conviction of someone else. Those sources are what allow people to make The Decision with relative ease.

 The brain hears these voices, but it discredits their conviction in each case because the certainty emerges from what the brain sees as an irrational place. For the brain, the only respectable source of conviction is sound evidence.

 And good luck with that.

 If you’re typically a brain person, when it comes to The Decision, you want to try to not be you. Because the brain, for all its merits, does not do well in this situation, where the outcome is critical and evidence is hard to come by. Let’s look at how it might go:

 Maybe you start by looking over to the marriage side of the balance beam—where you see a house.

 That’s the house of the life you’re about to sign up for. You really enjoy your relationship, so you’re excited about what might be inside that house. But the house is also mysterious, because you don’t really know what either you or your partner will be like as a spouse or how either of you will grow or change in the future. Not much concrete evidence there.

 So you turn and look over at the breakup side of the beam. You see a path, and a couple walking down it.

 That road is whatever life you’d end up living if you were to move on from your relationship, and that’s the marriage you’d end up in. The marriage that might have been.

 What kind of marriage would that be, and what adventures lie down that road? Maybe your life on that road would be much happier than whatever’s in that house on the other side, and maybe your current partner would end up happier somewhere else too. Or maybe you’d look back and realize that you made the biggest mistake of your life. Without knowing anything about that other path, there’s no way to compare it to the house on the other side. Again, no real evidence.

 So you take a closer look at the one thing you have actual information about: your current relationship.

 You decide to make a big chart where you list all the things you like and don’t like about your relationship—a relationship-assessment chart. You end up here:

 Fucking great—now what? All relationships—the good ones and the bad ones—have a chart that looks like that, with things in all four of those zones: blue, green, yellow, and red. And without much relationship experience or marriage expertise, you have no good way to evaluate whether your particular diagram looks as promising as you hope it does or whether there are red flags in it that you’re not seeing that will lead to major issues later. You try comparing your relationship to those that your friends are in—but it’s hard to know what really goes on in other relationships, and each one is so complicated and unique anyway that it’s mostly apples and oranges.

 Without any way to construct an airtight argument in either direction, you’re left feeling very little conviction about the situation. Because the stakes are so high, you become paranoid about making the wrong choice, and every time you think you might have an answer, you second-guess yourself.

 The whole thing quickly becomes a mindfuck. You try talking yourself into feeling good about marriage by reminding yourself that every relationship has flaws and that marriage is all about acceptance—but then you realize that that’s also exactly how someone sounds when they’re talking themselves into settling for the wrong person. In both of those cases, the green and red zones of the diagram provide more than enough material to construct a full “why this is a great decision” argument. Likewise, if you wanted to play devil’s advocate and look at the reasons this might not be the right marriage for you, the blue and yellow sections of the diagram would make it easy—whether breaking up is a wise move or a foolish one.

 And because the diagram and its four zones allow you to so effortlessly construct whatever convincing narrative you want to about your relationship and The Decision, you worry that anything that feels like conviction is just you falling for a narrative created by fear or ego or some other deep-down motivation.

 Unable to come to a trustworthy conclusion, the brain person becomes a Paralyzed Pre-Marriage Relationship Person. A PPMRP has three options:

 1) Procrastinate. Until you die, until your partner dies, or until your partner breaks up with you.

 2) Turn back around and succumb to one of the primal forces. Maybe if you wait for a while, your fear of being single at 36 will overpower your dedication to rationality?

 3) Come up with a decision-making litmus test that actually works.

 Assuming you don’t find the first two options ideal, let’s talk about litmus tests.

 The “actually works” part of option 3 is important, because people often come up with decision-making litmus tests that don’t actually tell you anything. For example:

 An overly-broad, one-size-fits-all litmus test is a bad litmus test.

 Like, “If I’m still toiling over this three years in, that’s probably a sign this isn’t the right thing for me.” Or, “I’m sure if we’ve been together this long, there’s a good reason for that.” Or, “If I still have the desire to sleep with other people, it must mean my heart’s not in this.”

 Litmus tests like those suggest that everyone who toils over the marriage decision should break up or that every couple who’s together for a long time should get married or that no one in a great relationship still wants to sleep with other people. Different people do things like toil or stay together or feel promiscuous—or 100 other things—for totally different reasons, so broad statements like those don’t help with anything.

 A litmus test that always yields the answer “We should get married” is a bad litmus test.

 Like, “When I picture them standing on the altar with someone else, it’s a horrible thought—that must mean it’s the right move to marry them.” Or, “When we broke up for three days last month, I missed them unbearably—and it told me all I need to know.” Or, “I care about them more than anything and really want the best for them—that’s how I know I want to be with them.”

 All these litmus tests tell you is that you A) feel possessive, B) feel attached, and C) love the person. In most long relationships—good and bad—the people in them feel all three of these things. The only real information you learn with tests like these is that you are, in fact, in a relationship.

 A litmus test that always yields the answer “We should break up” is a bad litmus test.

 Any version of the question, “Is this person a great match for me in every important way?” or “Is this person the best person for me?”

 No, the person isn’t a great match for you in every important way. That has never happened before in our species. Likewise, there are at least a few hundred million people in the world that match your sexual preference. Only one of them is the best possible person for you. The chances that you were ever in the same square mile as that person are tiny, and the chances that you’re currently dating them are you’re not currently dating them. Litmus tests like these either require you to have a delusional view of your partner or the world, or they’re pretty much guaranteed to yield the conclusion that you need to break up and continue your quest for The One.

 People struggling with The Decision crave guidance, and while statements like all of these can feel like a rescue line out of the PPMRP quagmire in the form of some larger wisdom, they don’t actually tell you anything about what you should do.

 A good system for tortured brain people

 I’m not an expert on this, nor am I married—but I’ve read a lot about it, and I’ve had a front row seat for a large handful of case studies, watching friends go through The Decision and talking to them about it while it was happening. And I think if we just use common sense, we can probably figure out what a hopeless brain person can do in this situation—so let’s give it a try.

 To me, a good system might be as simple as these two steps:

 Step 1) Find out where your gut is leaning, using thought experiments.

 The gut is a real thing. And for our purposes here, your gut is the little kid in you who just wants one outcome more than the other.

 The problem for brain people is that they’re by definition not gut people. The gut draws its wisdom from a mysterious place the prefrontal cortex does not understand, which makes brain people suspicious of the gut’s conclusions.

 And suspicion is fine here, since your gut’s wisdom is limited by your experience and guts are often proven wrong with time—but the gut’s opinion is still important information.

 Gut people have good practice at communicating with their gut about important decisions. Brain people do not—and the usual gut question—”does this feel right?”—won’t work. So we need to use thought experiments to isolate the gut’s voice amongst the cacophony in your head. Exercises like these are best designed by you, for you, since only you know you. But here are some ideas:

 One kind of thought experiment creates a simulation in your head, which acts like a fishing fly, and our goal is to try to get the gut to be fooled by the simulation for a moment and jump at the bait, revealing what it really wants.

 Something like: “Imagine you were being arranged married by the town matchmaker and she handed you an envelope with your to-be spouse’s name written inside. You open the envelope and it’s the name of your current partner.” This image might just make your gut jump up for a second and say, “Phew!” Or maybe instead, it would deflate just a little, just for a moment. If either happens, that’s good information.

 Another type of thought experiment tries to get at the general yes or no feeling the question “does this feel right?” is supposed to reveal, but with some real on-the-nose imagery.

 Like: “Picture two gravestones next to each other—yours and your partners. Does that feel right?”

 Some of the most telling thought experiments help hear what the gut’s saying by trying to remove the often deafening voice of fear from the question and seeing if that changes anything.

 For example, to test whether a resistance to breaking up is just a dread of the actual breakup itself, you could ask: “If there were a big green button in front of me that, if pressed, would make me fully single, where everything has been worked out with getting our things from each other’s apartments, where everyone in my life already knows, and where I’m totally emotionally recovered and moving on—in fact, I have a date tonight—would I press the button?”

 Or if the real fear is of being single for years and years and never finding a new relationship, the button could do all of those things but also include “and I’m immersed in a new relationship.”

 A fear of eternal commitment could be sussed out with a question like, “What if The Decision weren’t between breaking up and marriage, but only between breaking up and committing to the relationship for the next five years?”

 If thought exercises like these leave you with the feeling that your inner inner self is “pulling” for the relationship, that’s promising.

 But it’s not enough.

 Step 2) Figure out what your deal-breakers are.

 Let’s bring back our relationship assessment chart:

 As we established earlier, this chart doesn’t provide much insight into how The Decision should go, because almost every relationship—the good and the bad, the healthy and the harmful, those built to last and those doomed to fail—has a chart like this, where it checks some of the right boxes and some of the wrong boxes, and also misses some of each. And yet, certain charts map out happy couples and others do not. So what’s the difference?

 Deal-breakers.

 Even though these charts show that there are many, many things we want from a relationship, our ability to be happy only depends on a small percentage of them.

 Our relationship chart is like a happiness puzzle, and the items in the green and yellow zones are the pieces. The right question to ask about the chart isn’t, “Is this perfect for me?” or, “Will I automatically be happy if this is my chart?” The right question is, “How can I work with these pieces to figure out how to make myself and my partner happy?” If you’re a good puzzler, with some work and compromise—i.e. some adultness—you’ll probably be able to figure it out.

 Unless the chart is missing one of your deal-breakers.

 Your deal-breakers are the things that, if not part of your relationship, will guarantee your unhappiness. They’re things that no amount of hard work or compromise or maturity can fix. Your must-haves—and your must-not-haves.

 A deal-breaker usually comes in the format:

 There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who is / isn’t ____.

 There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who does / doesn’t ____.

 There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who values / doesn’t value ____.

 There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who treats me / doesn’t treat me ____.

 There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who believes / doesn’t believe ____.

 Or maybe:

 Out of principle, I will only be with / will not be with someone who ____.

 Most real deal-breakers will be broad—e.g. “I may be able to fall in love with a negative person, but I could never be happy with that person.” Or, “I will never be with someone who makes my self-esteem lower.” Or, “I could never be happy with someone who isn’t intellectually curious.” Or something clean-cut like, “I could never be happy with someone who refused to have children.”

 Deal-breakers that are more specific in nature can in some cases make sense—maybe you love dogs so much that it would truly impede you from being a happy person if you ended up with someone who didn’t want to own a dog—but they should be rare.

 The key with all of these is that there are very few. These aren’t wants—these are needs. Your wants are important, but remember, the only people even eligible for the deal-breaker test are those who have already passed the gut test—plenty of your wants have already been taken care of in step 1 of our system.

 Knowing your deal-breakers can help you know the right relationship when you see it, but it can also go a long way for anyone already in a relationship, because it lends insight into one of the trickiest aspects of a relationship: compromise. A great way to be unhappy is to refuse to compromise on things you wish were true about your relationship that aren’t. But another great way to be unhappy is to be too willing to compromise on your deal-breakers. That’s why this is so important—deal-breakers not only help Deciders and single people figure out what should be unacceptable in a relationship, they also remind already-Decided people that most of the problems in their relationship are probably non-deal-breakers that it’s okay to chill out about. Because so many relationship problems boil down to one or both members treating non-deal-breakers like deal-breakers—or vice versa.

 And that’s really it. This gut check / deal-breakers system suggests that the mindfuck of The Decision is actually pretty simple—if a relationship successfully makes it through both steps 1 and 2, get married. If it doesn’t, don’t.

 At least that’s what the system says.

 But who knows. Relationships are impossibly complicated. And making a black-and-white binary decision about something that’s anything but black-and-white is kind of an insane thing to do.

 And of course, even if it’s the right system, it’s not actually easy because assessing step 1 and step 2 isn’t easy. Getting a reading from your gut that you can trust is no small task for someone who typically lives in their brain—and figuring out what your deal-breakers are requires a serious deep-dive into your soul.

 But for now, at least it’s a system—and a system you can hang on to. Which is just what some of us need.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ___________

 If you liked this:

 Another Wait But Why deep dive into the quandaries of figuring out who to marry: How to Pick a Life Partner

 Some further issues, over in the world of single men: 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys

 Once you finally make The Decision, you go straight into another Decision: How to Name a Baby

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There’s not really any normal way to start a relationship. Some people go on a date, and then another date, and then another, and one day it’s just clear to both of them that they’re in a relationship. Some people start seeing each other, but they keep things black and white until a “So are we doing this?” conversation makes it official. Sometimes a platonic friendship forms first and tension builds under the surface until an unexpected kiss lights the friendship on fire.
But there’s usually some first time that this happens:
   
And suddenly, you’re here:
   
Your new relationship is with you all the time, even when you’re not together.
   
You’ve left the rest of shitty humanity behind, and it feels great. Then this happens:
   
   
And all the song lyrics make sense.
It goes on like this for a while, but as the months pass, you notice things changing. The unicorns turn into horses and then bikes and then one day, you’re not riding anything at all. The perfect person you found starts to say and do imperfect things. Some of those funny quirks you adored early on seem to be striking you as more annoying than funny. And it starts to dawn on you that you might be dating a fucking dick.
   
Sometimes things go further south, as butterflies and rainbows turn into frustration and disillusionment, and the relationship that used to lift you up seems to now be boxing you in.
   
All of the negative qualities you couldn’t see in the fog of love are suddenly right in your face, like a weight that’s dragging you down.
   
A lot of relationships end right about here.
But maybe, having seen the dark side of your partner, you step back and take a long look at both the good and bad together. You put away both the rose-colored glasses and the shit-colored glasses and see who you’re really dating: a three-dimensional, one-of-a-kind, beautiful, piece-of-shit human being.
Who’s the best.
   
And the worst.
   
And your teammate.
   
And your rock.
   
And you decide you like what you’ve got.
And your lives go on together.
   
But just when things get simple, something else starts to happen:
   
   
   
Society, in most parts of the world, doesn’t like when a relationship lasts too long. To society, a relationship is simply a testing ground—an incubator that prepares you for The Decision. And if too many years go by in a relationship without The Decision being made, society decides that something must be wrong. To help right the wrong, society will begin to apply pressure on the couple, from all angles.
Some people are bigger than society. Most of us are not. For most of us, society’s rules are our rules, and as you and your person walk down your blue balance beam, you can feel the walking space melt away around you. It’s time to make The Decision.
Your relationship needs to be converted into Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again. Soon.
The typical human isn’t really equipped to make The Decision. We evolved to live short lives, during which life-altering 60-year commitments weren’t a thing. We evolved in small communities without nearly as many available options. And most of us, when presented with The Decision, have relatively little relationship experience and an incomplete understanding of our own adult selves—selves that in many cases only recently started existing.
But society doesn’t care. So you decide.
Humans have come up with four main methods to make The Decision:
 Method 1) Let the other person decide 
The easiest way to handle The Decision is to just not really handle it. You take a passive approach, as if you’re on a raft, going down a river, and you have no control over where the current leads you—you’re in the hands of momentum and inertia. Once you hit your mid-20s, you just wait until you get into your next relationship and then marry whoever that person happens to be, whenever/if-ever that person decides it’s time, regardless of how right or wrong the relationship is for you. 
 Method 2) Let your primal forces battle it out 
For people determined to more actively make The Decision, the next easiest way to go is to let your emotions and primal forces figure it out. Making The Decision provides a reminder that “you” is actually a collection of voices, each weighing in from different parts of evolutionary history. Each voice has its role in the homeostasis of our normal lives, but when it’s time for something as rare and important as The Decision, there’s suddenly a brawl in your head for influence—and no one brawls harder than your primal forces. Some of the major players:
 Love 
Deep down, most people are sympathetic characters. And when you’re in a relationship for enough time, you’ll usually end up loving the person—even if you don’t like them. You know their whole story, which makes you care about them and the fact that they rely on you makes you feel a tremendous loyalty to them. This is the kind of love you feel for your family and closest friends, and it can exist in full force even after the feeling of being “in love” has faded. And for many people, this deep emotional connection makes it basically inconceivable to ever break up with their partner. This is a beautiful way to make The Decision when you’re in a strong, healthy relationship, and a tragedy when you’re not.
 Fear 
Humans specialize in making critical life decisions based on fear, and when it comes to The Decision, there’s a lot to be afraid of.
When a fearful person takes a look to the left side of the balance beam, they might see all kinds of things:
   
The right side of the beam isn’t much better.
   
Different people feel these fears at different levels of intensity, and for someone whose fear tends to run their life, it’s usually pretty simple: the particular fear that grabs them hardest by the collar ends up making The Decision.
 Ego 
Your ego, meanwhile, is busy staring down at a clipboard. Depending on what your ego values, that clipboard might display a checklist describing your ideal partner—their appearance, age, family background, intelligence, job, wealth, general personality type, etc. Or maybe the clipboard has a story written on it, one that was written long ago about how your life should go. Your ego will examine your current situation and see how it measures up to what’s written on the clipboard, and it’ll base The Decision on its findings.
While all of this analysis is going on, your ego sometimes also finds itself getting very hungry—for admiration, attention, and conquest. If this hunger gets too intense, it can overwhelm an ego to the point where it may sway its vote, no matter what the clipboard says.
 Sex Drive 
Your sex drive is not a complicated character. If it has a grilled cheese sandwich every day for lunch and then one day, you ask it if it would like to try the buffet, it’s going to say yes. Unless, of course, the grilled cheese is super fucking incredible.
So these four primal forces, along with a few others, all voice their opinion at the same time. In some people, all of the voices are in agreement about the verdict. In others, the voices disagree, but one of the voices is so loud that it drowns out the others. In both of those cases, The Decision is pretty easy.
But what happens when your primal forces provide no clear answer?
 Method 3) Turn to your gut 
For some reason, we have wise stomachs, and when The Decision isn’t obvious, sometimes asking your gut can do the trick.
Your gut relies on your intuition and asks one simple question:
   
And what makes your gut your gut is that when it answers that question, it doesn’t deliberate—it just knows the answer: a simple yes or a simple no. The gut doesn’t deal with nuance, which makes it a good match for something big and binary, like The Decision.
And for a lot of people, this works.
But there are some people who won’t end up being passive Deciders, or emotional Deciders, or gut Deciders—who won’t turn to any primal or instinctual voice when it comes to this particular decision. They’ll get to the bottom of this in spite of those voices—based on experience and evidence and data and facts. They won’t be instinct-driven or fear-driven or ego-driven or sex-driven—they’ll be guided by rationality.
The brain Deciders.
And when it comes time for them to make The Decision, they’re in big trouble.
 Method 4) Figure it out in your brain 
The prefrontal cortex is kind of like the brain’s brain. It’s the part of you that sorts through information and makes plans and predictions and weighs evidence. It’s great at using what it learns to draw conclusions about how to act or what to do—as long as it knows the rules of the game and has access to the right information. And when it’s time for The Decision, your brain will do what it always does when confronted by a fork in the road—it’ll attempt to think and assess and analyze its way to the optimal rational answer.
Something as important and permanent as The Decision requires conviction, and conviction requires a source. No source of conviction, no Decision.
The source of the heart’s conviction is its love and care for the other person. The source of the ego’s conviction is its belief in its clipboard. Fear and sex drive derive their conviction from the obvious—fear and sex. The source of the gut’s conviction is an instinctive feeling that emerges from experience. And an inertia-y person gets their conviction from the conviction of someone else. Those sources are what allow people to make The Decision with relative ease.
The brain hears these voices, but it discredits their conviction in each case because the certainty emerges from what the brain sees as an irrational place. For the brain, the only respectable source of conviction is sound evidence.
And good luck with that.
If you’re typically a brain person, when it comes to The Decision, you want to try to not be you. Because the brain, for all its merits, does not do well in this situation, where the outcome is critical and evidence is hard to come by. Let’s look at how it might go:
Maybe you start by looking over to the marriage side of the balance beam—where you see a house.
   
That’s the house of the life you’re about to sign up for. You really enjoy your relationship, so you’re excited about what might be inside that house. But the house is also mysterious, because you don’t really know what either you or your partner will be like as a spouse or how either of you will grow or change in the future. Not much concrete evidence there.
So you turn and look over at the breakup side of the beam. You see a path, and a couple walking down it.
   
That road is whatever life you’d end up living if you were to move on from your relationship, and that’s the marriage you’d end up in. The marriage that might have been.
What kind of marriage would that be, and what adventures lie down that road? Maybe your life on that road would be much happier than whatever’s in that house on the other side, and maybe your current partner would end up happier somewhere else too. Or maybe you’d look back and realize that you made the biggest mistake of your life. Without knowing anything about that other path, there’s no way to compare it to the house on the other side. Again, no real evidence.
So you take a closer look at the one thing you have actual information about: your current relationship.
You decide to make a big chart where you list all the things you like and don’t like about your relationship—a relationship-assessment chart. You end up here:
   
Fucking great—now what? All relationships—the good ones and the bad ones—have a chart that looks like that, with things in all four of those zones: blue, green, yellow, and red. And without much relationship experience or marriage expertise, you have no good way to evaluate whether your particular diagram looks as promising as you hope it does or whether there are red flags in it that you’re not seeing that will lead to major issues later. You try comparing your relationship to those that your friends are in—but it’s hard to know what really goes on in other relationships, and each one is so complicated and unique anyway that it’s mostly apples and oranges.
Without any way to construct an airtight argument in either direction, you’re left feeling very little conviction about the situation. Because the stakes are so high, you become paranoid about making the wrong choice, and every time you think you might have an answer, you second-guess yourself.
The whole thing quickly becomes a mindfuck. You try talking yourself into feeling good about marriage by reminding yourself that every relationship has flaws and that marriage is all about acceptance—but then you realize that that’s also exactly how someone sounds when they’re talking themselves into settling for the wrong person. In both of those cases, the green and red zones of the diagram provide more than enough material to construct a full “why this is a great decision” argument. Likewise, if you wanted to play devil’s advocate and look at the reasons this might not be the right marriage for you, the blue and yellow sections of the diagram would make it easy—whether breaking up is a wise move or a foolish one.
And because the diagram and its four zones allow you to so effortlessly construct whatever convincing narrative you want to about your relationship and The Decision, you worry that anything that feels like conviction is just you falling for a narrative created by fear or ego or some other deep-down motivation.
Unable to come to a trustworthy conclusion, the brain person becomes a Paralyzed Pre-Marriage Relationship Person. A PPMRP has three options:
 1) Procrastinate. Until you die, until your partner dies, or until your partner breaks up with you.
 2) Turn back around and succumb to one of the primal forces. Maybe if you wait for a while, your fear of being single at 36 will overpower your dedication to rationality?
 3) Come up with a decision-making litmus test that actually works. 
Assuming you don’t find the first two options ideal, let’s talk about litmus tests.
The “actually works” part of option 3 is important, because people often come up with decision-making litmus tests that don’t actually tell you anything. For example:
 An overly-broad, one-size-fits-all litmus test is a bad litmus test.  
Like, “If I’m still toiling over this three years in, that’s probably a sign this isn’t the right thing for me.” Or, “I’m sure if we’ve been together this long, there’s a good reason for that.” Or, “If I still have the desire to sleep with other people, it must mean my heart’s not in this.”
Litmus tests like those suggest that everyone who toils over the marriage decision should break up or that every couple who’s together for a long time should get married or that no one in a great relationship still wants to sleep with other people. Different people do things like toil or stay together or feel promiscuous—or 100 other things—for totally different reasons, so broad statements like those don’t help with anything.
 A litmus test that always yields the answer “We should get married” is a bad litmus test.  
Like, “When I picture them standing on the altar with someone else, it’s a horrible thought—that must mean it’s the right move to marry them.” Or, “When we broke up for three days last month, I missed them unbearably—and it told me all I need to know.” Or, “I care about them more than anything and really want the best for them—that’s how I know I want to be with them.”
All these litmus tests tell you is that you A) feel possessive, B) feel attached, and C) love the person. In most long relationships—good and bad—the people in them feel all three of these things. The only real information you learn with tests like these is that you are, in fact, in a relationship.
 A litmus test that always yields the answer “We should break up” is a bad litmus test. 
Any version of the question, “Is this person a great match for me in every important way?” or “Is this person the best person for me?”
No, the person isn’t a great match for you in every important way. That has never happened before in our species. Likewise, there are at least a few hundred million people in the world that match your sexual preference. Only one of them is the best possible person for you. The chances that you were ever in the same square mile as that person are tiny, and the chances that you’re currently dating them are you’re not currently dating them. Litmus tests like these either require you to have a delusional view of your partner or the world, or they’re pretty much guaranteed to yield the conclusion that you need to break up and continue your quest for The One.
People struggling with The Decision crave guidance, and while statements like all of these can feel like a rescue line out of the PPMRP quagmire in the form of some larger wisdom, they don’t actually tell you anything about what you should do.
 A good system for tortured brain people 
I’m not an expert on this, nor am I married—but I’ve read a lot about it, and I’ve had a front row seat for a large handful of case studies, watching friends go through The Decision and talking to them about it while it was happening. And I think if we just use common sense, we can probably figure out what a hopeless brain person can do in this situation—so let’s give it a try.
To me, a good system might be as simple as these two steps:
 Step 1) Find out where your gut is leaning, using thought experiments. 
The gut is a real thing. And for our purposes here, your gut is the little kid in you who just wants one outcome more than the other.
The problem for brain people is that they’re by definition not gut people. The gut draws its wisdom from a mysterious place the prefrontal cortex does not understand, which makes brain people suspicious of the gut’s conclusions.
And suspicion is fine here, since your gut’s wisdom is limited by your experience and guts are often proven wrong with time—but the gut’s opinion is still important information.
Gut people have good practice at communicating with their gut about important decisions. Brain people do not—and the usual gut question—”does this feel right?”—won’t work. So we need to use thought experiments to isolate the gut’s voice amongst the cacophony in your head. Exercises like these are best designed by you, for you, since only you know you. But here are some ideas:
One kind of thought experiment creates a simulation in your head, which acts like a fishing fly, and our goal is to try to get the gut to be fooled by the simulation for a moment and jump at the bait, revealing what it really wants.
Something like: “Imagine you were being arranged married by the town matchmaker and she handed you an envelope with your to-be spouse’s name written inside. You open the envelope and it’s the name of your current partner.” This image might just make your gut jump up for a second and say, “Phew!” Or maybe instead, it would deflate just a little, just for a moment. If either happens, that’s good information.
Another type of thought experiment tries to get at the general yes or no feeling the question “does this feel right?” is supposed to reveal, but with some real on-the-nose imagery.
Like: “Picture two gravestones next to each other—yours and your partners. Does that feel right?”
Some of the most telling thought experiments help hear what the gut’s saying by trying to remove the often deafening voice of fear from the question and seeing if that changes anything.
For example, to test whether a resistance to breaking up is just a dread of the actual breakup itself, you could ask: “If there were a big green button in front of me that, if pressed, would make me fully single, where everything has been worked out with getting our things from each other’s apartments, where everyone in my life already knows, and where I’m totally emotionally recovered and moving on—in fact, I have a date tonight—would I press the button?”
Or if the real fear is of being single for years and years and never finding a new relationship, the button could do all of those things but also include “and I’m immersed in a new relationship.”
A fear of eternal commitment could be sussed out with a question like, “What if The Decision weren’t between breaking up and marriage, but only between breaking up and committing to the relationship for the next five years?”
If thought exercises like these leave you with the feeling that your inner inner self is “pulling” for the relationship, that’s promising.
But it’s not enough.
 Step 2) Figure out what your deal-breakers are. 
Let’s bring back our relationship assessment chart:
   
As we established earlier, this chart doesn’t provide much insight into how The Decision should go, because almost every relationship—the good and the bad, the healthy and the harmful, those built to last and those doomed to fail—has a chart like this, where it checks some of the right boxes and some of the wrong boxes, and also misses some of each. And yet, certain charts map out happy couples and others do not. So what’s the difference?
Deal-breakers.
Even though these charts show that there are many, many things we want from a relationship, our ability to be happy only depends on a small percentage of them.
Our relationship chart is like a happiness puzzle, and the items in the green and yellow zones are the pieces. The right question to ask about the chart isn’t, “Is this perfect for me?” or, “Will I automatically be happy if this is my chart?” The right question is, “How can I work with these pieces to figure out how to make myself and my partner happy?” If you’re a good puzzler, with some work and compromise—i.e. some adultness—you’ll probably be able to figure it out.
 Unless the chart is missing one of your deal-breakers.
Your deal-breakers are the things that, if not part of your relationship, will guarantee your unhappiness. They’re things that no amount of hard work or compromise or maturity can fix. Your must-haves—and your must-not-haves.
A deal-breaker usually comes in the format:
There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who is / isn’t ____.
There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who does / doesn’t ____.
There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who values / doesn’t value ____.
There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who treats me / doesn’t treat me ____.
There’s no way I can figure out how to be happy with someone who believes / doesn’t believe ____.
Or maybe:
Out of principle, I will only be with / will not be with someone who ____.
Most real deal-breakers will be broad—e.g. “I may be able to fall in love with a negative person, but I could never be happy with that person.” Or, “I will never be with someone who makes my self-esteem lower.” Or, “I could never be happy with someone who isn’t intellectually curious.” Or something clean-cut like, “I could never be happy with someone who refused to have children.”
Deal-breakers that are more specific in nature can in some cases make sense—maybe you love dogs so much that it would truly impede you from being a happy person if you ended up with someone who didn’t want to own a dog—but they should be rare.
The key with all of these is that there are very few. These aren’t wants—these are needs. Your wants are important, but remember, the only people even eligible for the deal-breaker test are those who have already passed the gut test—plenty of your wants have already been taken care of in step 1 of our system.
Knowing your deal-breakers can help you know the right relationship when you see it, but it can also go a long way for anyone already in a relationship, because it lends insight into one of the trickiest aspects of a relationship: compromise. A great way to be unhappy is to refuse to compromise on things you wish were true about your relationship that aren’t. But another great way to be unhappy is to be too willing to compromise on your deal-breakers. That’s why this is so important—deal-breakers not only help Deciders and single people figure out what should be unacceptable in a relationship, they also remind already-Decided people that most of the problems in their relationship are probably non-deal-breakers that it’s okay to chill out about. Because so many relationship problems boil down to one or both members treating non-deal-breakers like deal-breakers—or vice versa.
And that’s really it. This gut check / deal-breakers system suggests that the mindfuck of The Decision is actually pretty simple—if a relationship successfully makes it through both steps 1 and 2, get married. If it doesn’t, don’t.
At least that’s what the system says.
But who knows. Relationships are impossibly complicated. And making a black-and-white binary decision about something that’s anything but black-and-white is kind of an insane thing to do.
And of course, even if it’s the right system, it’s not actually easy because assessing step 1 and step 2 isn’t easy. Getting a reading from your gut that you can trust is no small task for someone who typically lives in their brain—and figuring out what your deal-breakers are requires a serious deep-dive into your soul.
But for now, at least it’s a system—and a system you can hang on to. Which is just what some of us need.
   
___________
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
___________
 If you liked this: 
Another Wait But Why deep dive into the quandaries of figuring out who to marry:  How to Pick a Life Partner  
Some further issues, over in the world of single men:  10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys  
Once you finally make The Decision, you go straight into another Decision:  How to Name a Baby
The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html
How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 2 — Wait But Why
2014-02-13
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p><em>This is Part 2. Part 1 is <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html">here</a>.</em></p>
<p>Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.</p>
<p>When we examined <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.html">procrastination</a>, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. In <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">the pixel post</a>, we looked at a human life up close and saw that it was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and again—and that achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine weekday.</p>
<p>I think the same idea applies to marriage.<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lineup.png"></a></p>
<p>From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole.</p>
<p>But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.</p>
<p>So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.</p>
<p>Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.</p>
<p>Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.</p>
<p>So I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the twice-a-day sex to you—you’ll work that part out I’m sure—and spend this post trying to figure out the best way to make Forgettable Wednesday as happy as possible.</p>
<p>To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary:</p>
<p><strong>1) An Epic Friendship</strong></p>
<p>I enjoy spending time with most of my friends—that’s why they’re my friends. But with certain friends, the time is so high-quality, so interesting, and so fun that they pass the Traffic Test.</p>
<p>The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself <em>rooting </em>for traffic. That’s how much I’m enjoying the time with them.</p>
<p>Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost in the interaction, invigorated by it, and that I’m the complete opposite of bored.</p>
<p>To me, almost nothing is more critical in choosing a life partner than finding someone who passes the Traffic Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test, what a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life with someone who doesn’t.</p>
<p>A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>A great sense of humor click</strong>. No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing.</li>
<li><strong>Fun.</strong> And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations—airport delays, long drives, errands. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that the amount of fun a couple has is a strong predictor for their future.<sup>6</sup></li>
<li><strong>A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking.</strong> A life partner doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about it.</li>
<li><strong>A decent number of common interests, activities, and people-preferences.</strong> Otherwise a lot of what makes you ‘you’ will inevitably become a much smaller part of your life, and you and your life partner will struggle to find enjoyable ways to spend a free Saturday together.</li>
</ul>
<p>A friendship that passes the Traffic Test gets better and better with time, and it has endless room to deepen and grow ever-richer.</p>
<p><strong>2) A Feeling of Home</strong></p>
<p>If someone told you you had to sit in a chair for 12 straight hours without moving, aside from wondering why the hell they were making you do this, your first thought would be, “I better get in the most comfortable possible position”—because you’d know that even the <em>slightest </em>bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture. When you have to do something for a long, <em>long </em>time, it’s best if it’s <em>supremely </em>comfortable.</p>
<p>When it comes to marriage, a perpetual “discomfort” between you and your partner can be a permanent source of unhappiness, especially as it magnifies over time, much like your torturous situation in the chair. Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a few things need to be in place:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Trust and security. </strong>Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something? And on the other side of secrets will often be suspicion, a concept that directly clashes with the concept of home. This is why having an affair during an otherwise good marriage is one of the most self-defeating and short-sighted things someone could ever do.</li>
<li><strong>Natural chemistry. </strong>Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should be in the same vicinity, and you should feel on the same “wavelength” in general. When I’m with someone on a very different wavelength than I am, it doesn’t take long before the interaction becomes exhausting.</li>
<li><strong>Acceptance of human flaws. </strong>You’re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human. And one of the worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws and reprimanded for continuing to have them. This isn’t to say people shouldn’t work on self-improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy attitude is, “Every person comes with a set of flaws, these are my partner’s, and they’re part of the package I knowingly chose to spend my life with.”</li>
<li><b>A generally positive vibe. </b>Remember, this is <em>the </em>vibe you’re a part of now, forever. It’s not really acceptable for it to be a negative one, nor is it sustainable. Relationship scientist John Gottman has found that “couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive interactions for every negative one are destined for divorce.”<sup>7</sup></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>3) A Determination to be Good at Marriage</strong></p>
<p>Relationships are <em>hard. </em>Expecting a strong relationship without treating it like a rigorous part-time job is like expecting to have a great career without putting in any effort. In a time when humans in most parts of the world can enjoy freedom and carve their own path in life, it usually doesn’t sit that well to suddenly become half of something and compromise on a bunch of things you grew up being selfish about.</p>
<p>So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Communication. </strong>Communication being on this list is as silly as “oxygen” being on a list of items you need to stay healthy. And yet, poor communication is the downfall of a huge number of couples—in fact, in a study on divorcees, communication style was the top thing they said they’d change for their next relationship.<sup>8 </sup>Communication is hard to do well consistently—successful couples often need to create pre-planned systems or even partake in couples’ therapy to make sure it happens.</li>
<li><strong>Maintaining equality. </strong>Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty quickly. When one person’s mood always dictates the mood in the room, when one person’s needs or opinion consistently prevail over the other’s, when one person can treat the other in a way they’d never stand for being treated themselves—you’ve got a problem.</li>
<li><strong>Fighting well. </strong>Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a typical couple’s fights are perpetual, based on core differences, and cannot be resolved—and a skilled couple understands this and refrains from engaging in these brawls again and again.<sup>9</sup></li>
</ul>
<p>In searching for your life partner or assessing your current life partnership, it’s important to remember that every relationship is flawed and you probably won’t end up in something that gets an A in every one of the above items and bullet points—but you should hope to do pretty well on <em>most</em> of them, since each one plays a large part in your lifelong happiness.</p>
<p>And since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership, you probably don’t want to make things even harder than they need to be by insisting upon too many other checkboxes—most of which will <em>not </em>have a large effect on your happiness during dinner #4,386 of your marriage. It would be nice if he played the guitar, but take it off the list of must-haves.</p>
<p>I hope Valentine’s Day was good for you this year, whatever you did for it. Just remember that Forgettable Wednesday is a much more important day.</p>
<p><strong>If you liked this, check these out next:<br />
</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html">10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel</a></p>
<p><strong>Sources</strong></p>
<p>The facts and opinions in this article are based on a combination of dozens of hours of research, on both scientific study results and expert opinions, and of my own personal experience and observations and those of a number of my friends and family (many of whom I interviewed in the last week). Special thanks to Eric Barker for his great blog, <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/">Barking Up the Wrong Tree</a>, from which I mined a number of sources for this post.</p>
<p>1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10090130/Marriage-makes-people-happier-than-six-figure-salaries-and-religion.html<br />
 2. “Marital Status is Misunderstood in Happiness Models” from Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance; Economics Series Paper # 2010_03.<br />
 3. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/08/most-young-adults-expect-marriage-for-life-study/<br />
 4. “Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Eastwick, Paul W.; Finkel, Eli J.<br />
 5. “Can Anyone Be “The” One? Evidence on Mate Selection from Speed Dating” from IZA Discussion Papers, number 2377.<br />
 6. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/recipe-for-a-happy-marriage-2/<br />
 7. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/12/is-5-to-1-the-golden-ratio-for-both-work-and/<br />
8. Terri Orbuch, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1402265670/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1402265670&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=spacforrent-20">Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship<br />
</a>9. John Gottman, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Marriage-Clinic-Scientifically-Professional/dp/0393702820">The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy</a><br />
10. Dan Wile, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0979563909/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0979563909&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=spacforrent-20">After the Honeymoon: How Conflict Can Improve Your Relationship<br />
</a>11. Dolan, P., Peasgood, T., &amp; White, M. (2008). Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29, 94–122.</p>
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 How to Pick Your Life Partner – Part 2

 February 13, 2014 By Tim Urban


 This is Part 2. Part 1 is here.

 Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.

 When we examined procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. In the pixel post, we looked at a human life up close and saw that it was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and again—and that achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine weekday.

 I think the same idea applies to marriage.

 From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole.

 But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.

 So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

 Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.

 Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.

 So I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the twice-a-day sex to you—you’ll work that part out I’m sure—and spend this post trying to figure out the best way to make Forgettable Wednesday as happy as possible.

 To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary:

 1) An Epic Friendship

 I enjoy spending time with most of my friends—that’s why they’re my friends. But with certain friends, the time is so high-quality, so interesting, and so fun that they pass the Traffic Test.

 The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself rooting for traffic. That’s how much I’m enjoying the time with them.

 Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost in the interaction, invigorated by it, and that I’m the complete opposite of bored.

 To me, almost nothing is more critical in choosing a life partner than finding someone who passes the Traffic Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test, what a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life with someone who doesn’t.

 A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:

 * A great sense of humor click. No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing.
 * Fun. And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations—airport delays, long drives, errands. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that the amount of fun a couple has is a strong predictor for their future.6
 * A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. A life partner doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about it.
 * A decent number of common interests, activities, and people-preferences. Otherwise a lot of what makes you ‘you’ will inevitably become a much smaller part of your life, and you and your life partner will struggle to find enjoyable ways to spend a free Saturday together.

 A friendship that passes the Traffic Test gets better and better with time, and it has endless room to deepen and grow ever-richer.

 2) A Feeling of Home

 If someone told you you had to sit in a chair for 12 straight hours without moving, aside from wondering why the hell they were making you do this, your first thought would be, “I better get in the most comfortable possible position”—because you’d know that even the slightest bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture. When you have to do something for a long, long time, it’s best if it’s supremely comfortable.

 When it comes to marriage, a perpetual “discomfort” between you and your partner can be a permanent source of unhappiness, especially as it magnifies over time, much like your torturous situation in the chair. Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a few things need to be in place:

 * Trust and security. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something? And on the other side of secrets will often be suspicion, a concept that directly clashes with the concept of home. This is why having an affair during an otherwise good marriage is one of the most self-defeating and short-sighted things someone could ever do.
 * Natural chemistry. Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should be in the same vicinity, and you should feel on the same “wavelength” in general. When I’m with someone on a very different wavelength than I am, it doesn’t take long before the interaction becomes exhausting.
 * Acceptance of human flaws. You’re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human. And one of the worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws and reprimanded for continuing to have them. This isn’t to say people shouldn’t work on self-improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy attitude is, “Every person comes with a set of flaws, these are my partner’s, and they’re part of the package I knowingly chose to spend my life with.”
 * A generally positive vibe. Remember, this is the vibe you’re a part of now, forever. It’s not really acceptable for it to be a negative one, nor is it sustainable. Relationship scientist John Gottman has found that “couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive interactions for every negative one are destined for divorce.”7

 3) A Determination to be Good at Marriage

 Relationships are hard. Expecting a strong relationship without treating it like a rigorous part-time job is like expecting to have a great career without putting in any effort. In a time when humans in most parts of the world can enjoy freedom and carve their own path in life, it usually doesn’t sit that well to suddenly become half of something and compromise on a bunch of things you grew up being selfish about.

 So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?

 * Communication. Communication being on this list is as silly as “oxygen” being on a list of items you need to stay healthy. And yet, poor communication is the downfall of a huge number of couples—in fact, in a study on divorcees, communication style was the top thing they said they’d change for their next relationship.8 Communication is hard to do well consistently—successful couples often need to create pre-planned systems or even partake in couples’ therapy to make sure it happens.
 * Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty quickly. When one person’s mood always dictates the mood in the room, when one person’s needs or opinion consistently prevail over the other’s, when one person can treat the other in a way they’d never stand for being treated themselves—you’ve got a problem.
 * Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a typical couple’s fights are perpetual, based on core differences, and cannot be resolved—and a skilled couple understands this and refrains from engaging in these brawls again and again.9

 In searching for your life partner or assessing your current life partnership, it’s important to remember that every relationship is flawed and you probably won’t end up in something that gets an A in every one of the above items and bullet points—but you should hope to do pretty well on most of them, since each one plays a large part in your lifelong happiness.

 And since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership, you probably don’t want to make things even harder than they need to be by insisting upon too many other checkboxes—most of which will not have a large effect on your happiness during dinner #4,386 of your marriage. It would be nice if he played the guitar, but take it off the list of must-haves.

 I hope Valentine’s Day was good for you this year, whatever you did for it. Just remember that Forgettable Wednesday is a much more important day.

 If you liked this, check these out next:

 Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of

 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys

 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

 Sources

 The facts and opinions in this article are based on a combination of dozens of hours of research, on both scientific study results and expert opinions, and of my own personal experience and observations and those of a number of my friends and family (many of whom I interviewed in the last week). Special thanks to Eric Barker for his great blog, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, from which I mined a number of sources for this post.

 1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10090130/Marriage-makes-people-happier-than-six-figure-salaries-and-religion.html
 2. “Marital Status is Misunderstood in Happiness Models” from Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance; Economics Series Paper # 2010_03.
 3. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/08/most-young-adults-expect-marriage-for-life-study/
 4. “Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Eastwick, Paul W.; Finkel, Eli J.
 5. “Can Anyone Be “The” One? Evidence on Mate Selection from Speed Dating” from IZA Discussion Papers, number 2377.
 6. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/recipe-for-a-happy-marriage-2/
 7. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/12/is-5-to-1-the-golden-ratio-for-both-work-and/
 8. Terri Orbuch, Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship
 9. John Gottman, The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy
 10. Dan Wile, After the Honeymoon: How Conflict Can Improve Your Relationship
 11. Dolan, P., Peasgood, T., & White, M. (2008). Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29, 94–122.

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 * 
 * 
This is Part 2. Part 1 is here. 
Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.
When we examined procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. In the pixel post, we looked at a human life up close and saw that it was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and again—and that achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine weekday.
I think the same idea applies to marriage.  
From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole.
But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.
So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.
Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.
Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.
So I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the twice-a-day sex to you—you’ll work that part out I’m sure—and spend this post trying to figure out the best way to make Forgettable Wednesday as happy as possible.
To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary:
 1) An Epic Friendship 
I enjoy spending time with most of my friends—that’s why they’re my friends. But with certain friends, the time is so high-quality, so interesting, and so fun that they pass the Traffic Test.
The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself rooting for traffic. That’s how much I’m enjoying the time with them.
Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost in the interaction, invigorated by it, and that I’m the complete opposite of bored.
To me, almost nothing is more critical in choosing a life partner than finding someone who passes the Traffic Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test, what a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life with someone who doesn’t.
A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:
 A great sense of humor click. No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing.
 Fun. And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations—airport delays, long drives, errands. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that the amount of fun a couple has is a strong predictor for their future.6 
 A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. A life partner doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about it.
 A decent number of common interests, activities, and people-preferences. Otherwise a lot of what makes you ‘you’ will inevitably become a much smaller part of your life, and you and your life partner will struggle to find enjoyable ways to spend a free Saturday together.
A friendship that passes the Traffic Test gets better and better with time, and it has endless room to deepen and grow ever-richer.
 2) A Feeling of Home 
If someone told you you had to sit in a chair for 12 straight hours without moving, aside from wondering why the hell they were making you do this, your first thought would be, “I better get in the most comfortable possible position”—because you’d know that even the slightest bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture. When you have to do something for a long, long time, it’s best if it’s supremely comfortable.
When it comes to marriage, a perpetual “discomfort” between you and your partner can be a permanent source of unhappiness, especially as it magnifies over time, much like your torturous situation in the chair. Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a few things need to be in place:
 Trust and security. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something? And on the other side of secrets will often be suspicion, a concept that directly clashes with the concept of home. This is why having an affair during an otherwise good marriage is one of the most self-defeating and short-sighted things someone could ever do.
 Natural chemistry. Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should be in the same vicinity, and you should feel on the same “wavelength” in general. When I’m with someone on a very different wavelength than I am, it doesn’t take long before the interaction becomes exhausting.
 Acceptance of human flaws. You’re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human. And one of the worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws and reprimanded for continuing to have them. This isn’t to say people shouldn’t work on self-improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy attitude is, “Every person comes with a set of flaws, these are my partner’s, and they’re part of the package I knowingly chose to spend my life with.”
 A generally positive vibe. Remember, this is the vibe you’re a part of now, forever. It’s not really acceptable for it to be a negative one, nor is it sustainable. Relationship scientist John Gottman has found that “couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive interactions for every negative one are destined for divorce.”7 
 3) A Determination to be Good at Marriage 
Relationships are hard. Expecting a strong relationship without treating it like a rigorous part-time job is like expecting to have a great career without putting in any effort. In a time when humans in most parts of the world can enjoy freedom and carve their own path in life, it usually doesn’t sit that well to suddenly become half of something and compromise on a bunch of things you grew up being selfish about.
So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?
 Communication. Communication being on this list is as silly as “oxygen” being on a list of items you need to stay healthy. And yet, poor communication is the downfall of a huge number of couples—in fact, in a study on divorcees, communication style was the top thing they said they’d change for their next relationship.8 Communication is hard to do well consistently—successful couples often need to create pre-planned systems or even partake in couples’ therapy to make sure it happens.
 Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty quickly. When one person’s mood always dictates the mood in the room, when one person’s needs or opinion consistently prevail over the other’s, when one person can treat the other in a way they’d never stand for being treated themselves—you’ve got a problem.
 Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a typical couple’s fights are perpetual, based on core differences, and cannot be resolved—and a skilled couple understands this and refrains from engaging in these brawls again and again.9 
In searching for your life partner or assessing your current life partnership, it’s important to remember that every relationship is flawed and you probably won’t end up in something that gets an A in every one of the above items and bullet points—but you should hope to do pretty well on most of them, since each one plays a large part in your lifelong happiness.
And since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership, you probably don’t want to make things even harder than they need to be by insisting upon too many other checkboxes—most of which will not have a large effect on your happiness during dinner #4,386 of your marriage. It would be nice if he played the guitar, but take it off the list of must-haves.
I hope Valentine’s Day was good for you this year, whatever you did for it. Just remember that Forgettable Wednesday is a much more important day.
 If you liked this, check these out next:
 
 Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think 
 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of 
 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys 
 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel 
 Sources 
The facts and opinions in this article are based on a combination of dozens of hours of research, on both scientific study results and expert opinions, and of my own personal experience and observations and those of a number of my friends and family (many of whom I interviewed in the last week). Special thanks to Eric Barker for his great blog, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, from which I mined a number of sources for this post.
1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10090130/Marriage-makes-people-happier-than-six-figure-salaries-and-religion.html
 2. “Marital Status is Misunderstood in Happiness Models” from Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance; Economics Series Paper # 2010_03.
 3. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/08/most-young-adults-expect-marriage-for-life-study/
 4. “Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Eastwick, Paul W.; Finkel, Eli J.
 5. “Can Anyone Be “The” One? Evidence on Mate Selection from Speed Dating” from IZA Discussion Papers, number 2377.
 6. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/recipe-for-a-happy-marriage-2/
 7. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/12/is-5-to-1-the-golden-ratio-for-both-work-and/
8. Terri Orbuch, Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship
9. John Gottman, The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy 
10. Dan Wile, After the Honeymoon: How Conflict Can Improve Your Relationship
11. Dolan, P., Peasgood, T., &amp; White, M. (2008). Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29, 94–122.
How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 2 — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html
How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 1 — Wait But Why
2014-02-12
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/non-vday-staircase.png"></a></p>
<p>And at first glance, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10090130/Marriage-makes-people-happier-than-six-figure-salaries-and-religion.html">research</a> seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.<sup>1</sup> But a closer analysis reveals that if you split up “married people” into two groups based on marriage <em>quality</em>, “people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports”.<sup>2 </sup>In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality:</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/non-vday-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Dissatisfied single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful position, compared to what their situation could be. A single person who would like to find a great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list reading, “1) Find a great relationship.” People in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, are three<em> </em>leaps away, with a to-do list of “1) Go through a soul-crushing break-up. 2) Emotionally recover. 3) Find a great relationship.” Not as bad when you look at it that way, right?</p>
<p>All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense, of course. It’s your <em>life partner</em>.</p>
<p>Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick the right life partner is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think about it that hard and remain in slight denial about the magnitude of the situation.</p>
<p>But unlike death and the universe’s size, picking a life partner <i>is fully in your control</i>, so it’s critical to make yourself entirely clear on how big a deal the decision really is and to thoroughly analyze the most important factors in making it.</p>
<p>So how big a deal is it?</p>
<p>Well, start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that’s about the number of years you’re going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure no one over 80 reads Wait But Why, so no matter who you are, that’s a <em>lot</em> of time—and almost the entirety of the rest of your one existence.</p>
<p>(Sure, people get divorced, but you don’t think you will. <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/08/most-young-adults-expect-marriage-for-life-study/">A recent study</a> shows that 86% of young people assume their current or future marriage will be forever, and I doubt older people feel much differently. So we’ll proceed under that assumption.)</p>
<p>And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about 18,000 times.</p>
<p>Intense shit.</p>
<p>So given that this is <em>by far </em>the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that <em>so </em>many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?</p>
<p>Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us:</p>
<p><strong> People tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship</strong></p>
<p>Studies have shown people to be generally bad, when single, at predicting what later turn out to be their actual relationship preferences. One study found that speed daters questioned about their relationship preferences usually prove themselves wrong just minutes later with what they show to prefer in the actual event.<sup>4</sup></p>
<p>This shouldn’t be a surprise—in life, you usually don’t get good at something until you’ve done it a bunch of times. Unfortunately, not many people have a chance to be in more than a few, if any, serious relationships before they make their big decision. There’s just not enough time. And given that a person’s partnership persona and relationship needs are often quite different from the way they are as a single person, it’s hard as a single person to really know what you want or need from a relationship.</p>
<p><strong>Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice</strong></p>
<p><b>→ Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide.</b></p>
<p>If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and analyze your business’s performance diligently. This is logical, because that’s the way you proceed when you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.</p>
<p>But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.</p>
<p>No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. If a business owner took society’s dating advice for her business, she’d probably fail, and if she succeeded, it would be partially due to good luck—and that’s how society wants us to approach dating.</p>
<p><b><b>→ </b>Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners.</b></p>
<p>In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down—our dating choices are<strong> </strong>“98% a response…to market conditions and just 2% immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what’s on offer that night.”<sup>5</sup></p>
<p>In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.</p>
<p>But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their spouse on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool. Fortunately, this stigma is diminishing with time, but that it’s there at all is a reflection of how illogical the socially accepted dating rulebook is.</p>
<p><strong>→<b> </b>Society rushes us.</strong></p>
<p>In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old—and “too old” varies from 25 – 35, depending on where you live. The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t marry the wrong person,” but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person than it does an unhappily married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense—the former is one step away from a happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for permanent unhappiness or endure a messy divorce just to catch up to where the single person is.</p>
<p><strong>Our Biology Is Doing Us No Favors</strong></p>
<p><b><b>→ Human biology evolved a long time ago and doesn’t understand the concept of having a deep connection with a life partner for 50 years.</b></b></p>
<p>When we start seeing someone and feel the <em>slightest</em> twinge of excitement, our biology gets into “okay let’s do this” mode and bombards us with chemicals designed to get us to mate (lust), fall in love (the Honeymoon Phase), and then commit for the long run (attachment). Our brains can usually override this process if we’re just not that into someone, but for all those middle ground cases where the right move is probably to move on and find something better, we often succumb to the chemical roller coaster and end up getting engaged.</p>
<p><b>→ Biological clocks are a bitch.</b></p>
<p>For a woman who wants to have biological children with her husband, she has one very real limitation in play, which is the need to pick the right life partner by forty, give or take. This is just a shitty fact and makes an already hard process one notch more stressful. Still, if it were me, I’d rather adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the wrong one.</p>
<p>___________________</p>
<p>So when you take a bunch of people who aren’t that good at knowing what they want in a relationship, surround them with a society that tells them they have to find a life partner but that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that drugs us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get?</p>
<p>A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important decision of their life. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of people who fall victim to all of this and end up in unhappy relationships:</p>
<p><strong>Overly Romantic Ronald</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/titanic.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>Overly Romantic Ronald’s downfall is believing that love is enough reason on its own to marry someone. Romance can be a great part of a relationship, and love is a key ingredient in a happy marriage, but without a bunch of other important things, it’s simply not enough.</p>
<p>The overly romantic person repeatedly ignores the little voice that tries to speak up when he and his girlfriend are fighting constantly or when he seems to feel much worse about himself these days than he used to before the relationship, shutting the voice down with thoughts like “Everything happens for a reason and the way we met couldn’t have just been coincidence” and “I’m totally in love with her, and that’s all that matters”—once an overly romantic person believes he’s found his soul mate, he stops questioning things, and he’ll hang onto that belief all the way through his 50 years of unhappy marriage.</p>
<p><strong>Fear-Driven Frida</strong></p>
<p><b><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fear.png"></a></b></p>
<p>Fear is one of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking the right life partner. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting all kinds of otherwise-rational people, sometimes as early as the mid-twenties. The types of fear our society (and parents, and friends) inflict upon us—fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, sometimes just fear of being judged or talked about—are the types that lead us to settle for a not-so-great partnership. The irony is that the only rational fear we <em>should </em>feel is the fear of spending the latter two thirds of life unhappily, with the wrong person—the exact fate the fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse.</p>
<p><strong>Externally-Influenced Ed</strong></p>
<p><b><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/gut.png"></a></b></p>
<p>Externally-Influenced Ed lets other people play way too big a part in the life partner decision. The choosing of a life partner is deeply personal, enormously complicated, different for everyone, and almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you know someone. As such, other people’s opinions and preferences really have no<em> </em>place getting involved, other than an extreme case involving mistreatment or abuse.</p>
<p>The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the right life partner because of external disapproval or a factor the chooser doesn’t actually care about (religion is a common one) but feels compelled to stick to for the sake of family insistence or expectations.</p>
<p>It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone’s life is <em>thrilled </em>with his relationship because it looks great from the outside, and even though it’s not actually that great from the inside, Ed listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.</p>
<p><strong>Shallow Sharon</strong></p>
<p><b><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/shallow.png"></a></b></p>
<p>Shallow Sharon is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner personality beneath it. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have checked—things like his height, job prestige, wealth-level, accomplishments, or maybe a novelty item like being foreign or having a specific talent.</p>
<p>Everyone has certain on-paper boxes they’d like checked, but a strongly ego-driven person prioritizes appearances and résumés above even the quality of her connection with her potential life partner when weighing things.</p>
<p>If you want a fun new term, a significant other whom you suspect was chosen more because of the boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a “scan-tron boyfriend” or a “scan-tron wife,” etc.—because they correctly fill out all the bubbles. I’ve gotten some good mileage out of that one.</p>
<p><b>Selfish Stanley</b></p>
<p><b><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/selfish.png"></a></b></p>
<p>The selfish come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:</p>
<p><strong>1) The “My Way or the Highway” Type</strong></p>
<p>This person cannot handle sacrifice or compromise. She believes her needs and desires and opinions are simply more important than her partner’s, and she needs to get her way in almost any big decision. In the end, she doesn’t want a legitimate partnership, she wants to keep her single life and have someone there to keep her company.</p>
<p>This person inevitably ends up with at best a super easy-going person, and at worst, a pushover with a self-esteem issue, and sacrifices a chance to be part of a team of equals, almost certainly limiting the potential quality of her marriage.</p>
<p><strong>2) The Main Character</strong></p>
<p>The Main Character’s tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life partner who serves as both his therapist and biggest admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning either favor. Each night, he and his partner discuss their days, but 90% of the discussion centers around his day—after all, he’s the main character of the relationship. The issue for him is that by being incapable of tearing himself away from his personal world, he ends up with a sidekick as his life partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.</p>
<p><strong>3) The Needs-Driven</strong></p>
<p>Everyone has needs, and everyone likes those needs to be met, but problems arise when the meeting of needs—she cooks for me, he’ll be a great father, she’ll make a great wife, he’s rich, she keeps me organized, he’s great in bed—becomes the main grounds for choosing someone as a life partner. Those listed things are all great <em>perks</em>, but that’s all they are—perks. And after a year of marriage, when the needs-driven person is now totally accustomed to having her needs met and it’s no longer exciting, there better be a lot more good parts of the relationship she’s chosen or she’s in for a dull ride.</p>
<p>___________________</p>
<p>The main reason most of the above types end up in unhappy relationships is that they’re consumed by a motivating force that doesn’t take into account the reality of what a life partnership is and what makes it a happy thing.</p>
<p>So what makes a happy life partnership? <strong>We’ll explore in <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html">Part 2 of this post</a>.</strong></p>
<p><em>[Sources at the bottom of Part 2]</em></p>
<p><strong>______</strong></p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="#">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. </p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p><strong>______</strong></p>
<p><strong>If you liked this, check these out next:<br />
</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html">10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel</a></p>
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 How to Pick Your Life Partner – Part 1

 February 12, 2014 By Tim Urban


 To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:

 And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.1 But a closer analysis reveals that if you split up “married people” into two groups based on marriage quality, “people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports”.2 In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality:

 Dissatisfied single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful position, compared to what their situation could be. A single person who would like to find a great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list reading, “1) Find a great relationship.” People in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, are three leaps away, with a to-do list of “1) Go through a soul-crushing break-up. 2) Emotionally recover. 3) Find a great relationship.” Not as bad when you look at it that way, right?

 All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense, of course. It’s your life partner.

 Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick the right life partner is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think about it that hard and remain in slight denial about the magnitude of the situation.

 But unlike death and the universe’s size, picking a life partner is fully in your control, so it’s critical to make yourself entirely clear on how big a deal the decision really is and to thoroughly analyze the most important factors in making it.

 So how big a deal is it?

 Well, start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that’s about the number of years you’re going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few.

 I’m pretty sure no one over 80 reads Wait But Why, so no matter who you are, that’s a lot of time—and almost the entirety of the rest of your one existence.

 (Sure, people get divorced, but you don’t think you will. A recent study shows that 86% of young people assume their current or future marriage will be forever, and I doubt older people feel much differently. So we’ll proceed under that assumption.)

 And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about 18,000 times.

 Intense shit.

 So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?

 Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us:

 People tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship

 Studies have shown people to be generally bad, when single, at predicting what later turn out to be their actual relationship preferences. One study found that speed daters questioned about their relationship preferences usually prove themselves wrong just minutes later with what they show to prefer in the actual event.4

 This shouldn’t be a surprise—in life, you usually don’t get good at something until you’ve done it a bunch of times. Unfortunately, not many people have a chance to be in more than a few, if any, serious relationships before they make their big decision. There’s just not enough time. And given that a person’s partnership persona and relationship needs are often quite different from the way they are as a single person, it’s hard as a single person to really know what you want or need from a relationship.

 Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice

 → Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide.

 If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and analyze your business’s performance diligently. This is logical, because that’s the way you proceed when you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.

 But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.

 No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. If a business owner took society’s dating advice for her business, she’d probably fail, and if she succeeded, it would be partially due to good luck—and that’s how society wants us to approach dating.

 → Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners.

 In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down—our dating choices are “98% a response…to market conditions and just 2% immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what’s on offer that night.”5

 In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.

 But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their spouse on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool. Fortunately, this stigma is diminishing with time, but that it’s there at all is a reflection of how illogical the socially accepted dating rulebook is.

 → Society rushes us.

 In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old—and “too old” varies from 25 – 35, depending on where you live. The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t marry the wrong person,” but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person than it does an unhappily married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense—the former is one step away from a happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for permanent unhappiness or endure a messy divorce just to catch up to where the single person is.

 Our Biology Is Doing Us No Favors

 → Human biology evolved a long time ago and doesn’t understand the concept of having a deep connection with a life partner for 50 years.

 When we start seeing someone and feel the slightest twinge of excitement, our biology gets into “okay let’s do this” mode and bombards us with chemicals designed to get us to mate (lust), fall in love (the Honeymoon Phase), and then commit for the long run (attachment). Our brains can usually override this process if we’re just not that into someone, but for all those middle ground cases where the right move is probably to move on and find something better, we often succumb to the chemical roller coaster and end up getting engaged.

 → Biological clocks are a bitch.

 For a woman who wants to have biological children with her husband, she has one very real limitation in play, which is the need to pick the right life partner by forty, give or take. This is just a shitty fact and makes an already hard process one notch more stressful. Still, if it were me, I’d rather adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the wrong one.

 ___________________

 So when you take a bunch of people who aren’t that good at knowing what they want in a relationship, surround them with a society that tells them they have to find a life partner but that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that drugs us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get?

 A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important decision of their life. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of people who fall victim to all of this and end up in unhappy relationships:

 Overly Romantic Ronald

 Overly Romantic Ronald’s downfall is believing that love is enough reason on its own to marry someone. Romance can be a great part of a relationship, and love is a key ingredient in a happy marriage, but without a bunch of other important things, it’s simply not enough.

 The overly romantic person repeatedly ignores the little voice that tries to speak up when he and his girlfriend are fighting constantly or when he seems to feel much worse about himself these days than he used to before the relationship, shutting the voice down with thoughts like “Everything happens for a reason and the way we met couldn’t have just been coincidence” and “I’m totally in love with her, and that’s all that matters”—once an overly romantic person believes he’s found his soul mate, he stops questioning things, and he’ll hang onto that belief all the way through his 50 years of unhappy marriage.

 Fear-Driven Frida

 Fear is one of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking the right life partner. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting all kinds of otherwise-rational people, sometimes as early as the mid-twenties. The types of fear our society (and parents, and friends) inflict upon us—fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, sometimes just fear of being judged or talked about—are the types that lead us to settle for a not-so-great partnership. The irony is that the only rational fear we should feel is the fear of spending the latter two thirds of life unhappily, with the wrong person—the exact fate the fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse.

 Externally-Influenced Ed

 Externally-Influenced Ed lets other people play way too big a part in the life partner decision. The choosing of a life partner is deeply personal, enormously complicated, different for everyone, and almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you know someone. As such, other people’s opinions and preferences really have no place getting involved, other than an extreme case involving mistreatment or abuse.

 The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the right life partner because of external disapproval or a factor the chooser doesn’t actually care about (religion is a common one) but feels compelled to stick to for the sake of family insistence or expectations.

 It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone’s life is thrilled with his relationship because it looks great from the outside, and even though it’s not actually that great from the inside, Ed listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.

 Shallow Sharon

 Shallow Sharon is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner personality beneath it. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have checked—things like his height, job prestige, wealth-level, accomplishments, or maybe a novelty item like being foreign or having a specific talent.

 Everyone has certain on-paper boxes they’d like checked, but a strongly ego-driven person prioritizes appearances and résumés above even the quality of her connection with her potential life partner when weighing things.

 If you want a fun new term, a significant other whom you suspect was chosen more because of the boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a “scan-tron boyfriend” or a “scan-tron wife,” etc.—because they correctly fill out all the bubbles. I’ve gotten some good mileage out of that one.

 Selfish Stanley

 The selfish come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:

 1) The “My Way or the Highway” Type

 This person cannot handle sacrifice or compromise. She believes her needs and desires and opinions are simply more important than her partner’s, and she needs to get her way in almost any big decision. In the end, she doesn’t want a legitimate partnership, she wants to keep her single life and have someone there to keep her company.

 This person inevitably ends up with at best a super easy-going person, and at worst, a pushover with a self-esteem issue, and sacrifices a chance to be part of a team of equals, almost certainly limiting the potential quality of her marriage.

 2) The Main Character

 The Main Character’s tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life partner who serves as both his therapist and biggest admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning either favor. Each night, he and his partner discuss their days, but 90% of the discussion centers around his day—after all, he’s the main character of the relationship. The issue for him is that by being incapable of tearing himself away from his personal world, he ends up with a sidekick as his life partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.

 3) The Needs-Driven

 Everyone has needs, and everyone likes those needs to be met, but problems arise when the meeting of needs—she cooks for me, he’ll be a great father, she’ll make a great wife, he’s rich, she keeps me organized, he’s great in bed—becomes the main grounds for choosing someone as a life partner. Those listed things are all great perks, but that’s all they are—perks. And after a year of marriage, when the needs-driven person is now totally accustomed to having her needs met and it’s no longer exciting, there better be a lot more good parts of the relationship she’s chosen or she’s in for a dull ride.

 ___________________

 The main reason most of the above types end up in unhappy relationships is that they’re consumed by a motivating force that doesn’t take into account the reality of what a life partnership is and what makes it a happy thing.

 So what makes a happy life partnership? We’ll explore in Part 2 of this post.

 [Sources at the bottom of Part 2]

 ______

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ______

 If you liked this, check these out next:

 Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of

 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys

 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

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To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:
   
And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.1 But a closer analysis reveals that if you split up “married people” into two groups based on marriage quality, “people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports”.2 In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality:
   
Dissatisfied single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful position, compared to what their situation could be. A single person who would like to find a great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list reading, “1) Find a great relationship.” People in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, are three leaps away, with a to-do list of “1) Go through a soul-crushing break-up. 2) Emotionally recover. 3) Find a great relationship.” Not as bad when you look at it that way, right?
All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense, of course. It’s your life partner.
Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick the right life partner is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think about it that hard and remain in slight denial about the magnitude of the situation.
But unlike death and the universe’s size, picking a life partner is fully in your control, so it’s critical to make yourself entirely clear on how big a deal the decision really is and to thoroughly analyze the most important factors in making it.
So how big a deal is it?
Well, start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that’s about the number of years you’re going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few.
I’m pretty sure no one over 80 reads Wait But Why, so no matter who you are, that’s a lot of time—and almost the entirety of the rest of your one existence.
(Sure, people get divorced, but you don’t think you will. A recent study shows that 86% of young people assume their current or future marriage will be forever, and I doubt older people feel much differently. So we’ll proceed under that assumption.)
And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about 18,000 times.
Intense shit.
So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?
Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us:
  People tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship 
Studies have shown people to be generally bad, when single, at predicting what later turn out to be their actual relationship preferences. One study found that speed daters questioned about their relationship preferences usually prove themselves wrong just minutes later with what they show to prefer in the actual event.4 
This shouldn’t be a surprise—in life, you usually don’t get good at something until you’ve done it a bunch of times. Unfortunately, not many people have a chance to be in more than a few, if any, serious relationships before they make their big decision. There’s just not enough time. And given that a person’s partnership persona and relationship needs are often quite different from the way they are as a single person, it’s hard as a single person to really know what you want or need from a relationship.
 Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice 
 → Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide. 
If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and analyze your business’s performance diligently. This is logical, because that’s the way you proceed when you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.
But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.
No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. If a business owner took society’s dating advice for her business, she’d probably fail, and if she succeeded, it would be partially due to good luck—and that’s how society wants us to approach dating.
  → Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. 
In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down—our dating choices are “98% a response…to market conditions and just 2% immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what’s on offer that night.”5 
In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.
But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their spouse on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool. Fortunately, this stigma is diminishing with time, but that it’s there at all is a reflection of how illogical the socially accepted dating rulebook is.
 → Society rushes us. 
In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old—and “too old” varies from 25 – 35, depending on where you live. The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t marry the wrong person,” but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person than it does an unhappily married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense—the former is one step away from a happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for permanent unhappiness or endure a messy divorce just to catch up to where the single person is.
 Our Biology Is Doing Us No Favors 
  → Human biology evolved a long time ago and doesn’t understand the concept of having a deep connection with a life partner for 50 years.  
When we start seeing someone and feel the slightest twinge of excitement, our biology gets into “okay let’s do this” mode and bombards us with chemicals designed to get us to mate (lust), fall in love (the Honeymoon Phase), and then commit for the long run (attachment). Our brains can usually override this process if we’re just not that into someone, but for all those middle ground cases where the right move is probably to move on and find something better, we often succumb to the chemical roller coaster and end up getting engaged.
 → Biological clocks are a bitch. 
For a woman who wants to have biological children with her husband, she has one very real limitation in play, which is the need to pick the right life partner by forty, give or take. This is just a shitty fact and makes an already hard process one notch more stressful. Still, if it were me, I’d rather adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the wrong one.
___________________
So when you take a bunch of people who aren’t that good at knowing what they want in a relationship, surround them with a society that tells them they have to find a life partner but that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that drugs us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get?
A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important decision of their life. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of people who fall victim to all of this and end up in unhappy relationships:
 Overly Romantic Ronald 
     
Overly Romantic Ronald’s downfall is believing that love is enough reason on its own to marry someone. Romance can be a great part of a relationship, and love is a key ingredient in a happy marriage, but without a bunch of other important things, it’s simply not enough.
The overly romantic person repeatedly ignores the little voice that tries to speak up when he and his girlfriend are fighting constantly or when he seems to feel much worse about himself these days than he used to before the relationship, shutting the voice down with thoughts like “Everything happens for a reason and the way we met couldn’t have just been coincidence” and “I’m totally in love with her, and that’s all that matters”—once an overly romantic person believes he’s found his soul mate, he stops questioning things, and he’ll hang onto that belief all the way through his 50 years of unhappy marriage.
 Fear-Driven Frida 
     
Fear is one of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking the right life partner. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting all kinds of otherwise-rational people, sometimes as early as the mid-twenties. The types of fear our society (and parents, and friends) inflict upon us—fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, sometimes just fear of being judged or talked about—are the types that lead us to settle for a not-so-great partnership. The irony is that the only rational fear we should feel is the fear of spending the latter two thirds of life unhappily, with the wrong person—the exact fate the fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse.
 Externally-Influenced Ed 
     
Externally-Influenced Ed lets other people play way too big a part in the life partner decision. The choosing of a life partner is deeply personal, enormously complicated, different for everyone, and almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you know someone. As such, other people’s opinions and preferences really have no place getting involved, other than an extreme case involving mistreatment or abuse.
The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the right life partner because of external disapproval or a factor the chooser doesn’t actually care about (religion is a common one) but feels compelled to stick to for the sake of family insistence or expectations.
It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone’s life is thrilled with his relationship because it looks great from the outside, and even though it’s not actually that great from the inside, Ed listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.
 Shallow Sharon 
     
Shallow Sharon is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner personality beneath it. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have checked—things like his height, job prestige, wealth-level, accomplishments, or maybe a novelty item like being foreign or having a specific talent.
Everyone has certain on-paper boxes they’d like checked, but a strongly ego-driven person prioritizes appearances and résumés above even the quality of her connection with her potential life partner when weighing things.
If you want a fun new term, a significant other whom you suspect was chosen more because of the boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a “scan-tron boyfriend” or a “scan-tron wife,” etc.—because they correctly fill out all the bubbles. I’ve gotten some good mileage out of that one.
 Selfish Stanley 
     
The selfish come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:
 1) The “My Way or the Highway” Type 
This person cannot handle sacrifice or compromise. She believes her needs and desires and opinions are simply more important than her partner’s, and she needs to get her way in almost any big decision. In the end, she doesn’t want a legitimate partnership, she wants to keep her single life and have someone there to keep her company.
This person inevitably ends up with at best a super easy-going person, and at worst, a pushover with a self-esteem issue, and sacrifices a chance to be part of a team of equals, almost certainly limiting the potential quality of her marriage.
 2) The Main Character 
The Main Character’s tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life partner who serves as both his therapist and biggest admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning either favor. Each night, he and his partner discuss their days, but 90% of the discussion centers around his day—after all, he’s the main character of the relationship. The issue for him is that by being incapable of tearing himself away from his personal world, he ends up with a sidekick as his life partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.
 3) The Needs-Driven 
Everyone has needs, and everyone likes those needs to be met, but problems arise when the meeting of needs—she cooks for me, he’ll be a great father, she’ll make a great wife, he’s rich, she keeps me organized, he’s great in bed—becomes the main grounds for choosing someone as a life partner. Those listed things are all great perks, but that’s all they are—perks. And after a year of marriage, when the needs-driven person is now totally accustomed to having her needs met and it’s no longer exciting, there better be a lot more good parts of the relationship she’s chosen or she’s in for a dull ride.
___________________
The main reason most of the above types end up in unhappy relationships is that they’re consumed by a motivating force that doesn’t take into account the reality of what a life partnership is and what makes it a happy thing.
So what makes a happy life partnership? We’ll explore in Part 2 of this post. 
 [Sources at the bottom of Part 2] 
 ______ 
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. 
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
 ______ 
 If you liked this, check these out next:
 
 Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think 
 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of 
 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys 
 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel
How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 1 — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html
https://bettermarketing.pub/7-lessons-from-tim-urban-on-reaching-1-million-views-a-month-f2dd1de46378?gi=820d8e60a0f4
7 Lessons From Tim Urban on Reaching 1 Million Views a Month
2020-07-07T04:22:27Z
Sah Kilic
<html><body><div><article><div><div><div><h2>Inside the mind of a master storyteller</h2><div><div><div><a href="https://sahkilic.medium.com/?source=post_page-----f2dd1de46378--------------------------------"><div><p></p></div></a><a href="https://bettermarketing.pub/?source=post_page-----f2dd1de46378--------------------------------"><div><p></p></div></a></div><div><div><p><span></span></p><div><div><p><a href="https://sahkilic.medium.com/?source=post_page-----f2dd1de46378--------------------------------">Sah Kilic</a></p></div><p><span><a href="https://medium.com/m/signin?actionUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F_%2Fsubscribe%2Fuser%2Fd5e32e5ad6b4&amp;operation=register&amp;redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fbettermarketing.pub%2F7-lessons-from-tim-urban-on-reaching-1-million-views-a-month-f2dd1de46378&amp;user=Sah+Kilic&amp;userId=d5e32e5ad6b4&amp;source=post_page-d5e32e5ad6b4----f2dd1de46378---------------------post_header-----------">Follow</a></span></p></div><p></p></div><div><p><span></span></p><div><div><p><span>Published in</span></p><div><a href="https://bettermarketing.pub/?source=post_page-----f2dd1de46378--------------------------------"><p>Better Marketing</p></a></div></div><p><span></span></p><div><p><span>10 min read</span></p><p><span>Jul 7, 2020</span></p></div><p></p></div><p></p></div></div></div><div><div><div><p><span>--</span></p></div></div><div></div></div></div></div><figure><figcaption>Image via <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU">TED</a></figcaption></figure><blockquote><p>“I picture the audience as a stadium full of me… I’m writing the exact post that I would be thrilled to get.” — The Master Storyteller</p></blockquote><p>And that’s lesson one in the humble start of climbing to 1.5 million views a month, but the views this guy gets isn’t even half of it.</p></div></div></article></div></body></html>
Inside the mind of a master storyteller                          Sah Kilic     Follow               Published in    Better Marketing          10 min read   Jul 7, 2020               --          Image via TED    “I picture the audience as a stadium full of me… I’m writing the exact post that I would be thrilled to get.” — The Master Storyteller  And that’s lesson one in the humble start of climbing to 1.5 million views a month, but the views this guy gets isn’t even half of it.
7 Lessons From Tim Urban on Reaching 1 Million Views a Month
https://bettermarketing.pub/7-lessons-from-tim-urban-on-reaching-1-million-views-a-month-f2dd1de46378
https://blog.getpocket.com/2016/11/tim-urban-is-an-expert-on-not-being-an-expert/
Tim Urban is an Expert on not Being an Expert
2016-11-16
Pocket
<div><div>
<article>
<div>
<figure></figure>
<p>This interview was originally published on Medium</p>
<p><em>For a self-proclaimed procrastinator (his recent </em><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator?language=en"><em>TED talk</em></a><em>
 on the subject has been viewed over 8 million times!), Tim Urban sure 
seems to get a lot done. He has quickly become one of the most popular 
writers on the internet with his blog, </em><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com"><em>Wait But Why</em></a><em>,
 where he posts weekly about anything from how to be insufferable on 
Facebook to artificial intelligence, all coupled with his signature 
stick figure illustrations that would make your kindergarten teacher 
proud.</em></p>
<h2><strong>Your
 stories from WaitButWhy have been shared more on Pocket than any other 
author on the Internet. It’s clear they have struck a chord with your 
readers. What do you think drives it? What type of impact do you hope 
you are having with your work?</strong></h2>
<p>When
 I write, I imagine the reader as myself, right before I started 
thinking about or researching the topic at hand. This makes it easy to 
figure out what topics to pick and how much depth to get into and what 
kind of sense of humor to use. There aren’t really that many categories 
of people out there, so even if only 1 in 500 people happens to have my 
exact taste, with the insane reach of the internet, that turns into a 
lot of people. The people who resonate well with the blog are probably a
 lot like me. I think it also helps that I spend at least a week, and 
sometimes more than a month, on each article. That’s pretty different 
than a typical writer’s schedule.</p>
<figure></figure>
<h2><strong>Personally, I’ll say that your article,</strong><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html"><strong> the Tail End</strong></a><strong>,
 about our limited time on this Earth, changed my behavior and choices 
that I was making. I’m sure I’m not the only one. What’s the best 
feedback that you’ve gotten from someone whether via an email or in 
person?</strong></h2>
<p>A mother emailed me and told me that the<a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html"> mammoth post</a> turned around her teenage son’s depression. That delighted me.</p>
<h2><strong>Your</strong><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html"><strong> article on the mind-blowing Fermi Paradox</strong></a><strong>
 was published 2 years ago but still remains one of the most popular 
articles in Pocket, with over 80,000 saves. After all of that research, 
and 2 years more to mull it over, do you have a leading guess on which 
hypothesis is right?</strong></h2>
<p>This
 is one of those topics where I’ve lost all self confidence about my own
 opinion — because I’ve talked to multiple people smarter than I am who 
make convincing arguments about why we’re almost definitely the only 
intelligent life in the universe, and multiple other people, also 
smarter than I am, who speak with conviction about how the universe is 
almost definitely brimming with intelligent life. So now I have no 
conviction about anything, since I’m not an expert — I draw my knowledge
 from what experts say. When this kind of disagreement happens, it’s a 
telltale sign that this is just one of those topics we don’t as a 
species yet understand. Future people will look back at us with this 
topic the way we look back at the people who were debating whether the 
stars were pinholes in the dome of the underside of heaven or something 
else. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a lot of other intelligent life
 out there, because how insane is it if this only happened here.</p>
<p><a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/fermi%20paradox"><em>Read more about the Fermi Paradox on Pocket »</em></a></p>
<h2><strong>Since writing your posts on the </strong><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html"><strong>AI Revolution and Super Intelligence</strong></a><strong> (which Elon Musk, who is famously scared of AI’s future,</strong><a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/558682281619906561"><strong> shared</strong></a><strong>
 as a good primer on the subject), efforts have ramped up dramatically. 
What’s been the most interesting announcement since then?</strong></h2>
<p>It
 seems like every week something new and important happens in the world 
of AI. The creation of Open AI by Elon Musk and Sam Altman — which will 
allow more collaborative and transparent efforts to develop hopefully 
safe AI — seems like a very important piece of the puzzle. But like the 
Fermi Paradox situation, our species currently has no idea what the hell
 is gonna happen with AI, so I’ve heard a vast range of strong opinions 
about whether Open AI is a good thing or a bad thing.</p>
<p><a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/artificial%20intelligence"><em>Read more about AI on Pocket »</em></a></p>
<figure></figure>
<h2><strong>What have you been finding interesting / what have you been saving recently?</strong></h2>
<p>Like everyone, I’ve been glued to election stuff because it’s so fun and trashy and terrifying. My favorite place for that is <a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/fivethirtyeight.com">FiveThirtyEight</a>
 — which I like for all kinds of stuff, not just election-related. I 
spend a few hours of every week glued to whatever the latest 
recommendations are on<a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/kottke.org"> kottke.org.</a> And have been loving Sam Harris’s blog (<a href="https://www.samharris.org/blog">https://www.samharris.org/blog</a>) recently.</p>
<h2><strong>What are your go-to places — sites, apps, people, etc — for finding new stories to read and watch in Pocket?</strong></h2>
<p>I already mentioned <a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/kottke.org">kottke.org</a>,
 but that guy has great taste and when he recommends and article, I’ll 
usually read it. I find myself actually using the iOS News app daily. I
 usually just open it up in the morning in bed and then read shit for 45
 minutes until my self-hatred hits the point in the meter that makes me 
get up. Most of the other articles I read usually come to me in the form of an email from a friend through the Pocket app.</p>
<h2><strong>Procrastination. As a person who has given a</strong><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator?language=en"><strong> TED talk</strong></a><strong> and written</strong><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html"><strong> several articles</strong></a><strong>
 on the topic, I imagine that Pocket and the concept of save-for-later 
is by now a part of your routine. Do you have a Pocket ritual? If so, 
what is it?</strong></h2>
<p>I
 constantly save things to Pocket. I used to just leave recommended 
articles in my inbox or email them to myself. That was a terrible 
system. Then I started saving each one in a new tab. That was a terrible
 system. Now I can get them out of my life by saving them to Pocket, 
usually using the Chrome extension. The danger there is I forget about 
them and just never read them — but I find that there is usually a time 
every few weeks, maybe on a plane or sitting in a waiting room or 
something else, when I open Pocket and pound through a bunch of articles
 at once. Pocket is definitely my consumption to-do list now.</p>
<h2><strong>If you had the chance to escape and read all of your current Pocket saves where would you go to do it?</strong></h2>
<p>Jail.
 My dream is to commit some crime that puts me in solitary confinement 
for one year with nothing besides a tablet with a good internet 
connection and where I’m not allowed to do any work or communicate with 
anyone. I’d read 5,000 articles and 500 books and watch 500 movies and 
documentaries and TV shows. But I so far haven’t found any crime where 
that’s the exact sentence so it’s hard. Second choice would be to be a 
truck driver and consume everything in the world by audio.</p>
<figure></figure>
<h2><strong>If people follow you on Pocket, what other types of things should they expect you to share about?</strong></h2>
<p>They
 should expect a highly irregular schedule, because I’ll go weeks and 
forget that recommending things on Pocket is a thing I can do, and then 
I’ll remember and suddenly recommend five things before forgetting 
again. As for specific type of recommendation, it can be anything — 
whatever I read that I would immediately send to a bunch of friends is a
 good thing to recommend on Pocket.</p>
<p><a href="https://getpocket.com/@timurban"><em>Follow the stories that Tim recommends on Pocket here »</em></a></p>
<h2><strong>Who would you want to see us interview next?</strong></h2>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/brainpicker">Maria Popova</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/farnamstreet">Shane Parrish</a>. They both read like 90 books a week and have the finest-tuned taste for what’s good.</p>
<h2><strong>How would you describe Pocket to someone who’s never heard of it?</strong></h2>
<p>A
 perfect place to put every article or video you come across or that 
people send you. It becomes your consumption to-do list, all in one 
place, waiting for you whenever you’re ready, even when you’re offline.</p>
<p><em>Love Tim’s work? So do we — </em><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/support-wait"><em>here’s how you can support WaitButWhy!</em></a><em> In the meantime, check out some of </em><a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/waitbutwhy.com"><em>WaitButWhy’s greatest hits on Pocket</em></a><em> and / or </em><a href="https://getpocket.com/@timurban"><em>follow him on Pocket</em></a><em> to see what he recommends you read next.</em></p>
<figure></figure>
</div>
</article>
</div></div>||||I|||| Pocket

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 Tim Urban is an Expert on not Being an Expert

 by Pocket Posted on November 15, 2016June 11, 2020

 This interview was originally published on Medium

 For a self-proclaimed procrastinator (his recent TED talk on the subject has been viewed over 8 million times!), Tim Urban sure seems to get a lot done. He has quickly become one of the most popular writers on the internet with his blog, Wait But Why, where he posts weekly about anything from how to be insufferable on Facebook to artificial intelligence, all coupled with his signature stick figure illustrations that would make your kindergarten teacher proud.

 Your stories from WaitButWhy have been shared more on Pocket than any other author on the Internet. It’s clear they have struck a chord with your readers. What do you think drives it? What type of impact do you hope you are having with your work?

 When I write, I imagine the reader as myself, right before I started thinking about or researching the topic at hand. This makes it easy to figure out what topics to pick and how much depth to get into and what kind of sense of humor to use. There aren’t really that many categories of people out there, so even if only 1 in 500 people happens to have my exact taste, with the insane reach of the internet, that turns into a lot of people. The people who resonate well with the blog are probably a lot like me. I think it also helps that I spend at least a week, and sometimes more than a month, on each article. That’s pretty different than a typical writer’s schedule.

 Personally, I’ll say that your article, the Tail End, about our limited time on this Earth, changed my behavior and choices that I was making. I’m sure I’m not the only one. What’s the best feedback that you’ve gotten from someone whether via an email or in person?

 A mother emailed me and told me that the mammoth post turned around her teenage son’s depression. That delighted me.

 Your article on the mind-blowing Fermi Paradox was published 2 years ago but still remains one of the most popular articles in Pocket, with over 80,000 saves. After all of that research, and 2 years more to mull it over, do you have a leading guess on which hypothesis is right?

 This is one of those topics where I’ve lost all self confidence about my own opinion — because I’ve talked to multiple people smarter than I am who make convincing arguments about why we’re almost definitely the only intelligent life in the universe, and multiple other people, also smarter than I am, who speak with conviction about how the universe is almost definitely brimming with intelligent life. So now I have no conviction about anything, since I’m not an expert — I draw my knowledge from what experts say. When this kind of disagreement happens, it’s a telltale sign that this is just one of those topics we don’t as a species yet understand. Future people will look back at us with this topic the way we look back at the people who were debating whether the stars were pinholes in the dome of the underside of heaven or something else. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a lot of other intelligent life out there, because how insane is it if this only happened here.

 Read more about the Fermi Paradox on Pocket »

 Since writing your posts on the AI Revolution and Super Intelligence (which Elon Musk, who is famously scared of AI’s future, shared as a good primer on the subject), efforts have ramped up dramatically. What’s been the most interesting announcement since then?

 It seems like every week something new and important happens in the world of AI. The creation of Open AI by Elon Musk and Sam Altman — which will allow more collaborative and transparent efforts to develop hopefully safe AI — seems like a very important piece of the puzzle. But like the Fermi Paradox situation, our species currently has no idea what the hell is gonna happen with AI, so I’ve heard a vast range of strong opinions about whether Open AI is a good thing or a bad thing.

 Read more about AI on Pocket »

 What have you been finding interesting / what have you been saving recently?

 Like everyone, I’ve been glued to election stuff because it’s so fun and trashy and terrifying. My favorite place for that is FiveThirtyEight — which I like for all kinds of stuff, not just election-related. I spend a few hours of every week glued to whatever the latest recommendations are on kottke.org. And have been loving Sam Harris’s blog (https://www.samharris.org/blog) recently.

 What are your go-to places — sites, apps, people, etc — for finding new stories to read and watch in Pocket?

 I already mentioned kottke.org, but that guy has great taste and when he recommends and article, I’ll usually read it. I find myself actually using the iOS News app daily. I usually just open it up in the morning in bed and then read shit for 45 minutes until my self-hatred hits the point in the meter that makes me get up. Most of the other articles I read usually come to me in the form of an email from a friend through the Pocket app.

 Procrastination. As a person who has given a TED talk and written several articles on the topic, I imagine that Pocket and the concept of save-for-later is by now a part of your routine. Do you have a Pocket ritual? If so, what is it?

 I constantly save things to Pocket. I used to just leave recommended articles in my inbox or email them to myself. That was a terrible system. Then I started saving each one in a new tab. That was a terrible system. Now I can get them out of my life by saving them to Pocket, usually using the Chrome extension. The danger there is I forget about them and just never read them — but I find that there is usually a time every few weeks, maybe on a plane or sitting in a waiting room or something else, when I open Pocket and pound through a bunch of articles at once. Pocket is definitely my consumption to-do list now.

 If you had the chance to escape and read all of your current Pocket saves where would you go to do it?

 Jail. My dream is to commit some crime that puts me in solitary confinement for one year with nothing besides a tablet with a good internet connection and where I’m not allowed to do any work or communicate with anyone. I’d read 5,000 articles and 500 books and watch 500 movies and documentaries and TV shows. But I so far haven’t found any crime where that’s the exact sentence so it’s hard. Second choice would be to be a truck driver and consume everything in the world by audio.

 If people follow you on Pocket, what other types of things should they expect you to share about?

 They should expect a highly irregular schedule, because I’ll go weeks and forget that recommending things on Pocket is a thing I can do, and then I’ll remember and suddenly recommend five things before forgetting again. As for specific type of recommendation, it can be anything — whatever I read that I would immediately send to a bunch of friends is a good thing to recommend on Pocket.

 Follow the stories that Tim recommends on Pocket here »

 Who would you want to see us interview next?

 Maria Popova or Shane Parrish. They both read like 90 books a week and have the finest-tuned taste for what’s good.

 How would you describe Pocket to someone who’s never heard of it?

 A perfect place to put every article or video you come across or that people send you. It becomes your consumption to-do list, all in one place, waiting for you whenever you’re ready, even when you’re offline.

 Love Tim’s work? So do we — here’s how you can support WaitButWhy! In the meantime, check out some of WaitButWhy’s greatest hits on Pocket and / or follow him on Pocket to see what he recommends you read next.

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 Allium Theme by TemplateLens ⋅ Powered by WordPress
This interview was originally published on Medium
 For a self-proclaimed procrastinator (his recent   TED talk  
 on the subject has been viewed over 8 million times!), Tim Urban sure 
seems to get a lot done. He has quickly become one of the most popular 
writers on the internet with his blog,   Wait But Why  ,
 where he posts weekly about anything from how to be insufferable on 
Facebook to artificial intelligence, all coupled with his signature 
stick figure illustrations that would make your kindergarten teacher 
proud. 
 Your
 stories from WaitButWhy have been shared more on Pocket than any other 
author on the Internet. It’s clear they have struck a chord with your 
readers. What do you think drives it? What type of impact do you hope 
you are having with your work? 
When
 I write, I imagine the reader as myself, right before I started 
thinking about or researching the topic at hand. This makes it easy to 
figure out what topics to pick and how much depth to get into and what 
kind of sense of humor to use. There aren’t really that many categories 
of people out there, so even if only 1 in 500 people happens to have my 
exact taste, with the insane reach of the internet, that turns into a 
lot of people. The people who resonate well with the blog are probably a
 lot like me. I think it also helps that I spend at least a week, and 
sometimes more than a month, on each article. That’s pretty different 
than a typical writer’s schedule.
 
 Personally, I’ll say that your article,   the Tail End  ,
 about our limited time on this Earth, changed my behavior and choices 
that I was making. I’m sure I’m not the only one. What’s the best 
feedback that you’ve gotten from someone whether via an email or in 
person? 
A mother emailed me and told me that the mammoth post turned around her teenage son’s depression. That delighted me.
 Your   article on the mind-blowing Fermi Paradox  
 was published 2 years ago but still remains one of the most popular 
articles in Pocket, with over 80,000 saves. After all of that research, 
and 2 years more to mull it over, do you have a leading guess on which 
hypothesis is right? 
This
 is one of those topics where I’ve lost all self confidence about my own
 opinion — because I’ve talked to multiple people smarter than I am who 
make convincing arguments about why we’re almost definitely the only 
intelligent life in the universe, and multiple other people, also 
smarter than I am, who speak with conviction about how the universe is 
almost definitely brimming with intelligent life. So now I have no 
conviction about anything, since I’m not an expert — I draw my knowledge
 from what experts say. When this kind of disagreement happens, it’s a 
telltale sign that this is just one of those topics we don’t as a 
species yet understand. Future people will look back at us with this 
topic the way we look back at the people who were debating whether the 
stars were pinholes in the dome of the underside of heaven or something 
else. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a lot of other intelligent life
 out there, because how insane is it if this only happened here.
  Read more about the Fermi Paradox on Pocket »  
 Since writing your posts on the   AI Revolution and Super Intelligence   (which Elon Musk, who is famously scared of AI’s future,   shared  
 as a good primer on the subject), efforts have ramped up dramatically. 
What’s been the most interesting announcement since then? 
It
 seems like every week something new and important happens in the world 
of AI. The creation of Open AI by Elon Musk and Sam Altman — which will 
allow more collaborative and transparent efforts to develop hopefully 
safe AI — seems like a very important piece of the puzzle. But like the 
Fermi Paradox situation, our species currently has no idea what the hell
 is gonna happen with AI, so I’ve heard a vast range of strong opinions 
about whether Open AI is a good thing or a bad thing.
  Read more about AI on Pocket »  
 
 What have you been finding interesting / what have you been saving recently? 
Like everyone, I’ve been glued to election stuff because it’s so fun and trashy and terrifying. My favorite place for that is FiveThirtyEight
 — which I like for all kinds of stuff, not just election-related. I 
spend a few hours of every week glued to whatever the latest 
recommendations are on kottke.org. And have been loving Sam Harris’s blog (https://www.samharris.org/blog) recently.
 What are your go-to places — sites, apps, people, etc — for finding new stories to read and watch in Pocket? 
I already mentioned kottke.org,
 but that guy has great taste and when he recommends and article, I’ll 
usually read it. I find myself actually using the iOS News app daily. I
 usually just open it up in the morning in bed and then read shit for 45
 minutes until my self-hatred hits the point in the meter that makes me 
get up. Most of the other articles I read usually come to me in the form of an email from a friend through the Pocket app.
 Procrastination. As a person who has given a   TED talk   and written   several articles  
 on the topic, I imagine that Pocket and the concept of save-for-later 
is by now a part of your routine. Do you have a Pocket ritual? If so, 
what is it? 
I
 constantly save things to Pocket. I used to just leave recommended 
articles in my inbox or email them to myself. That was a terrible 
system. Then I started saving each one in a new tab. That was a terrible
 system. Now I can get them out of my life by saving them to Pocket, 
usually using the Chrome extension. The danger there is I forget about 
them and just never read them — but I find that there is usually a time 
every few weeks, maybe on a plane or sitting in a waiting room or 
something else, when I open Pocket and pound through a bunch of articles
 at once. Pocket is definitely my consumption to-do list now.
 If you had the chance to escape and read all of your current Pocket saves where would you go to do it? 
Jail.
 My dream is to commit some crime that puts me in solitary confinement 
for one year with nothing besides a tablet with a good internet 
connection and where I’m not allowed to do any work or communicate with 
anyone. I’d read 5,000 articles and 500 books and watch 500 movies and 
documentaries and TV shows. But I so far haven’t found any crime where 
that’s the exact sentence so it’s hard. Second choice would be to be a 
truck driver and consume everything in the world by audio.
 
 If people follow you on Pocket, what other types of things should they expect you to share about? 
They
 should expect a highly irregular schedule, because I’ll go weeks and 
forget that recommending things on Pocket is a thing I can do, and then 
I’ll remember and suddenly recommend five things before forgetting 
again. As for specific type of recommendation, it can be anything — 
whatever I read that I would immediately send to a bunch of friends is a
 good thing to recommend on Pocket.
  Follow the stories that Tim recommends on Pocket here »  
 Who would you want to see us interview next? 
 Maria Popova or Shane Parrish. They both read like 90 books a week and have the finest-tuned taste for what’s good.
 How would you describe Pocket to someone who’s never heard of it? 
A
 perfect place to put every article or video you come across or that 
people send you. It becomes your consumption to-do list, all in one 
place, waiting for you whenever you’re ready, even when you’re offline.
 Love Tim’s work? So do we —   here’s how you can support WaitButWhy!   In the meantime, check out some of   WaitButWhy’s greatest hits on Pocket   and / or   follow him on Pocket   to see what he recommends you read next.
Tim Urban is an Expert on not Being an Expert
https://blog.getpocket.com/2016/11/tim-urban-is-an-expert-on-not-being-an-expert/
https://www.businessinsider.com/these-graphics-will-make-you-rethink-your-life-2016-1
These graphics will make you rethink your life
2016-01-04
Tim Urban
<div><section>
<div>
<article>
<section>
<h2>11 powerful graphics will make you realize how incredibly short life is</h2>
</section>
<section>
<div>
<p><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/">
</a>
</p>
</div>
<section>
<a href="https://insider-app.onelink.me/4cpG/?af_js_web=true&amp;af_ss_ver=2_3_0&amp;af_dp=insider%3A%2F%2Fbi%2Fpost%2Fthese-graphics-will-make-you-rethink-your-life-2016-1&amp;af_force_deeplink=true&amp;is_retargeting=true&amp;deep_link_value=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fthese-graphics-will-make-you-rethink-your-life-2016-1&amp;pid=businessinsider&amp;c=post_page_share_bar_v2_smart_4.13.23">
 
</a></section></section>
<section>
<div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>By months:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>And by weeks:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. Not this time.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>By days:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart. Each of those dots is only a single Tuesday or Friday or Sunday, but even a lucky person who lives to 90 will have no problem fitting every day in their life on one page.</p><p>But since doing the Life in Weeks post, I've been thinking about something else.</p><p>Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in activities or events. To use myself as an example:</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>I'm 34, so let's be super optimistic and say I'll be hanging around drawing stick figures till I'm 90. If so, I have a little under 60 winters left:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>And maybe around 60 Super Bowls left:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>Only about 60 more swims in the ocean:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>The ocean is freezing and putting my body into it is a bad life experience, so I tend to limit myself to around one ocean swim a year. So as weird as it seems, I might only go in the ocean 60 more times.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>Only 300 more books to read:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>Not counting Wait But Why research, I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I'll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I'll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>Only 20 more visits to Fenway:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>Growing up in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time, but if I never move back there, I'll probably continue at my current rate of going to a Sox game about once every three years — meaning this little row of 20 represents my remaining Fenway visits.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>I'll only see 9 more US presidents become elected:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>There have been eight US presidential elections during my lifetime and about 15 to go. I've seen five presidents in office and if that rate continues, I'll see about nine more.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>At least I'll have 700 more pizza slices and a ton of dumplings still to eat:</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>I probably eat pizza about once a month, so I've got about 700 more chances to eat pizza. I have an even brighter future with dumplings. I have Chinese food about twice a month and I tend to make sure six dumplings occur each time, so I have a ton of dumplings to look forward to.</p><p>But these things aren't what I've been thinking about. Most of the things I just mentioned happen with a similar frequency during each year of my life, which spreads them out somewhat evenly through time. If I'm around a third of my way through life, I'm also about a third of my way through experiencing the activity or event.</p><p>What I've been thinking about is a really important part of life that, unlike all of these examples, isn't spread out evenly through time — something whose [already done / still to come] ratio doesn't at all align with how far I am through life:</p><p>Relationships.</p><p>I've been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I've probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time — 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.</p><p>Being in their mid-60s, let's continue to be super optimistic and say I'm one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that's 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.</p><p>When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I'll ever spend with each of my parents — assuming I'm as lucky as can be — this becomes starkly clear:</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>
<h2>But the saddest thing to think about: Only about 300 days left to hang out with my mom and dad.</h2>
</p>
<figure>
<div>
<p>
</p></div>
</figure>
<p>It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I'm now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We're in the tail end.</p><p>It's a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.</p><p>The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.</p><p>So what do we do with this information?</p><p>Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:</p><p>1) <strong>Living in the same place as the people you love matters.</strong> I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.</p><p>2)<strong> Priorities matter.</strong> Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you — not by unconscious inertia.</p><p>3) <strong>Quality time matters.</strong> If you're in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you're with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.</p>
</div>
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 Science

 11 powerful graphics will make you realize how incredibly short life is

 Tim Urban,
 Wait But Why
 2016-01-04T18:00:00Z
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 In a post last year, we laid out the human lifespan visually.

 By years:

 Tim Urban/Wait But Why

 Advertisement

 By months:

 Wait But Why?

 And by weeks:

 Wait But Why?

 While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. Not this time.

 Advertisement

 By days:

 Wait But Why?

 The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart. Each of those dots is only a single Tuesday or Friday or Sunday, but even a lucky person who lives to 90 will have no problem fitting every day in their life on one page.

 But since doing the Life in Weeks post, I've been thinking about something else.

 Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in activities or events. To use myself as an example:

 I'm 34, so let's be super optimistic and say I'll be hanging around drawing stick figures till I'm 90. If so, I have a little under 60 winters left:

 Wait But Why?

 Advertisement

 And maybe around 60 Super Bowls left:

 Wait But Why?

 Only about 60 more swims in the ocean:

 Wait But Why?

 The ocean is freezing and putting my body into it is a bad life experience, so I tend to limit myself to around one ocean swim a year. So as weird as it seems, I might only go in the ocean 60 more times.

 Advertisement

 Only 300 more books to read:

 Wait But Why?

 Not counting Wait But Why research, I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I'll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I'll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest.

 Only 20 more visits to Fenway:

 Wait But Why?

 Growing up in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time, but if I never move back there, I'll probably continue at my current rate of going to a Sox game about once every three years — meaning this little row of 20 represents my remaining Fenway visits.

 Advertisement

 I'll only see 9 more US presidents become elected:

 Wait But Why?

 There have been eight US presidential elections during my lifetime and about 15 to go. I've seen five presidents in office and if that rate continues, I'll see about nine more.

 Advertisement

 At least I'll have 700 more pizza slices and a ton of dumplings still to eat:

 Wait But Why?

 I probably eat pizza about once a month, so I've got about 700 more chances to eat pizza. I have an even brighter future with dumplings. I have Chinese food about twice a month and I tend to make sure six dumplings occur each time, so I have a ton of dumplings to look forward to.

 But these things aren't what I've been thinking about. Most of the things I just mentioned happen with a similar frequency during each year of my life, which spreads them out somewhat evenly through time. If I'm around a third of my way through life, I'm also about a third of my way through experiencing the activity or event.

 What I've been thinking about is a really important part of life that, unlike all of these examples, isn't spread out evenly through time — something whose [already done / still to come] ratio doesn't at all align with how far I am through life:

 Relationships.

 I've been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I've probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time — 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.

 Being in their mid-60s, let's continue to be super optimistic and say I'm one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that's 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.

 When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I'll ever spend with each of my parents — assuming I'm as lucky as can be — this becomes starkly clear:

 Advertisement

 But the saddest thing to think about: Only about 300 days left to hang out with my mom and dad.

 Wait But Why?

 It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I'm now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We're in the tail end.

 It's a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.

 The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.

 So what do we do with this information?

 Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:

 1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

 2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you — not by unconscious inertia.

 3) Quality time matters. If you're in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you're with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

 MORE FROM WAIT BUT WHY:

 * Why You Secretly Hate Cool Bars
 * 10 Absurdly Famous People You Probably Don't Know Enough About
 * Your Life In Weeks
 * Everything You Don't Know About Tipping
 * 10 Types Of 30-Year-Old Single Guys
 Read the original article on Wait But Why. Copyright 2016.

 Check out Wait But Why on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for the Wait But Why newsletter here.

 Follow Wait But Why on Twitter.

 Read next

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11 powerful graphics will make you realize how incredibly short life is
 
 
  
By months:
 
And by weeks:
 
While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. Not this time.
By days:
 
The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart. Each of those dots is only a single Tuesday or Friday or Sunday, but even a lucky person who lives to 90 will have no problem fitting every day in their life on one page. But since doing the Life in Weeks post, I've been thinking about something else. Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in activities or events. To use myself as an example:
I'm 34, so let's be super optimistic and say I'll be hanging around drawing stick figures till I'm 90. If so, I have a little under 60 winters left:
 
And maybe around 60 Super Bowls left:
 
Only about 60 more swims in the ocean:
 
The ocean is freezing and putting my body into it is a bad life experience, so I tend to limit myself to around one ocean swim a year. So as weird as it seems, I might only go in the ocean 60 more times.
Only 300 more books to read:
 
Not counting Wait But Why research, I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I'll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I'll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest.
Only 20 more visits to Fenway:
 
Growing up in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time, but if I never move back there, I'll probably continue at my current rate of going to a Sox game about once every three years — meaning this little row of 20 represents my remaining Fenway visits.
I'll only see 9 more US presidents become elected:
 
There have been eight US presidential elections during my lifetime and about 15 to go. I've seen five presidents in office and if that rate continues, I'll see about nine more.
At least I'll have 700 more pizza slices and a ton of dumplings still to eat:
 
I probably eat pizza about once a month, so I've got about 700 more chances to eat pizza. I have an even brighter future with dumplings. I have Chinese food about twice a month and I tend to make sure six dumplings occur each time, so I have a ton of dumplings to look forward to. But these things aren't what I've been thinking about. Most of the things I just mentioned happen with a similar frequency during each year of my life, which spreads them out somewhat evenly through time. If I'm around a third of my way through life, I'm also about a third of my way through experiencing the activity or event. What I've been thinking about is a really important part of life that, unlike all of these examples, isn't spread out evenly through time — something whose [already done / still to come] ratio doesn't at all align with how far I am through life: Relationships. I've been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I've probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time — 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood. Being in their mid-60s, let's continue to be super optimistic and say I'm one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that's 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years. When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I'll ever spend with each of my parents — assuming I'm as lucky as can be — this becomes starkly clear:
But the saddest thing to think about: Only about 300 days left to hang out with my mom and dad.
 
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I'm now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We're in the tail end. It's a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left. The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%. So what do we do with this information? Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here: 1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else. 2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you — not by unconscious inertia. 3) Quality time matters. If you're in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you're with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
 
 Read the original article on Wait But Why. Copyright 2016.
 
 
 Check out Wait But Why on  Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for the Wait But Why newsletter here.
 
 
 Follow Wait But Why on Twitter.
 
 
 Read next
 
Thanks for signing up!
 Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go.
 
 
Life
Death
Relationships
These graphics will make you rethink your life
https://www.businessinsider.com/these-graphics-will-make-you-rethink-your-life-2016-1
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/09/debate2020.html
The Trump-Biden Debate — Wait But Why
2020-09-30
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div>
<p>In case you missed it, here’s a transcript of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cathmZFeXs&amp;ab_channel=NBCNews">first Trump-Biden Debate</a>:</p>
<p><strong>Chris Wallace: </strong>Good evening. I’m Chris Wallace and I welcome you to what I predict will be a very bad personal experience for me. There will be six 15-minute segments, each on a different topic. At the beginning of each segment, both candidates will get two uninterrupted minutes to respond. The remainder of the segment will be open discussion. The audience has agreed not to be trashy. Both campaigns have signed off on these rules, so for sure nothing will go wrong. And with that, let’s welcome the candidates.</p><p>
[CANDIDATES ENTER]
</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Let’s start with the Supreme Court. President Trump, you nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court. You say the Constitution is clear about your obligation to nominate someone to the court. Vice President Biden, you’ve called this an abuse of power. To start, why don’t you both explain your positions.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Amy Coney Barrett is a perfect nominee. Conservatives love her. Liberals love her. Chris Wallace loves her.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Amy Barrett would repeal the Affordable Care Act. And besides, the new thing is that you have to wait until after the election to nominate someone.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Not sure what you’re talking about, because last I checked a presidential term is four years, not three. You want to instate Communist medicine.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I don’t want to instate Communist medicine. I want to expand Obamacare.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Your party wants to instate Communist medicine, and you’re scared of them.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I may be scared of them but I <em>am</em> the Democrat Party now, so even if I was and still am scared of them, I’m not anymore. They’ll do what I say now. And how about Covid? The president killed 200,000 people. Roe v. Wade.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>You would have killed 2 million people by not banning China. Not Roe v. Wade.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>K let’s go back to healthcare for a minute. Mr. President, over the past four years you have promised to replace and repeal Obamacare, but you have never in these four years come up—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Yes I have.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>with a plan—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Of course I have.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>to—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Of course I have.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>replace—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>I got rid of the individual mandate.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Oba—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>The individual mandate was a joke.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>macare.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>The individual mandate was the worst part of Obamacare.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>I am the moder—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>The individual mandate sucks dick.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>I AM THE MODERATOR of this debate and I would like to be treated as such. You have never come up with a plan to replace Obamacare. So what is the Trump healthcare plan?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>I’m cutting drug prices. Insulin is like water.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Uh huh. How about you Joe? Why do you want to end private insurance?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I don’t want to end private insurance.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>You’re literally friends with Bernie Sanders.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>No I’m not. I want to—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>You’re a piece of shit Joe.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I want to make sure—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>A sad little man.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Stop picking on Joe, Mr. President.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>You care deeply about Bernie Sanders. You like Communist medicine. Anyway I asked the doctors and they said Obamacare is a disaster.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>He doesn’t have a plan.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Changing gears, Joe some of your colleagues are talking about ending the filibuster and packing the court. What’s your stance on that?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>My stance is that voting is good. Americans should vote. It’s easy. You just go to the polling place, you wait in line, and then you go into the booth, and you push the little switch down for the candidate you want to vote for. Sometimes it’s not a switch.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>You gonna pack the court, Joe? Tell us about how you’re gonna pack the court, Joe. The radical Left is pulling your puppet strings Joe. You and I both know it Joe.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Shut up, man.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>This is going well. Okay next segment. Covid-19. There have been more than 7 million cases in the United States and more than 200,000 have died. The question is, why should people trust you more than your opponent to handle this public health crisis?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>40,000 people a day contracting Covid. 200,000 people dead. He has no plan. He knew in February. He lied. He panicked. He complimented China. He has no plan. He’s playing golf.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>I saved lives. It’s China’s fault. You wanted to let Chinese people come here. Dr. Fauci and all the Democrat governors said, “President Trump did a phenomenal job.” And they’re not the only ones. All of the other people said it too. “President Trump did a phenomenal job,” they all said. I did a phenomenal job. The gowns, the masks, the ventilators, you don’t know how to make a ventilator, the vaccine is here, any week now. You could never have done the job I did because you’re a random old man. You couldn’t even do swine flu. Swine flu is a disaster.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong> He panicked. People died. And more people are gonna die unless he gets a lot smarter—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Did you just use the word smart? You lied about going to college at Delaware State. You were the worst student at Delaware State. You’re a dumb fuck Joe. I know it. Chris Wallace knows it don’t you Chris.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Trump:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Biden:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. President, you have begun to increasingly question the effectiveness of masks. Are you not in favor of masks?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Masks are tremendous. I have a mask right here in my pocket. I wear masks when needed. Masks have said I’ve done a phenomenal job. Joe wears masks even when it makes no sense. He wears them when he’s 200 feet away from me. He wears a mask when he’s sleeping.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. Vice President, is that true?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>If you wanna open a business, you gotta have a plan.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Sir, I was asking about masks.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Oh masks? Sure, you gotta have a mask.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Alright next segment. The economy. Mr. Trump, you go first.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>It’s a big dick economy.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>No.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Okay how about taxes. Mr. President, apparently you pay $750 a year in taxes. There’s a girl my daughter knows who’s 15 and she works in a movie theater on Sundays and sells the candy. And she pays more than $750 a year in taxes. So is this true, Mr. President? How much did you pay in taxes in 2016 and 2017?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Miyyons.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Miyyons, sir?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Miyyons and Biyyons. I don’t pay taxes because the Obama administration said I didn’t have to.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Joe, what’s your plan for taxes?</p>
<p><strong>Biden:</strong> I’m gonna build this economy. I’m gonna make jobs. We’re gonna buy American. We’re gonna buy American ships. American steel. American buildings. We handed him a booming economy and he blew it.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>But did you actually hand him a booming economy and did he actually blow it?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Sure, whatever. He talks about the art of the deal. China has perfected the art of the steal.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>China buttered your son’s belly.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>China did no such thing.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>And then, Joe? You know what happened after that? Your son went to Moscow. And you know what happened there Joe? Moscow buttered your son’s belly.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Nothing happened there.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Sure did Joe. The mayor of Moscow’s wife. She buttered his belly slick.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>You wanna talk about families Trump? How about your family. With their grease and their shoes. It’s not about families. It’s about the American people. It’s about families.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Oh and how about Ukraine?</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>You know what? Time to move on to—</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Ukraine buttered the shit out of—</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. President.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Ukraine buttered him up real good.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. <em>President</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Shut your mouth Chris. What about Ukraine Joe?</p>
<p><strong>Wallace:</strong> VAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH</p>
<p><strong>Trump:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Now I’m gonna say something and I want you to listen right to me, Mr. President. I have had it up to here with you. Any more misbehaving and I will put you in timeout.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>And you know what else—</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>I will put you <em>right in timeout</em>, Mr. President. And then you’ll be sorry. Now I want you to stop being a bad boy, is that clear?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>How about him? He should get timeout too.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Well frankly, Mr. President, you’ve been the badder boy.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>He’s been plenty bad.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>For the next segment, we’ll be talking about race. Why should voters trust you to deal with the race issues facing this country? Mr. Vice President, we’ll start with you.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I’m all for race. It’s about equity. About equality. About equanimity. Equilibrium. Equinox. We need to fix the systemic equity of racism and fragility in this country. And this president has done none of that. He wants to fix the systemic equity of the Nazis.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>The blacks love me. Everyone knows that the blacks love me. I have blacks come up to me on the street all the time and tell me they love me. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and I have done more for the blacks than Joe could ever dream of. Joe won’t say law enforcement. Why won’t you say it Joe? Why are you such a puppet Joe? You’re the radical Left’s toy. You’re a yo-yo. The radical Left won’t let you say law enforcement because they bounce you like a yo-yo, Joe.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>I want to turn to the subject of protests. In many cities, things have turned violent. Portland, for instance, is a certifiable madhouse. Mr. Biden, have you ever called the mayor of Portland or the governor of Oregon and been like, “wtf?”</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I don’t have their numbers. Otherwise I would have. Do you have their numbers Chris? If you do, text them to me. And besides, they’re taking care of things just fine.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Yeah Joe? They’re fine? They’re literally murdering people in the streets, which is a disaster, and no one in Portland cares.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. President do you like or not like white supremacists?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>No of course not. I don’t not like, or don’t not not like any of the people.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong></p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. President, what is your message to white supremacists?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Get your guns but don’t fire till I give the word. Anyway the Left is committing 99% of the violence right now.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Oh baloney. Antifa is an idea, not an organization. I heard it means anti-fascist, in which case heck, sign me up. And anyhow who hasn’t thrown urine at an old lady on a bad day? The Antifas are just like you and me.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>I’m having an awful time here. I’m really upset and I want to leave and I’m having a bad, bad time. For the next segment, let’s just go with “why should you be president over your opponent?”</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>There has never been a leader who has done more than I’ve done. And I don’t mean just U.S. presidents. Mandela. Attila the Hun. Caesar. King Tut. None of them did as much as I’ve done. I unified this country. For the first time in U.S. history, I ended division. I have the first 100% approval rating. And how about judges. I have 300 judges. I have judges up the ass, Chris. You know why? Because Obama and crazy Uncle Joe forgot to fill the seats. Who does that. No one does that. You forget your keys, sure I’ve forgotten my keys, I’m human, we all forget our keys, sometimes I leave my keys. But leaving judges is a disaster.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>This man has made the country weaker, sicker, poorer, fatter, sloppier, and slipperier. When I was Vice President I went head-to-head with Putin, but Trump is Putin’s little puppy. His cuddle-bunny. His bushy-bushy-boo-boo.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>At least Putin’s not my sugar daddy, like he is to your son.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>K speaking of that, fuck off. Second, you talk about the military being losers—my son was in Iraq and he was no loser, he was a patriot.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>Which son, the loser or the dead one?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong></p>
<p><strong>Wallace:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>I don’t know the dead one, but if I recall, the loser got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged for having a nice time with his cocaine, only to then head off on his famous belly-buttering tour.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>His belly is dry!</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Oh for fuck’s sake. Let’s move on to climate change. Mr. President, what do you believe about the science of climate change, and what is your plan to confront it?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>I want clean water and air. As far as the California fires are concerned, the forest floors are full of dead trees and leaves.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Okay but what do you believe about the science of climate change?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>I want clean water and air. I’ve planted a biyyon trees. We’ve got to pick the leaves up in the forest in California. Every year I get the call. California’s burning again. Because again they didn’t pick up the fucking leaves. You know in Europe, they pick up leaves.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Joe?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>I want to get rid of fossil fuel plants and invest in renewable energy. I want to transition to electric cars and make green buildings and create millions of new jobs.</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>He’s talking about the Green New Deal. The 55 quadrillion dollar Green New Deal.</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>The Green New Deal is a plan that’ll pay for itself. It’ll work great.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Do you support the Green New Deal?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>Of course not. I’m talking about the Biden Plan. Who said anything about the Green New Deal?</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mercifully, we’ve reached the final segment of my extremely awful night. Election integrity. How confident should we be that this will be a fair election?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>There is no evidence that mail-in ballots are problematic. Trump is trying to convince people not to vote. Listen to me America. Get out there and vote. If I get enough votes, this whole thing is over and the bad man can’t hurt you. It doesn’t matter what he says, if I get enough votes he’s legit not in power anymore, how rad is that.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Mr. President?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>A squirrel’s ass, Chris. That’s where someone found a ballot the other day. A squirrel shit out a ballot in a park in Philadelphia and a man picked it up and guess what? It said Trump on the ballot. Big shocker there. This is what happens with mail-in ballots. They end up in a trash can in a river in the woods in the backcountry and then eventually the trash can gets caught up in an eddy, we both know how eddies work Chris, and it washes up on the bank, and then a squirrel gets into it and eats the ballots. Half the country’s ballots have already been found in eddies and in squirrels, and all of them were votes for me. Mail-in ballots are a fraud.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>One thing we all know for sure is that this election is going to be a shitshow. Will you accept the results of the shitshow and tell your supporters to accept the results peacefully?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>If there’s no fraud, yes.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Is there any foreseeable outcome where you lose and you don’t say it’s fraud?</p>
<p><strong>Trump: </strong>No. I’ve already talked about the squirrels. If I lose, we’ll need to end the country.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>Biden?</p>
<p><strong>Biden: </strong>The country can go on if I lose.</p>
<p><strong>Wallace: </strong>And that concludes what will end up as a stain on my career even though it clearly wasn’t my fault. Thank you, and goodnight.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise <strong><a href="https://mailchi.mp/waitbutwhy/email-signup">email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.</p>
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 The Trump-Biden Debate

 September 30, 2020 By Tim Urban


 In case you missed it, here’s a transcript of the first Trump-Biden Debate:

 Chris Wallace: Good evening. I’m Chris Wallace and I welcome you to what I predict will be a very bad personal experience for me. There will be six 15-minute segments, each on a different topic. At the beginning of each segment, both candidates will get two uninterrupted minutes to respond. The remainder of the segment will be open discussion. The audience has agreed not to be trashy. Both campaigns have signed off on these rules, so for sure nothing will go wrong. And with that, let’s welcome the candidates.

 [CANDIDATES ENTER]

 Wallace: Let’s start with the Supreme Court. President Trump, you nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court. You say the Constitution is clear about your obligation to nominate someone to the court. Vice President Biden, you’ve called this an abuse of power. To start, why don’t you both explain your positions.

 Trump: Amy Coney Barrett is a perfect nominee. Conservatives love her. Liberals love her. Chris Wallace loves her.

 Biden: Amy Barrett would repeal the Affordable Care Act. And besides, the new thing is that you have to wait until after the election to nominate someone.

 Trump: Not sure what you’re talking about, because last I checked a presidential term is four years, not three. You want to instate Communist medicine.

 Biden: I don’t want to instate Communist medicine. I want to expand Obamacare.

 Trump: Your party wants to instate Communist medicine, and you’re scared of them.

 Biden: I may be scared of them but I am the Democrat Party now, so even if I was and still am scared of them, I’m not anymore. They’ll do what I say now. And how about Covid? The president killed 200,000 people. Roe v. Wade.

 Trump: You would have killed 2 million people by not banning China. Not Roe v. Wade.

 Wallace: K let’s go back to healthcare for a minute. Mr. President, over the past four years you have promised to replace and repeal Obamacare, but you have never in these four years come up—

 Trump: Yes I have.

 Wallace: with a plan—

 Trump: Of course I have.

 Wallace: to—

 Trump: Of course I have.

 Wallace: replace—

 Trump: I got rid of the individual mandate.

 Wallace: Oba—

 Trump: The individual mandate was a joke.

 Wallace: macare.

 Trump: The individual mandate was the worst part of Obamacare.

 Wallace: I am the moder—

 Trump: The individual mandate sucks dick.

 Wallace: I AM THE MODERATOR of this debate and I would like to be treated as such. You have never come up with a plan to replace Obamacare. So what is the Trump healthcare plan?

 Trump: I’m cutting drug prices. Insulin is like water.

 Wallace: Uh huh. How about you Joe? Why do you want to end private insurance?

 Biden: I don’t want to end private insurance.

 Trump: You’re literally friends with Bernie Sanders.

 Biden: No I’m not. I want to—

 Trump: You’re a piece of shit Joe.

 Biden: I want to make sure—

 Trump: A sad little man.

 Wallace: Stop picking on Joe, Mr. President.

 Trump: You care deeply about Bernie Sanders. You like Communist medicine. Anyway I asked the doctors and they said Obamacare is a disaster.

 Biden: He doesn’t have a plan.

 Wallace: Changing gears, Joe some of your colleagues are talking about ending the filibuster and packing the court. What’s your stance on that?

 Biden: My stance is that voting is good. Americans should vote. It’s easy. You just go to the polling place, you wait in line, and then you go into the booth, and you push the little switch down for the candidate you want to vote for. Sometimes it’s not a switch.

 Trump: You gonna pack the court, Joe? Tell us about how you’re gonna pack the court, Joe. The radical Left is pulling your puppet strings Joe. You and I both know it Joe.

 Biden: Shut up, man.

 Wallace: This is going well. Okay next segment. Covid-19. There have been more than 7 million cases in the United States and more than 200,000 have died. The question is, why should people trust you more than your opponent to handle this public health crisis?

 Biden: 40,000 people a day contracting Covid. 200,000 people dead. He has no plan. He knew in February. He lied. He panicked. He complimented China. He has no plan. He’s playing golf.

 Trump: I saved lives. It’s China’s fault. You wanted to let Chinese people come here. Dr. Fauci and all the Democrat governors said, “President Trump did a phenomenal job.” And they’re not the only ones. All of the other people said it too. “President Trump did a phenomenal job,” they all said. I did a phenomenal job. The gowns, the masks, the ventilators, you don’t know how to make a ventilator, the vaccine is here, any week now. You could never have done the job I did because you’re a random old man. You couldn’t even do swine flu. Swine flu is a disaster.

 Biden: He panicked. People died. And more people are gonna die unless he gets a lot smarter—

 Trump: Did you just use the word smart? You lied about going to college at Delaware State. You were the worst student at Delaware State. You’re a dumb fuck Joe. I know it. Chris Wallace knows it don’t you Chris.

 Wallace:

 Trump:

 Biden:

 Wallace: Mr. President, you have begun to increasingly question the effectiveness of masks. Are you not in favor of masks?

 Trump: Masks are tremendous. I have a mask right here in my pocket. I wear masks when needed. Masks have said I’ve done a phenomenal job. Joe wears masks even when it makes no sense. He wears them when he’s 200 feet away from me. He wears a mask when he’s sleeping.

 Wallace: Mr. Vice President, is that true?

 Biden: If you wanna open a business, you gotta have a plan.

 Wallace: Sir, I was asking about masks.

 Biden: Oh masks? Sure, you gotta have a mask.

 Wallace: Alright next segment. The economy. Mr. Trump, you go first.

 Trump: It’s a big dick economy.

 Biden: No.

 Wallace: Okay how about taxes. Mr. President, apparently you pay $750 a year in taxes. There’s a girl my daughter knows who’s 15 and she works in a movie theater on Sundays and sells the candy. And she pays more than $750 a year in taxes. So is this true, Mr. President? How much did you pay in taxes in 2016 and 2017?

 Trump: Miyyons.

 Wallace: Miyyons, sir?

 Trump: Miyyons and Biyyons. I don’t pay taxes because the Obama administration said I didn’t have to.

 Wallace: Joe, what’s your plan for taxes?

 Biden: I’m gonna build this economy. I’m gonna make jobs. We’re gonna buy American. We’re gonna buy American ships. American steel. American buildings. We handed him a booming economy and he blew it.

 Wallace: But did you actually hand him a booming economy and did he actually blow it?

 Biden: Sure, whatever. He talks about the art of the deal. China has perfected the art of the steal.

 Trump: China buttered your son’s belly.

 Biden: China did no such thing.

 Trump: And then, Joe? You know what happened after that? Your son went to Moscow. And you know what happened there Joe? Moscow buttered your son’s belly.

 Biden: Nothing happened there.

 Trump: Sure did Joe. The mayor of Moscow’s wife. She buttered his belly slick.

 Biden: You wanna talk about families Trump? How about your family. With their grease and their shoes. It’s not about families. It’s about the American people. It’s about families.

 Trump: Oh and how about Ukraine?

 Wallace: You know what? Time to move on to—

 Trump: Ukraine buttered the shit out of—

 Wallace: Mr. President.

 Trump: Ukraine buttered him up real good.

 Wallace: Mr. President.

 Trump: Shut your mouth Chris. What about Ukraine Joe?

 Wallace: VAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

 Trump:

 Wallace: Now I’m gonna say something and I want you to listen right to me, Mr. President. I have had it up to here with you. Any more misbehaving and I will put you in timeout.

 Trump: And you know what else—

 Wallace: I will put you right in timeout, Mr. President. And then you’ll be sorry. Now I want you to stop being a bad boy, is that clear?

 Trump: How about him? He should get timeout too.

 Wallace: Well frankly, Mr. President, you’ve been the badder boy.

 Trump: He’s been plenty bad.

 Wallace: For the next segment, we’ll be talking about race. Why should voters trust you to deal with the race issues facing this country? Mr. Vice President, we’ll start with you.

 Biden: I’m all for race. It’s about equity. About equality. About equanimity. Equilibrium. Equinox. We need to fix the systemic equity of racism and fragility in this country. And this president has done none of that. He wants to fix the systemic equity of the Nazis.

 Trump: The blacks love me. Everyone knows that the blacks love me. I have blacks come up to me on the street all the time and tell me they love me. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and I have done more for the blacks than Joe could ever dream of. Joe won’t say law enforcement. Why won’t you say it Joe? Why are you such a puppet Joe? You’re the radical Left’s toy. You’re a yo-yo. The radical Left won’t let you say law enforcement because they bounce you like a yo-yo, Joe.

 Wallace: I want to turn to the subject of protests. In many cities, things have turned violent. Portland, for instance, is a certifiable madhouse. Mr. Biden, have you ever called the mayor of Portland or the governor of Oregon and been like, “wtf?”

 Biden: I don’t have their numbers. Otherwise I would have. Do you have their numbers Chris? If you do, text them to me. And besides, they’re taking care of things just fine.

 Trump: Yeah Joe? They’re fine? They’re literally murdering people in the streets, which is a disaster, and no one in Portland cares.

 Wallace: Mr. President do you like or not like white supremacists?

 Trump: No of course not. I don’t not like, or don’t not not like any of the people.

 Wallace:

 Trump:

 Wallace: Mr. President, what is your message to white supremacists?

 Trump: Get your guns but don’t fire till I give the word. Anyway the Left is committing 99% of the violence right now.

 Biden: Oh baloney. Antifa is an idea, not an organization. I heard it means anti-fascist, in which case heck, sign me up. And anyhow who hasn’t thrown urine at an old lady on a bad day? The Antifas are just like you and me.

 Wallace: I’m having an awful time here. I’m really upset and I want to leave and I’m having a bad, bad time. For the next segment, let’s just go with “why should you be president over your opponent?”

 Trump: There has never been a leader who has done more than I’ve done. And I don’t mean just U.S. presidents. Mandela. Attila the Hun. Caesar. King Tut. None of them did as much as I’ve done. I unified this country. For the first time in U.S. history, I ended division. I have the first 100% approval rating. And how about judges. I have 300 judges. I have judges up the ass, Chris. You know why? Because Obama and crazy Uncle Joe forgot to fill the seats. Who does that. No one does that. You forget your keys, sure I’ve forgotten my keys, I’m human, we all forget our keys, sometimes I leave my keys. But leaving judges is a disaster.

 Biden: This man has made the country weaker, sicker, poorer, fatter, sloppier, and slipperier. When I was Vice President I went head-to-head with Putin, but Trump is Putin’s little puppy. His cuddle-bunny. His bushy-bushy-boo-boo.

 Trump: At least Putin’s not my sugar daddy, like he is to your son.

 Biden: K speaking of that, fuck off. Second, you talk about the military being losers—my son was in Iraq and he was no loser, he was a patriot.

 Trump: Which son, the loser or the dead one?

 Biden:

 Wallace:

 Trump: I don’t know the dead one, but if I recall, the loser got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged for having a nice time with his cocaine, only to then head off on his famous belly-buttering tour.

 Biden: His belly is dry!

 Wallace: Oh for fuck’s sake. Let’s move on to climate change. Mr. President, what do you believe about the science of climate change, and what is your plan to confront it?

 Trump: I want clean water and air. As far as the California fires are concerned, the forest floors are full of dead trees and leaves.

 Wallace: Okay but what do you believe about the science of climate change?

 Trump: I want clean water and air. I’ve planted a biyyon trees. We’ve got to pick the leaves up in the forest in California. Every year I get the call. California’s burning again. Because again they didn’t pick up the fucking leaves. You know in Europe, they pick up leaves.

 Wallace: Joe?

 Biden: I want to get rid of fossil fuel plants and invest in renewable energy. I want to transition to electric cars and make green buildings and create millions of new jobs.

 Trump: He’s talking about the Green New Deal. The 55 quadrillion dollar Green New Deal.

 Biden: The Green New Deal is a plan that’ll pay for itself. It’ll work great.

 Wallace: Do you support the Green New Deal?

 Biden: Of course not. I’m talking about the Biden Plan. Who said anything about the Green New Deal?

 Wallace: Mercifully, we’ve reached the final segment of my extremely awful night. Election integrity. How confident should we be that this will be a fair election?

 Biden: There is no evidence that mail-in ballots are problematic. Trump is trying to convince people not to vote. Listen to me America. Get out there and vote. If I get enough votes, this whole thing is over and the bad man can’t hurt you. It doesn’t matter what he says, if I get enough votes he’s legit not in power anymore, how rad is that.

 Wallace: Mr. President?

 Trump: A squirrel’s ass, Chris. That’s where someone found a ballot the other day. A squirrel shit out a ballot in a park in Philadelphia and a man picked it up and guess what? It said Trump on the ballot. Big shocker there. This is what happens with mail-in ballots. They end up in a trash can in a river in the woods in the backcountry and then eventually the trash can gets caught up in an eddy, we both know how eddies work Chris, and it washes up on the bank, and then a squirrel gets into it and eats the ballots. Half the country’s ballots have already been found in eddies and in squirrels, and all of them were votes for me. Mail-in ballots are a fraud.

 Wallace: One thing we all know for sure is that this election is going to be a shitshow. Will you accept the results of the shitshow and tell your supporters to accept the results peacefully?

 Trump: If there’s no fraud, yes.

 Wallace: Is there any foreseeable outcome where you lose and you don’t say it’s fraud?

 Trump: No. I’ve already talked about the squirrels. If I lose, we’ll need to end the country.

 Wallace: Biden?

 Biden: The country can go on if I lose.

 Wallace: And that concludes what will end up as a stain on my career even though it clearly wasn’t my fault. Thank you, and goodnight.

 ___________

 If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

 To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.

 ___________

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 * 
In case you missed it, here’s a transcript of the first Trump-Biden Debate:
 Chris Wallace: Good evening. I’m Chris Wallace and I welcome you to what I predict will be a very bad personal experience for me. There will be six 15-minute segments, each on a different topic. At the beginning of each segment, both candidates will get two uninterrupted minutes to respond. The remainder of the segment will be open discussion. The audience has agreed not to be trashy. Both campaigns have signed off on these rules, so for sure nothing will go wrong. And with that, let’s welcome the candidates. 
[CANDIDATES ENTER]
 Wallace: Let’s start with the Supreme Court. President Trump, you nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court. You say the Constitution is clear about your obligation to nominate someone to the court. Vice President Biden, you’ve called this an abuse of power. To start, why don’t you both explain your positions.
 Trump: Amy Coney Barrett is a perfect nominee. Conservatives love her. Liberals love her. Chris Wallace loves her.
 Biden: Amy Barrett would repeal the Affordable Care Act. And besides, the new thing is that you have to wait until after the election to nominate someone.
 Trump: Not sure what you’re talking about, because last I checked a presidential term is four years, not three. You want to instate Communist medicine.
 Biden: I don’t want to instate Communist medicine. I want to expand Obamacare.
 Trump: Your party wants to instate Communist medicine, and you’re scared of them.
 Biden: I may be scared of them but I am the Democrat Party now, so even if I was and still am scared of them, I’m not anymore. They’ll do what I say now. And how about Covid? The president killed 200,000 people. Roe v. Wade.
 Trump: You would have killed 2 million people by not banning China. Not Roe v. Wade.
 Wallace: K let’s go back to healthcare for a minute. Mr. President, over the past four years you have promised to replace and repeal Obamacare, but you have never in these four years come up—
 Trump: Yes I have.
 Wallace: with a plan—
 Trump: Of course I have.
 Wallace: to—
 Trump: Of course I have.
 Wallace: replace—
 Trump: I got rid of the individual mandate.
 Wallace: Oba—
 Trump: The individual mandate was a joke.
 Wallace: macare.
 Trump: The individual mandate was the worst part of Obamacare.
 Wallace: I am the moder—
 Trump: The individual mandate sucks dick.
 Wallace: I AM THE MODERATOR of this debate and I would like to be treated as such. You have never come up with a plan to replace Obamacare. So what is the Trump healthcare plan?
 Trump: I’m cutting drug prices. Insulin is like water.
 Wallace: Uh huh. How about you Joe? Why do you want to end private insurance?
 Biden: I don’t want to end private insurance.
 Trump: You’re literally friends with Bernie Sanders.
 Biden: No I’m not. I want to—
 Trump: You’re a piece of shit Joe.
 Biden: I want to make sure—
 Trump: A sad little man.
 Wallace: Stop picking on Joe, Mr. President.
 Trump: You care deeply about Bernie Sanders. You like Communist medicine. Anyway I asked the doctors and they said Obamacare is a disaster.
 Biden: He doesn’t have a plan.
 Wallace: Changing gears, Joe some of your colleagues are talking about ending the filibuster and packing the court. What’s your stance on that?
 Biden: My stance is that voting is good. Americans should vote. It’s easy. You just go to the polling place, you wait in line, and then you go into the booth, and you push the little switch down for the candidate you want to vote for. Sometimes it’s not a switch.
 Trump: You gonna pack the court, Joe? Tell us about how you’re gonna pack the court, Joe. The radical Left is pulling your puppet strings Joe. You and I both know it Joe.
 Biden: Shut up, man.
 Wallace: This is going well. Okay next segment. Covid-19. There have been more than 7 million cases in the United States and more than 200,000 have died. The question is, why should people trust you more than your opponent to handle this public health crisis?
 Biden: 40,000 people a day contracting Covid. 200,000 people dead. He has no plan. He knew in February. He lied. He panicked. He complimented China. He has no plan. He’s playing golf.
 Trump: I saved lives. It’s China’s fault. You wanted to let Chinese people come here. Dr. Fauci and all the Democrat governors said, “President Trump did a phenomenal job.” And they’re not the only ones. All of the other people said it too. “President Trump did a phenomenal job,” they all said. I did a phenomenal job. The gowns, the masks, the ventilators, you don’t know how to make a ventilator, the vaccine is here, any week now. You could never have done the job I did because you’re a random old man. You couldn’t even do swine flu. Swine flu is a disaster.
 Biden:  He panicked. People died. And more people are gonna die unless he gets a lot smarter—
 Trump: Did you just use the word smart? You lied about going to college at Delaware State. You were the worst student at Delaware State. You’re a dumb fuck Joe. I know it. Chris Wallace knows it don’t you Chris.
 Wallace: 
 Trump: 
 Biden: 
 Wallace: Mr. President, you have begun to increasingly question the effectiveness of masks. Are you not in favor of masks?
 Trump: Masks are tremendous. I have a mask right here in my pocket. I wear masks when needed. Masks have said I’ve done a phenomenal job. Joe wears masks even when it makes no sense. He wears them when he’s 200 feet away from me. He wears a mask when he’s sleeping.
 Wallace: Mr. Vice President, is that true?
 Biden: If you wanna open a business, you gotta have a plan.
 Wallace: Sir, I was asking about masks.
 Biden: Oh masks? Sure, you gotta have a mask.
 Wallace: Alright next segment. The economy. Mr. Trump, you go first.
 Trump: It’s a big dick economy.
 Biden: No.
 Wallace: Okay how about taxes. Mr. President, apparently you pay $750 a year in taxes. There’s a girl my daughter knows who’s 15 and she works in a movie theater on Sundays and sells the candy. And she pays more than $750 a year in taxes. So is this true, Mr. President? How much did you pay in taxes in 2016 and 2017?
 Trump: Miyyons.
 Wallace: Miyyons, sir?
 Trump: Miyyons and Biyyons. I don’t pay taxes because the Obama administration said I didn’t have to.
 Wallace: Joe, what’s your plan for taxes?
 Biden: I’m gonna build this economy. I’m gonna make jobs. We’re gonna buy American. We’re gonna buy American ships. American steel. American buildings. We handed him a booming economy and he blew it.
 Wallace: But did you actually hand him a booming economy and did he actually blow it?
 Biden: Sure, whatever. He talks about the art of the deal. China has perfected the art of the steal.
 Trump: China buttered your son’s belly.
 Biden: China did no such thing.
 Trump: And then, Joe? You know what happened after that? Your son went to Moscow. And you know what happened there Joe? Moscow buttered your son’s belly.
 Biden: Nothing happened there.
 Trump: Sure did Joe. The mayor of Moscow’s wife. She buttered his belly slick.
 Biden: You wanna talk about families Trump? How about your family. With their grease and their shoes. It’s not about families. It’s about the American people. It’s about families.
 Trump: Oh and how about Ukraine?
 Wallace: You know what? Time to move on to—
 Trump: Ukraine buttered the shit out of—
 Wallace: Mr. President.
 Trump: Ukraine buttered him up real good.
 Wallace: Mr. President.
 Trump: Shut your mouth Chris. What about Ukraine Joe?
 Wallace: VAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH
 Trump: 
 Wallace: Now I’m gonna say something and I want you to listen right to me, Mr. President. I have had it up to here with you. Any more misbehaving and I will put you in timeout.
 Trump: And you know what else—
 Wallace: I will put you right in timeout, Mr. President. And then you’ll be sorry. Now I want you to stop being a bad boy, is that clear?
 Trump: How about him? He should get timeout too.
 Wallace: Well frankly, Mr. President, you’ve been the badder boy.
 Trump: He’s been plenty bad.
 Wallace: For the next segment, we’ll be talking about race. Why should voters trust you to deal with the race issues facing this country? Mr. Vice President, we’ll start with you.
 Biden: I’m all for race. It’s about equity. About equality. About equanimity. Equilibrium. Equinox. We need to fix the systemic equity of racism and fragility in this country. And this president has done none of that. He wants to fix the systemic equity of the Nazis.
 Trump: The blacks love me. Everyone knows that the blacks love me. I have blacks come up to me on the street all the time and tell me they love me. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and I have done more for the blacks than Joe could ever dream of. Joe won’t say law enforcement. Why won’t you say it Joe? Why are you such a puppet Joe? You’re the radical Left’s toy. You’re a yo-yo. The radical Left won’t let you say law enforcement because they bounce you like a yo-yo, Joe.
 Wallace: I want to turn to the subject of protests. In many cities, things have turned violent. Portland, for instance, is a certifiable madhouse. Mr. Biden, have you ever called the mayor of Portland or the governor of Oregon and been like, “wtf?”
 Biden: I don’t have their numbers. Otherwise I would have. Do you have their numbers Chris? If you do, text them to me. And besides, they’re taking care of things just fine.
 Trump: Yeah Joe? They’re fine? They’re literally murdering people in the streets, which is a disaster, and no one in Portland cares.
 Wallace: Mr. President do you like or not like white supremacists?
 Trump: No of course not. I don’t not like, or don’t not not like any of the people.
 Wallace: 
 Trump:  
 Wallace: Mr. President, what is your message to white supremacists?
 Trump: Get your guns but don’t fire till I give the word. Anyway the Left is committing 99% of the violence right now.
 Biden: Oh baloney. Antifa is an idea, not an organization. I heard it means anti-fascist, in which case heck, sign me up. And anyhow who hasn’t thrown urine at an old lady on a bad day? The Antifas are just like you and me.
 Wallace: I’m having an awful time here. I’m really upset and I want to leave and I’m having a bad, bad time. For the next segment, let’s just go with “why should you be president over your opponent?”
 Trump: There has never been a leader who has done more than I’ve done. And I don’t mean just U.S. presidents. Mandela. Attila the Hun. Caesar. King Tut. None of them did as much as I’ve done. I unified this country. For the first time in U.S. history, I ended division. I have the first 100% approval rating. And how about judges. I have 300 judges. I have judges up the ass, Chris. You know why? Because Obama and crazy Uncle Joe forgot to fill the seats. Who does that. No one does that. You forget your keys, sure I’ve forgotten my keys, I’m human, we all forget our keys, sometimes I leave my keys. But leaving judges is a disaster.
 Biden: This man has made the country weaker, sicker, poorer, fatter, sloppier, and slipperier. When I was Vice President I went head-to-head with Putin, but Trump is Putin’s little puppy. His cuddle-bunny. His bushy-bushy-boo-boo.
 Trump: At least Putin’s not my sugar daddy, like he is to your son.
 Biden: K speaking of that, fuck off. Second, you talk about the military being losers—my son was in Iraq and he was no loser, he was a patriot.
 Trump: Which son, the loser or the dead one?
 Biden:  
 Wallace: 
 Trump: I don’t know the dead one, but if I recall, the loser got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged for having a nice time with his cocaine, only to then head off on his famous belly-buttering tour.
 Biden: His belly is dry!
 Wallace: Oh for fuck’s sake. Let’s move on to climate change. Mr. President, what do you believe about the science of climate change, and what is your plan to confront it?
 Trump: I want clean water and air. As far as the California fires are concerned, the forest floors are full of dead trees and leaves.
 Wallace: Okay but what do you believe about the science of climate change?
 Trump: I want clean water and air. I’ve planted a biyyon trees. We’ve got to pick the leaves up in the forest in California. Every year I get the call. California’s burning again. Because again they didn’t pick up the fucking leaves. You know in Europe, they pick up leaves.
 Wallace: Joe?
 Biden: I want to get rid of fossil fuel plants and invest in renewable energy. I want to transition to electric cars and make green buildings and create millions of new jobs.
 Trump: He’s talking about the Green New Deal. The 55 quadrillion dollar Green New Deal.
 Biden: The Green New Deal is a plan that’ll pay for itself. It’ll work great.
 Wallace: Do you support the Green New Deal?
 Biden: Of course not. I’m talking about the Biden Plan. Who said anything about the Green New Deal?
 Wallace: Mercifully, we’ve reached the final segment of my extremely awful night. Election integrity. How confident should we be that this will be a fair election?
 Biden: There is no evidence that mail-in ballots are problematic. Trump is trying to convince people not to vote. Listen to me America. Get out there and vote. If I get enough votes, this whole thing is over and the bad man can’t hurt you. It doesn’t matter what he says, if I get enough votes he’s legit not in power anymore, how rad is that.
 Wallace: Mr. President?
 Trump: A squirrel’s ass, Chris. That’s where someone found a ballot the other day. A squirrel shit out a ballot in a park in Philadelphia and a man picked it up and guess what? It said Trump on the ballot. Big shocker there. This is what happens with mail-in ballots. They end up in a trash can in a river in the woods in the backcountry and then eventually the trash can gets caught up in an eddy, we both know how eddies work Chris, and it washes up on the bank, and then a squirrel gets into it and eats the ballots. Half the country’s ballots have already been found in eddies and in squirrels, and all of them were votes for me. Mail-in ballots are a fraud.
 Wallace: One thing we all know for sure is that this election is going to be a shitshow. Will you accept the results of the shitshow and tell your supporters to accept the results peacefully?
 Trump: If there’s no fraud, yes.
 Wallace: Is there any foreseeable outcome where you lose and you don’t say it’s fraud?
 Trump: No. I’ve already talked about the squirrels. If I lose, we’ll need to end the country.
 Wallace: Biden?
 Biden: The country can go on if I lose.
 Wallace: And that concludes what will end up as a stain on my career even though it clearly wasn’t my fault. Thank you, and goodnight.
___________
If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise  email list  and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.
To support Wait But Why,  visit our Patreon page .
___________
 More Places: 
  The Trump-Clinton Town Hall  
  The full deal with the first 16 presidents  
  Why you should stop caring what other people think
The Trump-Biden Debate — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/09/debate2020.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/09/universe.html
The Big and the Small — Wait But Why
2020-09-22
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>I have a surprise for you.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1-surprise.png"></a></p>
<p>I’ll tell you about it in a minute. First, let’s have a little fun. Come with me.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2-fun-room.png"></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things.</p>
<p>I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened.</p>
<p>It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say.</p>
<p>He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters:</p>
<p>kurzgesagt</p>
<p>Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was <em>very </em>close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos.</p>
<p>It was <em>delightful</em>.</p>
<p>I watched another. And another. And then it hit me.</p>
<p>Philipp—this random man in Germany—<em>also lives in the fun room.</em></p>
<p>The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">one of my early posts</a> into a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkV6IpV2Y0&amp;ab_channel=Kurzgesagt%E2%80%93InaNutshell">kurzgesagt video</a>.<a href="#footnote-1-8973">1</a>
</p><p>In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months ago, we decided to collaborate again. It was time to go public with the fun room.</p>
<p>At some point in our pasts, we had both become enamored with two fun room icons, Cary and Michael Huang, known on the internet as the Huang Twins. The twins do <a href="https://www.htwins.net/">a lot of cool things</a>, but it was their <a href="https://www.htwins.net/scale2/">Scale of the Universe</a> toy that we loved most.</p>
<p>Inspired by their work, we decided to go for it. We wanted to make the best size explorer we could imagine. We called it Universe in a Nutshell.</p>
<p>Of course, it took roughly 18 times longer than we thought it would. We brainstormed the interface for quite some time, and then Philipp, along with the incredible kurzgesagt team, dug into working on illustrations and animations, while I worked with the team on the written explainers.</p>
<p>Thousands of human hours later, the app is done. 250 objects, 30,000+ words of explanations and fun facts, just the right mood music, and what we think is a pretty great interface.</p>
<p>Here’s how it works:</p>
<p>The app is a giant wall. The wall is impossibly large—large enough to fit full-sized galaxies on it. The wall is also impossibly high-resolution—hi-res enough to contain sharp images of subatomic particles.</p>
<p>I know it seems weird that I’m talking about it as if it’s a real object, but I have a good reason: to get the full mind-blow effect, you have to realize what you’re looking at. You’re not moving forward and backward through a tunnel of objects—it just seems that way because your brain will refuse to accept the insanity of the actual sizes you’re seeing. By reminding yourself again and again that all of these objects are “painted” on the same 2D wall, you’ll hopefully experience some fun mind-bending moments.</p>
<p>The app looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3.1-screenshot.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3.3-screenshot.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3.2-screenshot.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>And there are three ways to zoom:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/4-Zoom.png"></a></p>
<p>You can tap any object for an explainer and fun facts. All of the facts you just read in the fun room are also in the app, along with a million other things. (The surprisingly-good-for-Wait-But-Why-illustrations from the fun room are the work of Kurzgesagt. Don’t think this is some new normal.)</p>
<p>Three more things:</p>
<p>1) The app is $3 in the US store, which, considering the fact that a magical infinite wall should really go for like $2.5 million, is a huge steal.</p>
<p>2) If you like the app, please give it a rating or review. For example, here’s my review:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/5-review.jpg"></a></p>
<p>3) This is V1 of the app. As we made the app, we had a constant side conversation going on about possibilities for V2, V3, and beyond. We’re launching today, but this is just the beginning. We want this app to be a brain playground that just keeps getting better and better. And here’s where you come in.</p>
<p>As you use the app, whenever you have an “I wish the app did X” or “It would be so cool if the app could do Y” thought, we want to hear it. As this is V1, we of course also want to know whenever you have a “This isn’t working right” or an “I think this fact is off” thought. In the app’s menu, you’ll see a “feedback” tab, where you can tap the feedback <a href="mailto:appfeedback@kurzgesagt.org">email address</a> and let us know what you’re thinking.</p>
<p>Okay, here you go. <strong>Click the left app for iPhone/iPad, the right one for Android.</strong></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Also: </strong>To commemorate the app launch, Kurzgesagt did their own fun room creation today—<a href="https://youtu.be/3mnSDifDSxQ"><strong>a delightful video about the sizes of stars</strong></a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>End things:</strong></p>
<p>If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise <strong><a href="https://mailchi.mp/waitbutwhy/email-signup">email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.</p>
<p>To support Wait But Why, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy"><strong>visit our Patreon page</strong></a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More trips to the fun room:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html"><strong>The Fermi Paradox</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html"><strong>The SpaceX Post</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/what-does-quadrillion-sour-patch-kids.html"><strong>The Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Post</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html"><strong>And a trip to the not-so-fun room</strong></a></p>
</div></article>||||I|||| * Home

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 The Big and the Small

 September 22, 2020 By Tim Urban


 I have a surprise for you.

 I’ll tell you about it in a minute. First, let’s have a little fun. Come with me.

 I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things.

 I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened.

 It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say.

 He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters:

 kurzgesagt

 Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was very close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos.

 It was delightful.

 I watched another. And another. And then it hit me.

 Philipp—this random man in Germany—also lives in the fun room.

 The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting one of my early posts into a kurzgesagt video.1

 In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months ago, we decided to collaborate again. It was time to go public with the fun room.

 At some point in our pasts, we had both become enamored with two fun room icons, Cary and Michael Huang, known on the internet as the Huang Twins. The twins do a lot of cool things, but it was their Scale of the Universe toy that we loved most.

 Inspired by their work, we decided to go for it. We wanted to make the best size explorer we could imagine. We called it Universe in a Nutshell.

 Of course, it took roughly 18 times longer than we thought it would. We brainstormed the interface for quite some time, and then Philipp, along with the incredible kurzgesagt team, dug into working on illustrations and animations, while I worked with the team on the written explainers.

 Thousands of human hours later, the app is done. 250 objects, 30,000+ words of explanations and fun facts, just the right mood music, and what we think is a pretty great interface.

 Here’s how it works:

 The app is a giant wall. The wall is impossibly large—large enough to fit full-sized galaxies on it. The wall is also impossibly high-resolution—hi-res enough to contain sharp images of subatomic particles.

 I know it seems weird that I’m talking about it as if it’s a real object, but I have a good reason: to get the full mind-blow effect, you have to realize what you’re looking at. You’re not moving forward and backward through a tunnel of objects—it just seems that way because your brain will refuse to accept the insanity of the actual sizes you’re seeing. By reminding yourself again and again that all of these objects are “painted” on the same 2D wall, you’ll hopefully experience some fun mind-bending moments.

 The app looks like this:

 And this:

 And this:

 And there are three ways to zoom:

 You can tap any object for an explainer and fun facts. All of the facts you just read in the fun room are also in the app, along with a million other things. (The surprisingly-good-for-Wait-But-Why-illustrations from the fun room are the work of Kurzgesagt. Don’t think this is some new normal.)

 Three more things:

 1) The app is $3 in the US store, which, considering the fact that a magical infinite wall should really go for like $2.5 million, is a huge steal.

 2) If you like the app, please give it a rating or review. For example, here’s my review:

 3) This is V1 of the app. As we made the app, we had a constant side conversation going on about possibilities for V2, V3, and beyond. We’re launching today, but this is just the beginning. We want this app to be a brain playground that just keeps getting better and better. And here’s where you come in.

 As you use the app, whenever you have an “I wish the app did X” or “It would be so cool if the app could do Y” thought, we want to hear it. As this is V1, we of course also want to know whenever you have a “This isn’t working right” or an “I think this fact is off” thought. In the app’s menu, you’ll see a “feedback” tab, where you can tap the feedback email address and let us know what you’re thinking.

 Okay, here you go. Click the left app for iPhone/iPad, the right one for Android.

 ___________

 Also: To commemorate the app launch, Kurzgesagt did their own fun room creation today—a delightful video about the sizes of stars.

 ___________

 End things:

 If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

 To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.

 ___________

 More trips to the fun room:

 The Fermi Paradox

 The SpaceX Post

 The Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Post

 And a trip to the not-so-fun room

 1. Kurzgesagt did an updated version of the video in 2018.↩

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 * 
 * 
I have a surprise for you.
   
I’ll tell you about it in a minute. First, let’s have a little fun. Come with me.
   
 
I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things.
I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened.
It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say.
He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters:
kurzgesagt
Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was very close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos.
It was delightful.
I watched another. And another. And then it hit me.
Philipp—this random man in Germany—also lives in the fun room. 
The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting one of my early posts into a kurzgesagt video.1
 In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months ago, we decided to collaborate again. It was time to go public with the fun room.
At some point in our pasts, we had both become enamored with two fun room icons, Cary and Michael Huang, known on the internet as the Huang Twins. The twins do a lot of cool things, but it was their Scale of the Universe toy that we loved most.
Inspired by their work, we decided to go for it. We wanted to make the best size explorer we could imagine. We called it Universe in a Nutshell.
Of course, it took roughly 18 times longer than we thought it would. We brainstormed the interface for quite some time, and then Philipp, along with the incredible kurzgesagt team, dug into working on illustrations and animations, while I worked with the team on the written explainers.
Thousands of human hours later, the app is done. 250 objects, 30,000+ words of explanations and fun facts, just the right mood music, and what we think is a pretty great interface.
Here’s how it works:
The app is a giant wall. The wall is impossibly large—large enough to fit full-sized galaxies on it. The wall is also impossibly high-resolution—hi-res enough to contain sharp images of subatomic particles.
I know it seems weird that I’m talking about it as if it’s a real object, but I have a good reason: to get the full mind-blow effect, you have to realize what you’re looking at. You’re not moving forward and backward through a tunnel of objects—it just seems that way because your brain will refuse to accept the insanity of the actual sizes you’re seeing. By reminding yourself again and again that all of these objects are “painted” on the same 2D wall, you’ll hopefully experience some fun mind-bending moments.
The app looks like this:
   
And this:
   
And this:
   
And there are three ways to zoom:
   
You can tap any object for an explainer and fun facts. All of the facts you just read in the fun room are also in the app, along with a million other things. (The surprisingly-good-for-Wait-But-Why-illustrations from the fun room are the work of Kurzgesagt. Don’t think this is some new normal.)
Three more things:
1) The app is $3 in the US store, which, considering the fact that a magical infinite wall should really go for like $2.5 million, is a huge steal.
2) If you like the app, please give it a rating or review. For example, here’s my review:
   
3) This is V1 of the app. As we made the app, we had a constant side conversation going on about possibilities for V2, V3, and beyond. We’re launching today, but this is just the beginning. We want this app to be a brain playground that just keeps getting better and better. And here’s where you come in.
As you use the app, whenever you have an “I wish the app did X” or “It would be so cool if the app could do Y” thought, we want to hear it. As this is V1, we of course also want to know whenever you have a “This isn’t working right” or an “I think this fact is off” thought. In the app’s menu, you’ll see a “feedback” tab, where you can tap the feedback email address and let us know what you’re thinking.
Okay, here you go. Click the left app for iPhone/iPad, the right one for Android. 
___________
 Also: To commemorate the app launch, Kurzgesagt did their own fun room creation today— a delightful video about the sizes of stars .
___________
 End things: 
If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise  email list  and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.
To support Wait But Why,  visit our Patreon page .
___________
 More trips to the fun room: 
  The Fermi Paradox  
  The SpaceX Post  
  The Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Post  
  And a trip to the not-so-fun room
The Big and the Small — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/09/universe.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/03/my-morning.html
You Won't Believe My Morning — Wait But Why
2020-03-25
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>You won’t believe my morning.</p>
<p>I went out on my daily excursion to sit on the front step of my building for ten minutes holding my breath when people walked by. Normally, I spend the time diddling around my phone, but I forgot to bring my phone this morning, so I just looked around.</p>
<p>As I was taking in the emptiness of the street, a little glint caught my eye in a patch of dirt on the sidewalk. I bent over to look closer, and there was the glint again. It wasn’t a normal glint like from a shiny rock or a piece of metal—it was a little pinprick of flashing light.</p>
<p>Intrigued, I was now on all fours looking closer. And I saw the most surreal thing.</p>
<p><em>Tiny houses.</em></p>
<p>Like <em>tiny </em>houses. Each about a millimeter high, like ornately carved grains of sand.</p>
<p>I was either dreaming or looking at the coolest, <em>cutest </em>little art project ever.</p>
<p>As I examined the microscopic village, I noticed what looked like a scrawl of teeny letters on the dirt next to the houses. It said:</p>
<p>PUT YOUR THUMB ON THE OVAL</p>
<p>Now fully having the time of my life, I looked around for an oval. I searched for a few minutes with no luck until I saw, a bit outside the area where the houses were, a little strip of silver, maybe two millimeters long and a millimeter wide. Careful not to damage the houses, I put my thumb on it.</p>
<p>I won’t be able to accurately describe what happened next, but I’ll try my best. Imagine if the ground underneath you suddenly felt like a furiously spinning liquid whirlpool, combined with the feeling of freefalling, combined with your entire visual field turning into a blurry gray, combined with the worst nausea of your life.</p>
<p>And then, just as fast as it started, it all stopped. I cowered for a few seconds trying to catch my breath, and when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in New York anymore.</p>
<p>I was on a pastoral ranch, surrounded by big log cabins and a bunch of people staring down at me as I looked up at them, still on all fours. One of the people said to me, “Are you okay?”</p>
<p>“I feel okay, but I’m having <em>severe </em>hallucinations.”</p>
<p>They all started cheering and hugging and high-fiving each other.</p>
<p>“Are you doctors?” I asked.</p>
<p>“He thinks he has the virus,” one of them said, and they all roared with laughter.</p>
<p>A woman shushed the crowd and said, “Okay, back to work everyone. I’ll give him the briefing.”</p>
<p>The others left, and the woman smiled at me. “I’m Layla.”</p>
<p>“Hi Layla. Do I have coronavirus?” I asked.</p>
<p>“You don’t have coronavirus,” she said. “You’re just tiny. We shrunk you to 1/10,000<sup>th</sup> of your normal size. You haven’t moved anywhere, you’ve just gotten much smaller.”</p>
<p>“Fuck,” I explained.</p>
<p>“Yeah, I imagine it’s a lot to take in,” she said. “Let me try to clear things up. There are different tiers of human life, not just the one you’re used to. Our tier is exactly 1/10,000<sup>th</sup> the size of yours. In yours, people are about 180 centimeters tall. Here, we’re about 0.18 millimeters tall. We’d say 180 micrometers tall, but I know in your world, micrometers don’t mean very much.”</p>
<p>I stared at her. “You’re telling me I’m 0.18 millimeters tall right now?”</p>
<p>“Correct,” she said. “About half the size of a dust mite, or a little taller than the width of a human hair up in your world. A person in your world with really good eyesight could <em>barely </em>see you, if they looked closely. And see that house over there?” She pointed to a large, three-story house. “In the scale you’re used to, that would be about 10 meters high. Here, it’s about the size of a cubic millimeter—the size of a grain of sand on the sidewalk. Some of our houses were actually carved from grains of sand.”</p>
<p>“Hold on.” I stopped her. “I’m <em>very </em>scared of bugs. I wrote a whole post about it once. Are there <em>giant </em>bugs here?”</p>
<p>“Yes and no. There are no bugs in our village because we lined the perimeter with a poison that kills any insects that come too close. But you wouldn’t want to walk too far away from the houses—about three centimeters from here, you’ll cross that barrier and run into things you won’t like.”</p>
<p>“How about flying bugs?” I asked diligently.</p>
<p>“Oh, I haven’t mentioned time yet. Okay so time here moves 100 times faster than it does up on your tier. Time scales up inversely with the square root of the size difference. So 1/10,000<sup>th</sup> of the size means 100X faster time. So when a flying insect starts to descend into the village, our defense crew has over a minute here to handle the situation. They fire a jet of air at the insect that deflects it away from us. Same deal for dogs. Every year or two, a dog will pee on us. The defense crew keeps track of every dog walking by. At 1/100<sup>th</sup> the speed of our world, we first see an approaching dog about ten minutes before it gets near us, and by the time a peeing dog is lifting its leg over us, we’ve had plenty of time to draw the tarps, which roll over the entire village and cover everything—the same tarps we use every time it rains or snows.”</p>
<p>“Good to know. But why am I here?”</p>
<p>“Right, I was about to get to that. After a heated debate in the village, we voted to bring someone from your world here, because we wanted to show you something. We’ve been trying to catch someone’s eye in your world for three of your weeks. That’s almost <em>six years </em>here. That’s why everyone was so excited to see you.”</p>
<p>“How did you catch my attention?”</p>
<p>“With <em>that</em>.” She pointed at a tube on the roof of one of the houses that looked like large telescope. “That’s a super-powered laser that we’ve been trying to shine in people’s eyes as they walked by on the sidewalk. But no one noticed. Until today. Way out on the horizon, we piled boulders into the shapes of letters that spelled out the instructions, and you were dicking around just hard enough that you actually bent down to read them. We’re thankful.”</p>
<p>“What was that oval in the instructions?”</p>
<p>“Look down.”</p>
<p>I was standing on a metallic oval about the size of a swimming pool.</p>
<p>“This is our trans-tier station. When you touched this with your thumb, it shrunk you down to our tier.</p>
<p>“Wait.” I looked up at her. “Do I <em>live</em> here now?”</p>
<p>She laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ll send you back to your world in a little bit. Now come with me.”</p>
<p>I walked with Layla towards the other side of the village. I looked around. Everyone was staring at me. Some people waved.</p>
<p>“What’s that?” I asked Layla, pointing up at what looked like a sheet of color stretching into the sky.</p>
<p>“That’s your apartment building. All you can see from here is the first brick. That band of light way up in the sky is the mortar between the first and second brick in the wall.”</p>
<p>We walked into a small building and entered a room with a long white table in the middle. Layla turned towards a wall on the side of the room, and suddenly the outline of a square formed in the wall. The square moved outwards into the room and rotated downwards until it was parallel to the floor. Layla pulled a tweezer-like tool from her pocket and carefully pinched what looked like nothing a few centimeters above the panel.</p>
<p>She walked over to me. “Open your palm.”</p>
<p>She put her tweezers into my hand and dropped something the size of a grain of sand. I raised up my palm to look at it. It was reddish and fuzzy.</p>
<p>“What is it?” I asked.</p>
<p>“SARS-CoV-2. What you’ve been calling ‘coronavirus.’”</p>
<p>I flung it across the room. “What the <em>fuck</em>.”</p>
<p>Layla laughed, touched the square, and the little object flew back across the room into its spot above the square.</p>
<p>“It can’t hurt you here. The viruses of your world are <em>way </em>too big to do any damage in our bodies.”</p>
<p>I stared at her, trying to process the situation. “How do you know about coronavirus? And how did you…<em>get </em>one?”</p>
<p>“Oh we know everything about your world. Your tier moves so slowly compared to ours that your technology is eons behind ours. Our tools have allowed us to watch your world since your prehistoric days. As for how we got a coronavirus particle, we didn’t get it—we <em>made </em>it.”</p>
<p>“<em>You </em>made the coronavirus?”</p>
<p>“Well, with a little help. Follow me.”</p>
<p>Again I followed Layla, again dumbfounded, this time out of the building toward a fenced-in area outside. When we got close, a door in the fence opened and inside, we stood together on the edge of what looked like a barren circle of land.</p>
<p>Layla opened her hand. The little virus was sitting neatly on her palm. “SARS-CoV-2 is a standard sized Coronavirus—about 120 nanometers in diameter. 120 nanometers is ridiculously small in your world, but in ours, you can roll it around in your fingers.</p>
<p>“Cool…let me think about that for a minute.”</p>
<p>“Wait, I can explain this better. In your world, this is a perfect size analogy:</p>
<p>SARS-CoV-2 : grain of sand :: grain of sand : house</p>
<p>In both cases, the relationship is 1-to-10,000, which is also the relationship of our world to yours. In your world, your apartment building is huge, a grain of sand is tiny, and this coronavirus is unfathomably microscopic. In ours, the virus is tiny, a grain of your sand is huge enough to live in, and your apartment building is unfathomably large.”</p>
<p>“Makes sense.”</p>
<p>“Now, what’s a virus made of? Atoms. And atoms are about 0.1 nanometers in diameter—about 1/1,000<sup>th</sup> of the diameter of a SARS-CoV-2 particle. That’s small even for <em>us.</em> An atom is almost as small for us as a virus is for you. Constructing a virus requires incredibly complex engineering and tools that can interact with the quantum field. We can’t do it ourselves.”</p>
<p>“So how—”</p>
<p>“Look down.”</p>
<p>I looked at the ground.</p>
<p>She pulled me toward the center of the circle of land and then pulled me to an abrupt stop.</p>
<p>“Look closer.”</p>
<p>I bent over as far as I could and strained my eyes. No. Fucking. Way.</p>
<p><em>Another microscopic world</em>.</p>
<p><em>“Is that</em>…”</p>
<p>“Yup. That’s the tier below <em>us</em>. Give me your thumb.”</p>
<p>She carefully placed the virus particle onto the ground. Then she guided my hand to the ground, touching both of our thumbs to a little metallic spot.</p>
<p>Whirlpool. Falling. Gray. Nausea. Misery.</p>
<p>I eventually got a hold of my trembling and drooling and opened my eyes. In every direction, as far as I could see, stretched a hazy blue-ish / purple-ish plane. It also began to dawn on me that I wasn’t standing or sitting on anything—I was <em>floating</em>.</p>
<p>After about a minute of wondering what the <em>hell </em>was going on in my life, a patch of the sky darkened. The dark region became smaller and more defined until it condensed into Layla floating next to me.</p>
<p>“Please don’t leave me again,” I said.</p>
<p>“Sorry, my thumb hit the pad a split second later than yours did. Time moves 100 times faster here than up there, so you got to spend some reflective time here by yourself.”</p>
<p>“Okay where are we?”</p>
<p>“We’re outside your apartment building. Remember?”</p>
<p>“Righttt. So what <em>size</em> are we?”</p>
<p>“We went down the same jump you did when you transitioned from your world to ours—we shrunk to 1/10,000<sup>th</sup> of our previous size. So you’re now 18 nanometers tall. If you stood on the edge of a cross-section of a human hair, it would take you about two hours to walk across it.”</p>
<p>“Jesus.”</p>
<p>“Time here is now going by at 100X the speed of time in my world, which means it’s moving 10,000 times faster than the speed of time in yours. You could spend a year here and less than an hour would pass in your world.”</p>
<p>“Kind of like Inception?”</p>
<p>“Not really. Anyway, nothing down here works the way it does in our worlds. Like see how the ground is all eternal and purply?”</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>“That’s not really ground, and it’s not really purple. When you’re this small, there aren’t any solid objects in the sense you understand. And your eyes are too small now to perceive the visible light spectrum.”</p>
<p>“So what the hell?”</p>
<p>“I don’t really get it either. But the people who live here have incredibly advanced ways of manipulating the quantum field so we can feel like we’re intact humans, floating in place, seeing purple. They set it up this way because it’s something we can make sense of.”</p>
<p>“That’s nice of them. Where are they all anyway?”</p>
<p>“The thing is, they don’t like our world, and they <em>really </em>don’t like your world. They interact with us occasionally, when it’s necessary, but they’ll never allow you or anyone from your world to see them or know anything about how they live. This is actually the first time anyone from your world has been allowed down here, other than Andy Kaufman, who’s lived here since 1984.”</p>
<p>“Then why am I allowed to be here?”</p>
<p>“So I can show you this.”</p>
<p>Layla straightened her arm in front of her, with her palm facing outwards. Her palm lit up and when it did, a bizarre-looking giant object was revealed in front of us.</p>
<p>“This,” Layla said, “is SARS-CoV-2. Down here, it’s the size of a house.”</p>
<p>I looked up at the vast virus in front of me. It looked nothing like it had when it was a fuzzy grain of sand in my hand. It was transparent, like a massive, intricately structured, sphere-shaped jellyfish. There was a kind of furious movement within the transparency, but I couldn’t see anything specific moving. It was confusing.</p>
<p>Layla motioned for me to come close to the virus. She took my hand and placed my palm onto the virus’s almost invisible surface. It felt kind of like palming a grape bunch except instead of grapes it was tapioca balls like the ones in those bubble teas—if the tapioca balls were vibrating so vigorously that it felt a little like being mildly electroshocked, like when you put your finger in an electrical outlet. It was an unpleasant sensation, though not quite painful, and <em>super </em>weird and cool-feeling.</p>
<p>“Pull one off,” Layla said.</p>
<p>It took me a few tries to latch onto one of the atoms, because they’re “slippery” (quotes because there is no word for what it felt like, but “slippery” gets the general idea across), and when I finally got one and pulled, there was a lot of resistance. When I pulled it, it dragged the adjacent atoms along with it, and the harder I pulled, the more ferociously and unpleasantly it vibrated. Finally it <em>snapped </em>free. I looked at my fist—<em>I had an atom.</em></p>
<p>Layla smiled. “Cool right?”</p>
<p>“<em>So </em>cool. Can I keep it?”</p>
<p>“Sure good luck with that.”</p>
<p>I was so awe-struck by so many things, I had forgotten how intensely confused I was.</p>
<p>“Wait, so why did you <em>make</em> this?”</p>
<p>She turned towards me. “As I said, because of the way time moves—”</p>
<p>“Your world has been around a lot longer than ours.”</p>
<p>“Yes. And <em>this</em> world we’re in now has been around a lot longer than <em>mine</em>. They know much more about everything than we do, and they can do things we can’t even begin to understand. The stuff they can do is so over our heads they can’t even <em>explain </em>it to us. And <em>we’re</em> that far ahead of <em>your</em> world.</p>
<p>For a long time, as advanced as this world was, it relied on us to preserve our world for its own survival. It exists on a patch of dirt in our village. If our village were destroyed, they would be destroyed with it. But a while back, they worked out the technology for how to be <em>location independent</em>, which means they can move from wherever they are to any other place in the universe instantly.</p>
<p>We don’t have that technology yet. We tried to learn from them, but we couldn’t grasp the fundamental ideas well enough to develop it ourselves. So we’re stuck in our location.”</p>
<p>“In New York City?”</p>
<p>“Yup. We migrated here in the 1800s when we determined it would be a good place to interface with your world, should the need ever arise. We’re also not the only people in our world. There are lots of villages like ours in different parts of the Earth. Once we connected with you, the others stopped broadcasting their location. There’s no reason for more than one of us to be revealed to your world.</p>
<p>For most of time, Earth was a safe and stable home for our world. But over the last century, your world has been advancing exponentially in technology but remaining stagnant in wisdom. You’re rapidly gaining tremendous powers but still behaving like short-sighted primates. The voice of wisdom is there, but it’s being trampled over by political parties, religions, and nations too mired in blind conflict to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture.”</p>
<p>“It’s funny you say that Layla. I’m actually writing a whole thing about—”</p>
<p>“Oh I know. We did our research on everyone who lives in your vicinity so we’d know how to communicate with the person we brought to us if we caught someone’s attention. That’s why I’m speaking English and speaking in the odd way you do. Your little series is cute, even if it took us forever to read—but it will have limited effect. Your world is stubborn about growing up. And in the process of destroying yourselves, we believe you’ll destroy us as well.”</p>
<p>“So you’re trying to kill us off with a pandemic.”</p>
<p>“If we wanted to kill you off, you’d all be dead right now. It’s an option we hope we don’t have to use. We were once like you and we empathize with your struggle.</p>
<p>We created this coronavirus to fall into a certain sweet spot—not damaging enough to destroy your world, but bad enough to cause a long and scary global crisis. Short of an alien attack, it is the one thing that could make all humans in your world feel like they’re on the same team against a common enemy. The first and most crucial step on the road to a long-lasting species is the epiphany that you truly are a single team, alone in a dark and dangerous universe. We’re hoping the virus can help push you in that direction.”</p>
<p>“I feel like there was a better way to do this.”</p>
<p>“We probably could have thought a little harder about it.”</p>
<p>“Yeah cause it’s going pretty badly up there is the thing.”</p>
<p>“Totes. Anyway, we couldn’t make the virus on our own. It’s hard enough to make something that small and complex that involves atomic and subatomic construction, but we wanted the virus to be <em>precisely</em> as harmful as it is. We needed help. The tier below us is less vulnerable to your world than we are, but for reasons I’m not entirely sure about, they also believe living in a multi-tiered ecosystem may be important in the future—so they share our interests. They agreed to build the virus for us.”</p>
<p>“How did you manage to get the virus into our world?” I asked.</p>
<p>“It’s funny. You have to imagine it from our perspective. If you’re us, the world you’re planning to transform is a planet with nearly an <em>AU</em> diameter, full of <em>18-kilometer tall people</em>—people so tall, your world’s airplanes could accidentally fly into their belly buttons. Now imagine you’re standing on that planet, smaller than one of their dust mites, pinching between your fingers something the size of a grain of sand <em>on your scale</em>. You find your way onto one of these giants’ football-field-size teeth, and you <em>flick </em>the grain of sand into his kilometer-wide chasm of a mouth. And <em>that’s</em> supposed to change the trajectory of their future. It seems impossible.</p>
<p>“And yet.”</p>
<p>“And yet. With some very clever maneuvers, we flicked our little particle into the mouth of an unlucky giant, and it did the trick. By the way, we were dying when you blamed it on a <em>pangolin </em>of all things.”</p>
<p>“He seemed guilty. I still don’t understand why you brought <em>me</em> down here.”</p>
<p>“We weren’t originally planning to reveal any of this backstory to your world. But after watching things unfold for the first few weeks, we don’t see enough of the effect we were hoping for. Maybe if your world learns that there are other worlds out there—worlds that did manage to triumph in the wisdom game—it’ll empower the wise voices to stand up with a bit more courage in this struggle and in even greater challenges that lie ahead. It’s a long shot, but these are desperate times.”</p>
<p>“I guess it’s worth a try. I’ll write a post explaining what I learned from you.”</p>
<p>“And tweet out the post and send it out to your email list and stuff?”</p>
<p>“Eh. Fine.”</p>
<p>“Ready to go back up to your life? Only 23 seconds have passed there since you shrunk down.”</p>
<p>“Yeah let’s do it.”</p>
<p>Layla and I moved ourselves on top of the big metal oval.</p>
<p>“I’m going to increase my size 10,000-fold and yours 100,000,000-fold, so you can go back home in one shot…which is a good thing because transporting up is even worse than transporting down.”</p>
<p>“Great…”</p>
<p>“Ready?”</p>
<p>“I have one more question.”</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>“How many tiers are there?” I asked.</p>
<p>“No one knows for sure. The people on this atomic-level tier tell us they know of at least one tier below them, though they won’t tell us more than that. And no one seems to know about tiers above yours. Your world is thinking about that, with all your multiverse talk. We’re still working on that one too.”</p>
<p>“If you ever figure it out, will you let me know?”</p>
<p>“One thing at a time.”</p>
<p>We touched our thumbs to the metal.</p>
<p>___________</p>
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<h3>More Posts:</h3>
<p>As discussed, <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/why-bugs-ruin-everything.html"><strong>why bugs ruin everything</strong></a>.</p>
<p>Another time <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html"><strong>we transported ourselves</strong></a>.</p>
<p>And <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/04/stick-figure-puzzle.html"><strong>a puzzle</strong></a> for your quarantine.</p>
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 You Won’t Believe My Morning

 March 25, 2020 By Tim Urban


 You won’t believe my morning.

 I went out on my daily excursion to sit on the front step of my building for ten minutes holding my breath when people walked by. Normally, I spend the time diddling around my phone, but I forgot to bring my phone this morning, so I just looked around.

 As I was taking in the emptiness of the street, a little glint caught my eye in a patch of dirt on the sidewalk. I bent over to look closer, and there was the glint again. It wasn’t a normal glint like from a shiny rock or a piece of metal—it was a little pinprick of flashing light.

 Intrigued, I was now on all fours looking closer. And I saw the most surreal thing.

 Tiny houses.

 Like tiny houses. Each about a millimeter high, like ornately carved grains of sand.

 I was either dreaming or looking at the coolest, cutest little art project ever.

 As I examined the microscopic village, I noticed what looked like a scrawl of teeny letters on the dirt next to the houses. It said:

 PUT YOUR THUMB ON THE OVAL

 Now fully having the time of my life, I looked around for an oval. I searched for a few minutes with no luck until I saw, a bit outside the area where the houses were, a little strip of silver, maybe two millimeters long and a millimeter wide. Careful not to damage the houses, I put my thumb on it.

 I won’t be able to accurately describe what happened next, but I’ll try my best. Imagine if the ground underneath you suddenly felt like a furiously spinning liquid whirlpool, combined with the feeling of freefalling, combined with your entire visual field turning into a blurry gray, combined with the worst nausea of your life.

 And then, just as fast as it started, it all stopped. I cowered for a few seconds trying to catch my breath, and when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in New York anymore.

 I was on a pastoral ranch, surrounded by big log cabins and a bunch of people staring down at me as I looked up at them, still on all fours. One of the people said to me, “Are you okay?”

 “I feel okay, but I’m having severe hallucinations.”

 They all started cheering and hugging and high-fiving each other.

 “Are you doctors?” I asked.

 “He thinks he has the virus,” one of them said, and they all roared with laughter.

 A woman shushed the crowd and said, “Okay, back to work everyone. I’ll give him the briefing.”

 The others left, and the woman smiled at me. “I’m Layla.”

 “Hi Layla. Do I have coronavirus?” I asked.

 “You don’t have coronavirus,” she said. “You’re just tiny. We shrunk you to 1/10,000th of your normal size. You haven’t moved anywhere, you’ve just gotten much smaller.”

 “Fuck,” I explained.

 “Yeah, I imagine it’s a lot to take in,” she said. “Let me try to clear things up. There are different tiers of human life, not just the one you’re used to. Our tier is exactly 1/10,000th the size of yours. In yours, people are about 180 centimeters tall. Here, we’re about 0.18 millimeters tall. We’d say 180 micrometers tall, but I know in your world, micrometers don’t mean very much.”

 I stared at her. “You’re telling me I’m 0.18 millimeters tall right now?”

 “Correct,” she said. “About half the size of a dust mite, or a little taller than the width of a human hair up in your world. A person in your world with really good eyesight could barely see you, if they looked closely. And see that house over there?” She pointed to a large, three-story house. “In the scale you’re used to, that would be about 10 meters high. Here, it’s about the size of a cubic millimeter—the size of a grain of sand on the sidewalk. Some of our houses were actually carved from grains of sand.”

 “Hold on.” I stopped her. “I’m very scared of bugs. I wrote a whole post about it once. Are there giant bugs here?”

 “Yes and no. There are no bugs in our village because we lined the perimeter with a poison that kills any insects that come too close. But you wouldn’t want to walk too far away from the houses—about three centimeters from here, you’ll cross that barrier and run into things you won’t like.”

 “How about flying bugs?” I asked diligently.

 “Oh, I haven’t mentioned time yet. Okay so time here moves 100 times faster than it does up on your tier. Time scales up inversely with the square root of the size difference. So 1/10,000th of the size means 100X faster time. So when a flying insect starts to descend into the village, our defense crew has over a minute here to handle the situation. They fire a jet of air at the insect that deflects it away from us. Same deal for dogs. Every year or two, a dog will pee on us. The defense crew keeps track of every dog walking by. At 1/100th the speed of our world, we first see an approaching dog about ten minutes before it gets near us, and by the time a peeing dog is lifting its leg over us, we’ve had plenty of time to draw the tarps, which roll over the entire village and cover everything—the same tarps we use every time it rains or snows.”

 “Good to know. But why am I here?”

 “Right, I was about to get to that. After a heated debate in the village, we voted to bring someone from your world here, because we wanted to show you something. We’ve been trying to catch someone’s eye in your world for three of your weeks. That’s almost six years here. That’s why everyone was so excited to see you.”

 “How did you catch my attention?”

 “With that.” She pointed at a tube on the roof of one of the houses that looked like large telescope. “That’s a super-powered laser that we’ve been trying to shine in people’s eyes as they walked by on the sidewalk. But no one noticed. Until today. Way out on the horizon, we piled boulders into the shapes of letters that spelled out the instructions, and you were dicking around just hard enough that you actually bent down to read them. We’re thankful.”

 “What was that oval in the instructions?”

 “Look down.”

 I was standing on a metallic oval about the size of a swimming pool.

 “This is our trans-tier station. When you touched this with your thumb, it shrunk you down to our tier.

 “Wait.” I looked up at her. “Do I live here now?”

 She laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ll send you back to your world in a little bit. Now come with me.”

 I walked with Layla towards the other side of the village. I looked around. Everyone was staring at me. Some people waved.

 “What’s that?” I asked Layla, pointing up at what looked like a sheet of color stretching into the sky.

 “That’s your apartment building. All you can see from here is the first brick. That band of light way up in the sky is the mortar between the first and second brick in the wall.”

 We walked into a small building and entered a room with a long white table in the middle. Layla turned towards a wall on the side of the room, and suddenly the outline of a square formed in the wall. The square moved outwards into the room and rotated downwards until it was parallel to the floor. Layla pulled a tweezer-like tool from her pocket and carefully pinched what looked like nothing a few centimeters above the panel.

 She walked over to me. “Open your palm.”

 She put her tweezers into my hand and dropped something the size of a grain of sand. I raised up my palm to look at it. It was reddish and fuzzy.

 “What is it?” I asked.

 “SARS-CoV-2. What you’ve been calling ‘coronavirus.’”

 I flung it across the room. “What the fuck.”

 Layla laughed, touched the square, and the little object flew back across the room into its spot above the square.

 “It can’t hurt you here. The viruses of your world are way too big to do any damage in our bodies.”

 I stared at her, trying to process the situation. “How do you know about coronavirus? And how did you…get one?”

 “Oh we know everything about your world. Your tier moves so slowly compared to ours that your technology is eons behind ours. Our tools have allowed us to watch your world since your prehistoric days. As for how we got a coronavirus particle, we didn’t get it—we made it.”

 “You made the coronavirus?”

 “Well, with a little help. Follow me.”

 Again I followed Layla, again dumbfounded, this time out of the building toward a fenced-in area outside. When we got close, a door in the fence opened and inside, we stood together on the edge of what looked like a barren circle of land.

 Layla opened her hand. The little virus was sitting neatly on her palm. “SARS-CoV-2 is a standard sized Coronavirus—about 120 nanometers in diameter. 120 nanometers is ridiculously small in your world, but in ours, you can roll it around in your fingers.

 “Cool…let me think about that for a minute.”

 “Wait, I can explain this better. In your world, this is a perfect size analogy:

 SARS-CoV-2 : grain of sand :: grain of sand : house

 In both cases, the relationship is 1-to-10,000, which is also the relationship of our world to yours. In your world, your apartment building is huge, a grain of sand is tiny, and this coronavirus is unfathomably microscopic. In ours, the virus is tiny, a grain of your sand is huge enough to live in, and your apartment building is unfathomably large.”

 “Makes sense.”

 “Now, what’s a virus made of? Atoms. And atoms are about 0.1 nanometers in diameter—about 1/1,000th of the diameter of a SARS-CoV-2 particle. That’s small even for us. An atom is almost as small for us as a virus is for you. Constructing a virus requires incredibly complex engineering and tools that can interact with the quantum field. We can’t do it ourselves.”

 “So how—”

 “Look down.”

 I looked at the ground.

 She pulled me toward the center of the circle of land and then pulled me to an abrupt stop.

 “Look closer.”

 I bent over as far as I could and strained my eyes. No. Fucking. Way.

 Another microscopic world.

 “Is that…”

 “Yup. That’s the tier below us. Give me your thumb.”

 She carefully placed the virus particle onto the ground. Then she guided my hand to the ground, touching both of our thumbs to a little metallic spot.

 Whirlpool. Falling. Gray. Nausea. Misery.

 I eventually got a hold of my trembling and drooling and opened my eyes. In every direction, as far as I could see, stretched a hazy blue-ish / purple-ish plane. It also began to dawn on me that I wasn’t standing or sitting on anything—I was floating.

 After about a minute of wondering what the hell was going on in my life, a patch of the sky darkened. The dark region became smaller and more defined until it condensed into Layla floating next to me.

 “Please don’t leave me again,” I said.

 “Sorry, my thumb hit the pad a split second later than yours did. Time moves 100 times faster here than up there, so you got to spend some reflective time here by yourself.”

 “Okay where are we?”

 “We’re outside your apartment building. Remember?”

 “Righttt. So what size are we?”

 “We went down the same jump you did when you transitioned from your world to ours—we shrunk to 1/10,000th of our previous size. So you’re now 18 nanometers tall. If you stood on the edge of a cross-section of a human hair, it would take you about two hours to walk across it.”

 “Jesus.”

 “Time here is now going by at 100X the speed of time in my world, which means it’s moving 10,000 times faster than the speed of time in yours. You could spend a year here and less than an hour would pass in your world.”

 “Kind of like Inception?”

 “Not really. Anyway, nothing down here works the way it does in our worlds. Like see how the ground is all eternal and purply?”

 “Yeah.”

 “That’s not really ground, and it’s not really purple. When you’re this small, there aren’t any solid objects in the sense you understand. And your eyes are too small now to perceive the visible light spectrum.”

 “So what the hell?”

 “I don’t really get it either. But the people who live here have incredibly advanced ways of manipulating the quantum field so we can feel like we’re intact humans, floating in place, seeing purple. They set it up this way because it’s something we can make sense of.”

 “That’s nice of them. Where are they all anyway?”

 “The thing is, they don’t like our world, and they really don’t like your world. They interact with us occasionally, when it’s necessary, but they’ll never allow you or anyone from your world to see them or know anything about how they live. This is actually the first time anyone from your world has been allowed down here, other than Andy Kaufman, who’s lived here since 1984.”

 “Then why am I allowed to be here?”

 “So I can show you this.”

 Layla straightened her arm in front of her, with her palm facing outwards. Her palm lit up and when it did, a bizarre-looking giant object was revealed in front of us.

 “This,” Layla said, “is SARS-CoV-2. Down here, it’s the size of a house.”

 I looked up at the vast virus in front of me. It looked nothing like it had when it was a fuzzy grain of sand in my hand. It was transparent, like a massive, intricately structured, sphere-shaped jellyfish. There was a kind of furious movement within the transparency, but I couldn’t see anything specific moving. It was confusing.

 Layla motioned for me to come close to the virus. She took my hand and placed my palm onto the virus’s almost invisible surface. It felt kind of like palming a grape bunch except instead of grapes it was tapioca balls like the ones in those bubble teas—if the tapioca balls were vibrating so vigorously that it felt a little like being mildly electroshocked, like when you put your finger in an electrical outlet. It was an unpleasant sensation, though not quite painful, and super weird and cool-feeling.

 “Pull one off,” Layla said.

 It took me a few tries to latch onto one of the atoms, because they’re “slippery” (quotes because there is no word for what it felt like, but “slippery” gets the general idea across), and when I finally got one and pulled, there was a lot of resistance. When I pulled it, it dragged the adjacent atoms along with it, and the harder I pulled, the more ferociously and unpleasantly it vibrated. Finally it snapped free. I looked at my fist—I had an atom.

 Layla smiled. “Cool right?”

 “So cool. Can I keep it?”

 “Sure good luck with that.”

 I was so awe-struck by so many things, I had forgotten how intensely confused I was.

 “Wait, so why did you make this?”

 She turned towards me. “As I said, because of the way time moves—”

 “Your world has been around a lot longer than ours.”

 “Yes. And this world we’re in now has been around a lot longer than mine. They know much more about everything than we do, and they can do things we can’t even begin to understand. The stuff they can do is so over our heads they can’t even explain it to us. And we’re that far ahead of your world.

 For a long time, as advanced as this world was, it relied on us to preserve our world for its own survival. It exists on a patch of dirt in our village. If our village were destroyed, they would be destroyed with it. But a while back, they worked out the technology for how to be location independent, which means they can move from wherever they are to any other place in the universe instantly.

 We don’t have that technology yet. We tried to learn from them, but we couldn’t grasp the fundamental ideas well enough to develop it ourselves. So we’re stuck in our location.”

 “In New York City?”

 “Yup. We migrated here in the 1800s when we determined it would be a good place to interface with your world, should the need ever arise. We’re also not the only people in our world. There are lots of villages like ours in different parts of the Earth. Once we connected with you, the others stopped broadcasting their location. There’s no reason for more than one of us to be revealed to your world.

 For most of time, Earth was a safe and stable home for our world. But over the last century, your world has been advancing exponentially in technology but remaining stagnant in wisdom. You’re rapidly gaining tremendous powers but still behaving like short-sighted primates. The voice of wisdom is there, but it’s being trampled over by political parties, religions, and nations too mired in blind conflict to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture.”

 “It’s funny you say that Layla. I’m actually writing a whole thing about—”

 “Oh I know. We did our research on everyone who lives in your vicinity so we’d know how to communicate with the person we brought to us if we caught someone’s attention. That’s why I’m speaking English and speaking in the odd way you do. Your little series is cute, even if it took us forever to read—but it will have limited effect. Your world is stubborn about growing up. And in the process of destroying yourselves, we believe you’ll destroy us as well.”

 “So you’re trying to kill us off with a pandemic.”

 “If we wanted to kill you off, you’d all be dead right now. It’s an option we hope we don’t have to use. We were once like you and we empathize with your struggle.

 We created this coronavirus to fall into a certain sweet spot—not damaging enough to destroy your world, but bad enough to cause a long and scary global crisis. Short of an alien attack, it is the one thing that could make all humans in your world feel like they’re on the same team against a common enemy. The first and most crucial step on the road to a long-lasting species is the epiphany that you truly are a single team, alone in a dark and dangerous universe. We’re hoping the virus can help push you in that direction.”

 “I feel like there was a better way to do this.”

 “We probably could have thought a little harder about it.”

 “Yeah cause it’s going pretty badly up there is the thing.”

 “Totes. Anyway, we couldn’t make the virus on our own. It’s hard enough to make something that small and complex that involves atomic and subatomic construction, but we wanted the virus to be precisely as harmful as it is. We needed help. The tier below us is less vulnerable to your world than we are, but for reasons I’m not entirely sure about, they also believe living in a multi-tiered ecosystem may be important in the future—so they share our interests. They agreed to build the virus for us.”

 “How did you manage to get the virus into our world?” I asked.

 “It’s funny. You have to imagine it from our perspective. If you’re us, the world you’re planning to transform is a planet with nearly an AU diameter, full of 18-kilometer tall people—people so tall, your world’s airplanes could accidentally fly into their belly buttons. Now imagine you’re standing on that planet, smaller than one of their dust mites, pinching between your fingers something the size of a grain of sand on your scale. You find your way onto one of these giants’ football-field-size teeth, and you flick the grain of sand into his kilometer-wide chasm of a mouth. And that’s supposed to change the trajectory of their future. It seems impossible.

 “And yet.”

 “And yet. With some very clever maneuvers, we flicked our little particle into the mouth of an unlucky giant, and it did the trick. By the way, we were dying when you blamed it on a pangolin of all things.”

 “He seemed guilty. I still don’t understand why you brought me down here.”

 “We weren’t originally planning to reveal any of this backstory to your world. But after watching things unfold for the first few weeks, we don’t see enough of the effect we were hoping for. Maybe if your world learns that there are other worlds out there—worlds that did manage to triumph in the wisdom game—it’ll empower the wise voices to stand up with a bit more courage in this struggle and in even greater challenges that lie ahead. It’s a long shot, but these are desperate times.”

 “I guess it’s worth a try. I’ll write a post explaining what I learned from you.”

 “And tweet out the post and send it out to your email list and stuff?”

 “Eh. Fine.”

 “Ready to go back up to your life? Only 23 seconds have passed there since you shrunk down.”

 “Yeah let’s do it.”

 Layla and I moved ourselves on top of the big metal oval.

 “I’m going to increase my size 10,000-fold and yours 100,000,000-fold, so you can go back home in one shot…which is a good thing because transporting up is even worse than transporting down.”

 “Great…”

 “Ready?”

 “I have one more question.”

 “Yes?”

 “How many tiers are there?” I asked.

 “No one knows for sure. The people on this atomic-level tier tell us they know of at least one tier below them, though they won’t tell us more than that. And no one seems to know about tiers above yours. Your world is thinking about that, with all your multiverse talk. We’re still working on that one too.”

 “If you ever figure it out, will you let me know?”

 “One thing at a time.”

 We touched our thumbs to the metal.

 ___________

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 * 
You won’t believe my morning.
I went out on my daily excursion to sit on the front step of my building for ten minutes holding my breath when people walked by. Normally, I spend the time diddling around my phone, but I forgot to bring my phone this morning, so I just looked around.
As I was taking in the emptiness of the street, a little glint caught my eye in a patch of dirt on the sidewalk. I bent over to look closer, and there was the glint again. It wasn’t a normal glint like from a shiny rock or a piece of metal—it was a little pinprick of flashing light.
Intrigued, I was now on all fours looking closer. And I saw the most surreal thing.
 Tiny houses. 
Like tiny houses. Each about a millimeter high, like ornately carved grains of sand.
I was either dreaming or looking at the coolest, cutest little art project ever.
As I examined the microscopic village, I noticed what looked like a scrawl of teeny letters on the dirt next to the houses. It said:
PUT YOUR THUMB ON THE OVAL
Now fully having the time of my life, I looked around for an oval. I searched for a few minutes with no luck until I saw, a bit outside the area where the houses were, a little strip of silver, maybe two millimeters long and a millimeter wide. Careful not to damage the houses, I put my thumb on it.
I won’t be able to accurately describe what happened next, but I’ll try my best. Imagine if the ground underneath you suddenly felt like a furiously spinning liquid whirlpool, combined with the feeling of freefalling, combined with your entire visual field turning into a blurry gray, combined with the worst nausea of your life.
And then, just as fast as it started, it all stopped. I cowered for a few seconds trying to catch my breath, and when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in New York anymore.
I was on a pastoral ranch, surrounded by big log cabins and a bunch of people staring down at me as I looked up at them, still on all fours. One of the people said to me, “Are you okay?”
“I feel okay, but I’m having severe hallucinations.”
They all started cheering and hugging and high-fiving each other.
“Are you doctors?” I asked.
“He thinks he has the virus,” one of them said, and they all roared with laughter.
A woman shushed the crowd and said, “Okay, back to work everyone. I’ll give him the briefing.”
The others left, and the woman smiled at me. “I’m Layla.”
“Hi Layla. Do I have coronavirus?” I asked.
“You don’t have coronavirus,” she said. “You’re just tiny. We shrunk you to 1/10,000th of your normal size. You haven’t moved anywhere, you’ve just gotten much smaller.”
“Fuck,” I explained.
“Yeah, I imagine it’s a lot to take in,” she said. “Let me try to clear things up. There are different tiers of human life, not just the one you’re used to. Our tier is exactly 1/10,000th the size of yours. In yours, people are about 180 centimeters tall. Here, we’re about 0.18 millimeters tall. We’d say 180 micrometers tall, but I know in your world, micrometers don’t mean very much.”
I stared at her. “You’re telling me I’m 0.18 millimeters tall right now?”
“Correct,” she said. “About half the size of a dust mite, or a little taller than the width of a human hair up in your world. A person in your world with really good eyesight could barely see you, if they looked closely. And see that house over there?” She pointed to a large, three-story house. “In the scale you’re used to, that would be about 10 meters high. Here, it’s about the size of a cubic millimeter—the size of a grain of sand on the sidewalk. Some of our houses were actually carved from grains of sand.”
“Hold on.” I stopped her. “I’m very scared of bugs. I wrote a whole post about it once. Are there giant bugs here?”
“Yes and no. There are no bugs in our village because we lined the perimeter with a poison that kills any insects that come too close. But you wouldn’t want to walk too far away from the houses—about three centimeters from here, you’ll cross that barrier and run into things you won’t like.”
“How about flying bugs?” I asked diligently.
“Oh, I haven’t mentioned time yet. Okay so time here moves 100 times faster than it does up on your tier. Time scales up inversely with the square root of the size difference. So 1/10,000th of the size means 100X faster time. So when a flying insect starts to descend into the village, our defense crew has over a minute here to handle the situation. They fire a jet of air at the insect that deflects it away from us. Same deal for dogs. Every year or two, a dog will pee on us. The defense crew keeps track of every dog walking by. At 1/100th the speed of our world, we first see an approaching dog about ten minutes before it gets near us, and by the time a peeing dog is lifting its leg over us, we’ve had plenty of time to draw the tarps, which roll over the entire village and cover everything—the same tarps we use every time it rains or snows.”
“Good to know. But why am I here?”
“Right, I was about to get to that. After a heated debate in the village, we voted to bring someone from your world here, because we wanted to show you something. We’ve been trying to catch someone’s eye in your world for three of your weeks. That’s almost six years here. That’s why everyone was so excited to see you.”
“How did you catch my attention?”
“With that.” She pointed at a tube on the roof of one of the houses that looked like large telescope. “That’s a super-powered laser that we’ve been trying to shine in people’s eyes as they walked by on the sidewalk. But no one noticed. Until today. Way out on the horizon, we piled boulders into the shapes of letters that spelled out the instructions, and you were dicking around just hard enough that you actually bent down to read them. We’re thankful.”
“What was that oval in the instructions?”
“Look down.”
I was standing on a metallic oval about the size of a swimming pool.
“This is our trans-tier station. When you touched this with your thumb, it shrunk you down to our tier.
“Wait.” I looked up at her. “Do I live here now?”
She laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ll send you back to your world in a little bit. Now come with me.”
I walked with Layla towards the other side of the village. I looked around. Everyone was staring at me. Some people waved.
“What’s that?” I asked Layla, pointing up at what looked like a sheet of color stretching into the sky.
“That’s your apartment building. All you can see from here is the first brick. That band of light way up in the sky is the mortar between the first and second brick in the wall.”
We walked into a small building and entered a room with a long white table in the middle. Layla turned towards a wall on the side of the room, and suddenly the outline of a square formed in the wall. The square moved outwards into the room and rotated downwards until it was parallel to the floor. Layla pulled a tweezer-like tool from her pocket and carefully pinched what looked like nothing a few centimeters above the panel.
She walked over to me. “Open your palm.”
She put her tweezers into my hand and dropped something the size of a grain of sand. I raised up my palm to look at it. It was reddish and fuzzy.
“What is it?” I asked.
“SARS-CoV-2. What you’ve been calling ‘coronavirus.’”
I flung it across the room. “What the fuck.”
Layla laughed, touched the square, and the little object flew back across the room into its spot above the square.
“It can’t hurt you here. The viruses of your world are way too big to do any damage in our bodies.”
I stared at her, trying to process the situation. “How do you know about coronavirus? And how did you…get one?”
“Oh we know everything about your world. Your tier moves so slowly compared to ours that your technology is eons behind ours. Our tools have allowed us to watch your world since your prehistoric days. As for how we got a coronavirus particle, we didn’t get it—we made it.”
“You made the coronavirus?”
“Well, with a little help. Follow me.”
Again I followed Layla, again dumbfounded, this time out of the building toward a fenced-in area outside. When we got close, a door in the fence opened and inside, we stood together on the edge of what looked like a barren circle of land.
Layla opened her hand. The little virus was sitting neatly on her palm. “SARS-CoV-2 is a standard sized Coronavirus—about 120 nanometers in diameter. 120 nanometers is ridiculously small in your world, but in ours, you can roll it around in your fingers.
“Cool…let me think about that for a minute.”
“Wait, I can explain this better. In your world, this is a perfect size analogy:
SARS-CoV-2 : grain of sand :: grain of sand : house
In both cases, the relationship is 1-to-10,000, which is also the relationship of our world to yours. In your world, your apartment building is huge, a grain of sand is tiny, and this coronavirus is unfathomably microscopic. In ours, the virus is tiny, a grain of your sand is huge enough to live in, and your apartment building is unfathomably large.”
“Makes sense.”
“Now, what’s a virus made of? Atoms. And atoms are about 0.1 nanometers in diameter—about 1/1,000th of the diameter of a SARS-CoV-2 particle. That’s small even for us. An atom is almost as small for us as a virus is for you. Constructing a virus requires incredibly complex engineering and tools that can interact with the quantum field. We can’t do it ourselves.”
“So how—”
“Look down.”
I looked at the ground.
She pulled me toward the center of the circle of land and then pulled me to an abrupt stop.
“Look closer.”
I bent over as far as I could and strained my eyes. No. Fucking. Way.
 Another microscopic world.
 “Is that…”
“Yup. That’s the tier below us. Give me your thumb.”
She carefully placed the virus particle onto the ground. Then she guided my hand to the ground, touching both of our thumbs to a little metallic spot.
Whirlpool. Falling. Gray. Nausea. Misery.
I eventually got a hold of my trembling and drooling and opened my eyes. In every direction, as far as I could see, stretched a hazy blue-ish / purple-ish plane. It also began to dawn on me that I wasn’t standing or sitting on anything—I was floating.
After about a minute of wondering what the hell was going on in my life, a patch of the sky darkened. The dark region became smaller and more defined until it condensed into Layla floating next to me.
“Please don’t leave me again,” I said.
“Sorry, my thumb hit the pad a split second later than yours did. Time moves 100 times faster here than up there, so you got to spend some reflective time here by yourself.”
“Okay where are we?”
“We’re outside your apartment building. Remember?”
“Righttt. So what size are we?”
“We went down the same jump you did when you transitioned from your world to ours—we shrunk to 1/10,000th of our previous size. So you’re now 18 nanometers tall. If you stood on the edge of a cross-section of a human hair, it would take you about two hours to walk across it.”
“Jesus.”
“Time here is now going by at 100X the speed of time in my world, which means it’s moving 10,000 times faster than the speed of time in yours. You could spend a year here and less than an hour would pass in your world.”
“Kind of like Inception?”
“Not really. Anyway, nothing down here works the way it does in our worlds. Like see how the ground is all eternal and purply?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not really ground, and it’s not really purple. When you’re this small, there aren’t any solid objects in the sense you understand. And your eyes are too small now to perceive the visible light spectrum.”
“So what the hell?”
“I don’t really get it either. But the people who live here have incredibly advanced ways of manipulating the quantum field so we can feel like we’re intact humans, floating in place, seeing purple. They set it up this way because it’s something we can make sense of.”
“That’s nice of them. Where are they all anyway?”
“The thing is, they don’t like our world, and they really don’t like your world. They interact with us occasionally, when it’s necessary, but they’ll never allow you or anyone from your world to see them or know anything about how they live. This is actually the first time anyone from your world has been allowed down here, other than Andy Kaufman, who’s lived here since 1984.”
“Then why am I allowed to be here?”
“So I can show you this.”
Layla straightened her arm in front of her, with her palm facing outwards. Her palm lit up and when it did, a bizarre-looking giant object was revealed in front of us.
“This,” Layla said, “is SARS-CoV-2. Down here, it’s the size of a house.”
I looked up at the vast virus in front of me. It looked nothing like it had when it was a fuzzy grain of sand in my hand. It was transparent, like a massive, intricately structured, sphere-shaped jellyfish. There was a kind of furious movement within the transparency, but I couldn’t see anything specific moving. It was confusing.
Layla motioned for me to come close to the virus. She took my hand and placed my palm onto the virus’s almost invisible surface. It felt kind of like palming a grape bunch except instead of grapes it was tapioca balls like the ones in those bubble teas—if the tapioca balls were vibrating so vigorously that it felt a little like being mildly electroshocked, like when you put your finger in an electrical outlet. It was an unpleasant sensation, though not quite painful, and super weird and cool-feeling.
“Pull one off,” Layla said.
It took me a few tries to latch onto one of the atoms, because they’re “slippery” (quotes because there is no word for what it felt like, but “slippery” gets the general idea across), and when I finally got one and pulled, there was a lot of resistance. When I pulled it, it dragged the adjacent atoms along with it, and the harder I pulled, the more ferociously and unpleasantly it vibrated. Finally it snapped free. I looked at my fist—I had an atom. 
Layla smiled. “Cool right?”
“So cool. Can I keep it?”
“Sure good luck with that.”
I was so awe-struck by so many things, I had forgotten how intensely confused I was.
“Wait, so why did you make this?”
She turned towards me. “As I said, because of the way time moves—”
“Your world has been around a lot longer than ours.”
“Yes. And this world we’re in now has been around a lot longer than mine. They know much more about everything than we do, and they can do things we can’t even begin to understand. The stuff they can do is so over our heads they can’t even explain it to us. And we’re that far ahead of your world.
For a long time, as advanced as this world was, it relied on us to preserve our world for its own survival. It exists on a patch of dirt in our village. If our village were destroyed, they would be destroyed with it. But a while back, they worked out the technology for how to be location independent, which means they can move from wherever they are to any other place in the universe instantly.
We don’t have that technology yet. We tried to learn from them, but we couldn’t grasp the fundamental ideas well enough to develop it ourselves. So we’re stuck in our location.”
“In New York City?”
“Yup. We migrated here in the 1800s when we determined it would be a good place to interface with your world, should the need ever arise. We’re also not the only people in our world. There are lots of villages like ours in different parts of the Earth. Once we connected with you, the others stopped broadcasting their location. There’s no reason for more than one of us to be revealed to your world.
For most of time, Earth was a safe and stable home for our world. But over the last century, your world has been advancing exponentially in technology but remaining stagnant in wisdom. You’re rapidly gaining tremendous powers but still behaving like short-sighted primates. The voice of wisdom is there, but it’s being trampled over by political parties, religions, and nations too mired in blind conflict to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture.”
“It’s funny you say that Layla. I’m actually writing a whole thing about—”
“Oh I know. We did our research on everyone who lives in your vicinity so we’d know how to communicate with the person we brought to us if we caught someone’s attention. That’s why I’m speaking English and speaking in the odd way you do. Your little series is cute, even if it took us forever to read—but it will have limited effect. Your world is stubborn about growing up. And in the process of destroying yourselves, we believe you’ll destroy us as well.”
“So you’re trying to kill us off with a pandemic.”
“If we wanted to kill you off, you’d all be dead right now. It’s an option we hope we don’t have to use. We were once like you and we empathize with your struggle.
We created this coronavirus to fall into a certain sweet spot—not damaging enough to destroy your world, but bad enough to cause a long and scary global crisis. Short of an alien attack, it is the one thing that could make all humans in your world feel like they’re on the same team against a common enemy. The first and most crucial step on the road to a long-lasting species is the epiphany that you truly are a single team, alone in a dark and dangerous universe. We’re hoping the virus can help push you in that direction.”
“I feel like there was a better way to do this.”
“We probably could have thought a little harder about it.”
“Yeah cause it’s going pretty badly up there is the thing.”
“Totes. Anyway, we couldn’t make the virus on our own. It’s hard enough to make something that small and complex that involves atomic and subatomic construction, but we wanted the virus to be precisely as harmful as it is. We needed help. The tier below us is less vulnerable to your world than we are, but for reasons I’m not entirely sure about, they also believe living in a multi-tiered ecosystem may be important in the future—so they share our interests. They agreed to build the virus for us.”
“How did you manage to get the virus into our world?” I asked.
“It’s funny. You have to imagine it from our perspective. If you’re us, the world you’re planning to transform is a planet with nearly an AU diameter, full of 18-kilometer tall people—people so tall, your world’s airplanes could accidentally fly into their belly buttons. Now imagine you’re standing on that planet, smaller than one of their dust mites, pinching between your fingers something the size of a grain of sand on your scale. You find your way onto one of these giants’ football-field-size teeth, and you flick the grain of sand into his kilometer-wide chasm of a mouth. And that’s supposed to change the trajectory of their future. It seems impossible.
“And yet.”
“And yet. With some very clever maneuvers, we flicked our little particle into the mouth of an unlucky giant, and it did the trick. By the way, we were dying when you blamed it on a pangolin of all things.”
“He seemed guilty. I still don’t understand why you brought me down here.”
“We weren’t originally planning to reveal any of this backstory to your world. But after watching things unfold for the first few weeks, we don’t see enough of the effect we were hoping for. Maybe if your world learns that there are other worlds out there—worlds that did manage to triumph in the wisdom game—it’ll empower the wise voices to stand up with a bit more courage in this struggle and in even greater challenges that lie ahead. It’s a long shot, but these are desperate times.”
“I guess it’s worth a try. I’ll write a post explaining what I learned from you.”
“And tweet out the post and send it out to your email list and stuff?”
“Eh. Fine.”
“Ready to go back up to your life? Only 23 seconds have passed there since you shrunk down.”
“Yeah let’s do it.”
Layla and I moved ourselves on top of the big metal oval.
“I’m going to increase my size 10,000-fold and yours 100,000,000-fold, so you can go back home in one shot…which is a good thing because transporting up is even worse than transporting down.”
“Great…”
“Ready?”
“I have one more question.”
“Yes?”
“How many tiers are there?” I asked.
“No one knows for sure. The people on this atomic-level tier tell us they know of at least one tier below them, though they won’t tell us more than that. And no one seems to know about tiers above yours. Your world is thinking about that, with all your multiverse talk. We’re still working on that one too.”
“If you ever figure it out, will you let me know?”
“One thing at a time.”
We touched our thumbs to the metal.
___________
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As discussed,  why bugs ruin everything .
Another time  we transported ourselves .
And  a puzzle  for your quarantine.
You Won't Believe My Morning — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/03/my-morning.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
2024-02-22T22:02:35Z

<html><body><div><div>
	<main>
<div>
	
<div>
<div>
<figure></figure></div>
<pre>a self-help book for societies</pre>
</div>
<div>
<figure></figure></div>
<div>
<h2>Available NOW</h2>
<div>
<div>
<h3>ebook</h3>
<div>
<p>Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we’ve seen is Apple Books &gt; iPad &gt; sepia &gt; vertical scroll.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>audiobook</h3>
<div>
<p>Comes along with a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/audio">website</a> with the book’s most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>wait but why</h3>
<div><div>
<figure><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2023/02/wop-contents.html"></a></figure></div>
<p>You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h2>About the book</h2>
<p>Hi, I’m Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages:</p>
<div>
<figure><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/V7-full.png"></a></figure></div>
<p>See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I’m happy it’s over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2023/02/last-six-years.html">The full story behind the making of this book</a> | <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/homepage">Wait But Why homepage</a></strong></p>
</div>
</div>
</main>
</div></div></body></html>
a self-help book for societies
  
Available NOW
ebook
Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we’ve seen is Apple Books &gt; iPad &gt; sepia &gt; vertical scroll.
audiobook
Comes along with a website with the book’s most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.
wait but why
 
    
You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.
About the book
Hi, I’m Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages:
    
See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I’m happy it’s over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.
  The full story behind the making of this book | Wait But Why homepage
What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
2024-02-22T22:02:35Z

<html><body><div><div>
	<main>
<div>
	
<div>
<div>
<figure></figure></div>
<pre>a self-help book for societies</pre>
</div>
<div>
<figure></figure></div>
<div>
<h2>Available NOW</h2>
<div>
<div>
<h3>ebook</h3>
<div>
<p>Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we’ve seen is Apple Books &gt; iPad &gt; sepia &gt; vertical scroll.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>audiobook</h3>
<div>
<p>Comes along with a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/audio">website</a> with the book’s most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>wait but why</h3>
<div><div>
<figure><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2023/02/wop-contents.html"></a></figure></div>
<p>You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h2>About the book</h2>
<p>Hi, I’m Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages:</p>
<div>
<figure><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/V7-full.png"></a></figure></div>
<p>See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I’m happy it’s over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2023/02/last-six-years.html">The full story behind the making of this book</a> | <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/homepage">Wait But Why homepage</a></strong></p>
</div>
</div>
</main>
</div></div></body></html>
a self-help book for societies
  
Available NOW
ebook
Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we’ve seen is Apple Books &gt; iPad &gt; sepia &gt; vertical scroll.
audiobook
Comes along with a website with the book’s most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.
wait but why
 
    
You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.
About the book
Hi, I’m Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages:
    
See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I’m happy it’s over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.
  The full story behind the making of this book | Wait But Why homepage
What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future — Wait But Why
2017-04-20
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><em><strong>Note:</strong> If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can <a href="https://gum.co/neuralink">buy it here</a>.<br />
</em><em>And <a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/neuralink-cleanversion">here’s a G-rated version of the post</a>, appropriate for all ages.</em></p>
<p>_______________________</p>
<p>Last month, I got a phone call.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Okay maybe that’s not exactly how it happened, and maybe those weren’t his exact words. But after learning about the new company Elon Musk was starting, I’ve come to realize that that’s exactly what he’s trying to do.</p>
<p>When I wrote about <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">Tesla</a> and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">SpaceX</a>, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in <em>and</em> way, way out. In, on the technical challenges facing the engineers, out on the existential challenges facing our species. In on a snapshot of the world right now, out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like.</p>
<p>Not only is Elon’s new venture—Neuralink—the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do—Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will <em>be</em><em>.</em></p>
<p>The mind-bending <em>bigness </em>of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally <em>clicked</em>. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.</p>
<p>But before I can bring you in the time machine to show you what I found, we need to get in our zoom machine—because as I learned the hard way, Elon’s wizard hat plans cannot be properly understood until your head’s in the right place.</p>
<p>So wipe your brain clean of what it thinks it knows about itself and its future, put on soft clothes, and let’s jump into the vortex.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Contents</p>
<p><strong><a href="#part1">Part 1: The Human Colossus</a> </strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="#part2">Part 2: The Brain</a> </strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="#part3">Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces</a> </strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="#part4">Part 4: Neuralink’s Challenge</a> </strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="#part5">Part 5: The Wizard Era</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a></a><a href="#part6">Part 6: The Great Merger</a> </strong></p>
<p></p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Part 1: The Human Colossus</strong></p>
<p>600 million years ago, no one really did anything, ever.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/sponge.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/sponge-2.png"></a></p>
<p>The problem is that no one had any nerves. Without nerves, you can’t move, or think, or process information of any kind. So you just had to kind of exist and wait there until you died.</p>
<p>But then came the jellyfish.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jellyfish-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The jellyfish was the first animal to figure out that nerves were an obvious thing to make sure you had, and it had the world’s first nervous system—a nerve net.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jellyfish-3.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jellyfish-5.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jellyfish-6.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jellyfish-7.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jellyfish-8a.png"></a></p>
<p>The jellyfish’s nerve net allowed it to collect important information from the world around it—like where there were objects, predators, or food—and pass that information along, through a big game of telephone, to all parts of its body. Being able to receive and process information meant that the jellyfish could actually react to changes in its environment in order to increase the odds of life going well, rather than just floating aimlessly and hoping for the best.</p>
<p>A little later, a new animal came around who had an even cooler idea.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/flatworm-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The flatworm figured out that you could get a lot more done if there was someone in the nervous system who was in charge of everything—a nervous system boss. The boss lived in the flatworm’s head and had a rule that all nerves in the body had to report any new information directly to him. So instead of arranging themselves in a net shape, the flatworm’s nervous system all revolved around a central highway of messenger nerves that would pass messages back and forth between the boss and everyone else:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Flatworm-brain-1-2.jpg"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Flatworm-brain-2-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The flatworm’s boss-highway system was the world’s first central nervous system, and the boss in the flatworm’s head was the world’s first brain.</p>
<p>The idea of a nervous system boss quickly caught on with others, and soon, there were thousands of species on Earth with brains.</p>
<p>As time passed and Earth’s animals started inventing intricate new body systems, the bosses got busier.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/frog-1-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Frog-brain-1-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Frog-brain-2-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>A little while later came the arrival of mammals. For the Millennials of the Animal Kingdom, life was complicated. Yes, their hearts needed to beat and their lungs needed to breathe, but mammals were about a lot more than survival functions—they were in touch with complex feelings like love, anger, and fear.</p>
<p>For the reptilian brain, which had only had to deal with reptiles and other simpler creatures so far, mammals were just…a lot. So a second boss developed in mammals to pair up with the reptilian brain and take care of all of these new needs—the world’s first limbic system.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rodent-1-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rodent-brain-1-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Over the next 100 million years, the lives of mammals grew more and more complex, and one day, the two bosses noticed a new resident in the cockpit with them.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/primate-1-2.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Primate-brain-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>What appeared to be a random infant was actually the early version of the neocortex, and though he didn’t say much at first, as evolution gave rise to primates and then great apes and then early hominids, this new boss grew from a baby into a child and eventually into a teenager with his own idea of how things should be run.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/homonid-1-1.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Hominid-brain-1-3.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Hominid-brain-2-3.png"></a></p>
<p>The new boss’s ideas turned out to be really helpful, and he became the hominid’s go-to boss for things like tool-making, hunting strategy, and cooperation with other hominids.</p>
<p>Over the next few million years, the new boss grew older and wiser, and his ideas kept getting better. He figured out how to not be naked. He figured out how to control fire. He learned how to make a spear.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Spear.png"></a></p>
<p>But his coolest trick was <em>thinking</em>. He turned each human’s head into a little world of its own, making humans the first animal that could think complex thoughts, reason through decisions, and make long-term plans.</p>
<p>And then, maybe about 100,000 years ago, he came up with a breakthrough.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-1.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-2-3.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-3-3.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-4.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-5.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-6.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-7.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-8.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-9.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-10.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-11.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-12.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-13.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-14.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-15.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-16.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-17.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-18.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-19.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-20.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-21.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-22.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Rock-23.png"></a></p>
<p>The human brain had advanced to the point where it could understand that even though the sound “rock” was not <em>itself</em> a rock, it could be used as a <em>symbol</em> of a rock—it was a sound that <em>referred</em> to a rock. The early human had invented language.</p>
<p>Soon there were words for all kinds of things, and by 50,000 BC, humans were speaking in full, complex language with each other.</p>
<p>The neocortex had turned humans into magicians. Not only had he made the human head a wondrous internal ocean of complex thoughts, his latest breakthrough had found a way to translate those thoughts into a symbolic set of sounds and send them vibrating through the air into the heads of other humans, who could then decode the sounds and absorb the embedded idea into their own internal thought oceans. The human neocortex had been thinking about things for a long time—and he finally had someone to talk about it all with.</p>
<p>A neocortex party ensued. Neocortexes—fine—neocortices shared everything with each other—stories from their past, funny jokes they had thought of, opinions they had formed, plans for the future.</p>
<p>But most useful was sharing what they had <em>learned</em>. If one human learned through trial and error that a certain type of berry led to 48 hours of your life being run by diarrhea, they could use language to share the hard-earned lesson with the rest of their tribe, like photocopying the lesson and handing it to everyone else. Tribe members would then use language to pass along that lesson to their children, and their children would pass it to their own children. Rather than the same mistake being made again and again by many different people, one person’s “stay away from that berry” wisdom could travel through space and time to protect everyone else from having their bad experience.</p>
<p>The same thing would happen when one human figured out a new clever trick. One unusually-intelligent hunter particularly attuned to both star constellations and the annual migration patterns of wildebeest<a href="#footnote-1-6120">1</a> herds could share a system he devised that used the night sky to determine exactly how many days remained until the herd would return. Even though very few hunters would have been able to come up with that system on their own, through word-of-mouth, all future hunters in the tribe would now benefit from the ingenuity of one ancestor, with that one hunter’s crowning discovery serving as every future hunter’s <em>starting point</em> of knowledge.</p>
<p>And let’s say this knowledge advancement makes the hunting season more efficient, which gives tribe members more time to work on their weapons—which allows one extra-clever hunter a few generations later to discover a method for making lighter, denser spears that can be thrown more accurately. And just like that, every present and future hunter in the tribe hunts with a more effective spear.</p>
<p>Language allows the best epiphanies of the very smartest people, through the generations, to accumulate into a little collective tower of tribal knowledge—a “greatest hits” of their ancestors’ best “aha!” moments. Every new generation has this knowledge tower installed in their heads as their starting point in life, leading them to new, even better discoveries that build on what their ancestors learned, as the tribe’s knowledge continues to grow bigger and wiser. Language is the difference between this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Knowledge-growth-graph-1b.png"></a></p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Knowledge-growth-graph-2-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The major trajectory upgrade happens for two reasons. Each generation can learn a lot more new things when they can talk to each other, compare notes, and combine their individual learnings (that’s why the blue bars are so much higher in the second graph). And each generation can successfully pass a higher percentage of their learnings on to the next generation, so knowledge <em>sticks</em> better through time.</p>
<p>Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration. Hundreds of generations later, what started as a pro tip about a certain berry to avoid has become an intricate system of planting long rows of the stomach-friendly berry bushes and harvesting them annually. The initial stroke of genius about wildebeest migrations has turned into a system of goat domestication. The spear innovation, through hundreds of incremental tweaks over tens of thousands of years, has become the bow and arrow.</p>
<p>Language gives a group of humans a <em>collective intelligence </em>far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself. We think of the bow and arrow as a primitive technology, but raise Einstein in the woods with no existing knowledge and tell him to come up with the best hunting device he can, and he won’t be <em>nearly </em>intelligent or skilled or knowledgeable enough to invent the bow and arrow. Only a <em>collective </em>human effort can pull that off.</p>
<p>Being able to speak to each other also allowed humans to form complex social structures which, along with advanced technologies like farming and animal domestication, led tribes over time to begin to settle into permanent locations and merge into organized super-tribes. When this happened, each tribe’s tower of accumulated knowledge could be shared with the larger super-tribe, forming a super-tower. Mass cooperation raised the quality of life for everyone, and by 10,000 BC, the first cities had formed.</p>
<p>According to Wikipedia, there’s something called Metcalfe’s law, which states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” And they include this little chart of old telephones:<a href="#footnote2-1-6120">1</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Metcalfe-Network-Effect.svg_.png"></a></p>
<p>But the same idea applies to people. Two people can have one conversation. Three people have four unique conversation groups (three different two-person conversations and a fourth conversation between all three as a group). Five people have 26. Twenty people have 1,048,555.</p>
<p>So not only did the members of a city benefit from a <em>huge </em>knowledge tower as a foundation, but Metcalfe’s law means that the number of conversation possibilities now skyrocketed to an unprecedented amount of variety. More conversations meant more ideas bumping up against each other, which led to many more discoveries clicking together, and the pace of innovation soared.</p>
<p>Humans soon mastered agriculture, which freed many people up to think about all kinds of other ideas, and it wasn’t long before they stumbled upon a new, giant breakthrough: writing.</p>
<p>Historians think humans first started writing things down about 5 – 6,000 years ago. Up until that point, the collective knowledge tower was stored only in a network of people’s memories and accessed only through livestream word-of-mouth communication. This system worked in small tribes, but with a vastly larger body of knowledge shared among a vastly larger group of people, memories alone would have had a hard time supporting it all, and most of it would have ended up lost.</p>
<p>If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical <em>object</em>,<em> </em>like a stone, where it could live forever. When people began writing on thin sheets of parchment or paper, huge fields of knowledge that would take weeks to be conveyed by word of mouth could be compressed into a book or a scroll you could hold in your hand. The human collective knowledge tower now lived in physical form, neatly organized on the shelves of city libraries and universities.</p>
<p>These shelves became humanity’s grand instruction manual on everything. They guided humanity toward new inventions and discoveries, and those would in turn become new books on the shelves, as the grand instruction manual built upon itself. The manual taught us the intricacies of trade and currency, of shipbuilding and architecture, of medicine and astronomy. Each generation began life with a higher floor of knowledge and technology than the last, and progress continued to accelerate.</p>
<p>But painstakingly handwritten books were treated like treasures,<a href="#footnote-2-6120">2</a> and likely only accessible to the extreme elite (in the mid 15th century, there were only <a href="http://www.history.com/news/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-gutenberg-bible">30,000 books</a> in all of Europe). And then came another breakthrough: the printing press.</p>
<p>In the 15th century, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg#/media/File:Gutenberg.jpg">beardy</a> Johannes Gutenberg came up with a way to create multiple identical copies of the same book, much more quickly and cheaply than ever before. (Or, more accurately, when Gutenberg was born, humanity had already figured out the first 95% of how to invent the printing press, and Gutenberg, with that knowledge as his starting point, invented the last 5%.) (Oh, also, Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press, <a href="http://www.history.com/news/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-gutenberg-bible">the Chinese did</a> a bunch of centuries earlier. Pretty reliable rule is that everything you think was invented somewhere other than China was probably actually invented in China.) Here’s how it worked:</p>
<div>
<p><strong>It Turns Out Gutenberg Isn’t Actually Impressive Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>To prepare to write this blue box, I found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ojyCDRc8uc">this video</a> explaining how Gutenberg’s press worked and was surprised to find myself unimpressed. I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. While he had the letters all set up for that page, he’d make a bunch of copies. Then he’d spend forever manually rearranging the stamps (this is the “movable type” part) into the next page, and then do a bunch of copies of that. His first project was 180 copies of the Bible,<a href="#footnote-3-6120">3</a> which took him and his employees two years.</p>
<p><em>That</em>‘<em>s </em>Gutenberg’s thing? A bunch of stamps? I feel like I could have come up with that pretty easily. Not really clear why it took humanity 5,000 years to go from figuring out how to write to creating a bunch of manual stamps. I guess it’s not that I’m unimpressed with Gutenberg—I’m neutral on Gutenberg, he’s fine—it’s that I’m unimpressed with everyone else.</p>
</div>
<p>Anyway, despite how disappointing Gutenberg’s press turned out to be, it was a <em>huge </em>leap forward for humanity’s ability to spread information. Over the coming centuries, printing technology rapidly improved, bringing the number of pages a machine could print in an hour from about 25 in Gutenberg’s time<a href="#footnote-4-6120">4</a> up 100-fold to 2,400 by the early 19th century.<a href="#footnote2-2-6120">2</a>
</p><p>Mass-produced books allowed information to spread like wildfire, and with books being made increasingly affordable, no longer was education an elite privilege—millions now had access to books, and literacy rates shot upwards. One person’s thoughts could now reach millions of people. The era of mass communication had begun.</p>
<p>The avalanche of books allowed knowledge to transcend borders, as the world’s regional knowledge towers finally merged into one species-wide knowledge tower that stretched into the stratosphere.</p>
<p>The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Human-Colossus.png"></a></p>
<p>With the entire body of collective human knowledge in its brain, the Human Colossus began inventing things no human could have dreamed of inventing on their own—things that would have seemed like absurd science fiction to people only a few generations before.</p>
<p>It turned our ox-drawn carts into speedy locomotives and our horse-and-buggies into shiny metal cars. It turned our lanterns into lightbulbs and written letters into telephone calls and factory workers into industrial machines. It sent us soaring through the skies and out into space. It redefined the meaning of “mass communication” by giving us radio and TV, opening up a world where a thought in someone’s head could be beamed instantly into the brains of a billion people.</p>
<p>If an individual human’s core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus’s core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff even faster.</p>
<p>And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious invention yet.</p>
<p>The Colossus had figured out a long time ago that the best way to create value was to invent value-creating <em>machines</em>. Machines were better than humans at doing many kinds of work, which generated a flood of new resources that could be put towards value creation. Perhaps even more importantly, machine labor freed up huge portions of human time and energy—i.e. huge portions of the Colossus itself—to focus on innovation. It had already outsourced the work of our arms to factory machines and the work of our legs to driving machines, and it had done so through the power of its brain—now what if, somehow, it could outsource the work of the brain <em>itself </em>to a machine?</p>
<p>The first digital computers sprung up in the 1940s.</p>
<p>One kind of brain labor computers could do was the work of information storage—they were <em>remembering</em> machines. But we already knew how to outsource our memories using books, just like we had been outsourcing our leg labor to <a href="http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Horse-hand.png">horses</a> long before cars provided a far better solution. Computers were simply a memory-outsourcing upgrade.</p>
<p>Information-<em>processing </em>was a different story—a type of brain labor we had never figured out how to outsource. The Human Colossus had always had to do all of its own computing. Computers changed that.</p>
<p>Factory machines allowed us to outsource a physical process—we put a material in, the machines physically processed it and spit out the results. Computers could do the same thing for information processing. A software program was like a factory machine for information processes.</p>
<p>These new information-storage/organizing/processing machines proved to be useful. Computers began to play a central role in the day-to-day operation of companies and governments. By the late 1980s, it was common for individual people to own their own personal brain assistant.</p>
<p>Then came another leap.</p>
<p>In the early 90s, we taught millions of isolated machine-brains how to communicate with one another. They formed a worldwide computer network, and a new giant was born—the Computer Colossus.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Computer-Colossus-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The Computer Colossus and the great network it formed were like popeye spinach for the Human Colossus.</p>
<p>If individual human brains are the nerves and muscle fibers of the Human Colossus, the internet gave the giant its first legit nervous system. Each of its nodes was now interconnected to all of its other nodes, and information could travel through the system with light speed. This made the Human Colossus a faster, more fluid thinker.</p>
<p>The internet gave billions of humans instant, free, easily-searchable access to the entire human knowledge tower (which by now stretched past the moon). This made the Human Colossus a smarter, faster learner.</p>
<p>And if individual computers had served as brain extensions for individual people, companies, or governments, the Computer Colossus was a brain extension for the entire Human Colossus itself.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/HC-3.png"></a></p>
<p>With its first real nervous system, an upgraded brain, and a powerful new tool, the Human Colossus took inventing to a whole new level—and noticing how useful its new computer friend was, it focused a large portion of its efforts on advancing computer technology.</p>
<p>It figured out how to make computers faster and cheaper. It made internet faster and wireless. It made computing chips smaller and smaller until there was a powerful computer in everyone’s pocket.</p>
<p>Each innovation was like a new truckload of spinach for the Human Colossus.</p>
<p>But today, the Human Colossus has its eyes set on an even bigger idea than more spinach. Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism. But there’s one kind of brain labor computers still can’t quite do. <em>Thinking.</em></p>
<p>Computers can compute and organize and run complex software—software that can even learn on its own. But they can’t <em>think </em>in the way humans can. The Human Colossus knows that everything it’s built has originated with its ability to reason creatively and independently—and it knows that the <em>ultimate </em>brain extension tool would be one that can really, actually, legitimately <em>think</em>. It has no idea what it will be like when the Computer Colossus can think for itself—when it one day opens its eyes and becomes a <em>real </em>colossus—but with its core goal to create value and push technology to its limits, the Human Colossus is determined to find out.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>We’ll come back here in a bit. First, we have some learning to do.</p>
<p>As we’ve discussed <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">before</a>, knowledge works like a tree. If you try to learn a branch or a leaf of a topic before you have a solid tree trunk foundation of understanding in your head, it won’t work. The branches and leaves will have nothing to stick to, so they’ll fall right out of your head.</p>
<p>We’ve established that Elon Musk wants to build a wizard hat for the brain, and understanding why he wants to do that is the key to understanding Neuralink—and to understanding what our future might actually be like.</p>
<p>But none of that will make much sense until we really get into the truly mind-blowing concept of what a wizard hat is, what it might be like to wear one, and how we get there from where we are today.</p>
<p>The foundation for <em>that </em>discussion is an understanding of what brain-machine interfaces are, how they work, and where the technology is today.</p>
<p>Finally, BMIs themselves are just a larger branch—not the tree’s trunk. In order to really understand BMIs and how they work, we need to understand the brain. Getting how the brain works is our tree trunk.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-tree-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a></a>So we’ll start with the brain, which will prepare us to learn about BMIs, which will teach us about what it’ll take to build a wizard hat, and that’ll set things up for an insane discussion about the future—which will get our heads right where they need to be to wrap themselves around why Elon thinks a wizard hat is such a critical piece of our future. And by the time we reach the end, this whole thing should click into place.</p>
<p><strong>Part 2: The Brain</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-tree-Parts-2.png"></a></p>
<p>This post was a nice reminder of why I like working with a brain that looks nice and cute like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/cartoon-brain.png"></a></p>
<p>Because the real brain is extremely uncute and upsetting-looking. People are gross.</p>
<p>But I’ve been living in a shimmery, oozy, blood-vessel-lined Google Images hell for the past month, and now you have to deal with it too. So just settle in.</p>
<p>We’ll start outside the head. One thing I will give to biology is that it’s sometimes very satisfying,<a href="#footnote-5-6120">5</a> and the brain has some satisfying things going on. The first of which is that there’s a real Russian doll situation going on with your head.</p>
<p>You have your hair, and under that is your scalp, and then you think your skull comes next—but it’s actually like 19 things and then your skull:<a href="#footnote2-3-6120">3</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/A270654_1_En_2_Fig3_HTML.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Then below your skull,<a href="#footnote-6-6120">6</a> another whole bunch of things are going on before you get to the brain<a href="#footnote2-4-6120">4</a>:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Men1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Your brain has three membranes around it underneath the skull:</p>
<p>On the outside, there’s the <strong>dura mater</strong> (which means “hard mother” in Latin), a firm, rugged, waterproof layer. The dura is flush with the skull. I’ve heard it said that the brain has no pain sensory area, but the dura actually does—it’s about as sensitive as the skin on your face—and pressure on or contusions in the dura often account for people’s bad headaches.</p>
<p>Then below that there’s the <strong>arachnoid mater </strong>(“spider mother”), which is a layer of skin and then an open space with these stretchy-looking fibers. I always thought my brain was just floating aimlessly in my head in some kind of fluid, but actually, the only real space gap between the outside of the brain and the inner wall of the skull is this arachnoid business. Those fibers stabilize the brain in position so it can’t move too much, and they act as a shock absorber when your head bumps into something. This area is filled with spinal fluid, which keeps the brain mostly buoyant, since its density is similar to that of water.</p>
<p>Finally you have the <strong>pia mater </strong>(“soft mother”), a fine, delicate layer of skin that’s fused with the outside of the brain. You know how when you see a brain, it’s always covered with icky blood vessels? Those aren’t actually on the brain’s surface, they’re embedded in the pia. (For the non-squeamish, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak1FWodg5Nw">here’s a video</a> of a professor peeling the pia off of a human brain.)</p>
<p>Here’s the full overview, using the head of what looks like probably a pig:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/338317926b0c5edcd883a0ff35fa3f2b.jpg"></a></p>
<p>From the left you have the skin (the pink), then two scalp layers, then the skull, then the dura, arachnoid, and on the far right, just the brain covered by the pia.</p>
<p>Once we’ve stripped everything down, we’re left with this silly boy:<a href="#footnote2-5-6120">5</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/brain1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>This ridiculous-looking thing is the most complex known object in the universe—three pounds of what neuroengineer Tim Hanson calls “one of the most information-dense, structured, and self-structuring matter known.”<a href="#footnote2-6-6120">6</a> All while operating on only <a href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/neuron-computer-chips-could-overcome-power-limitations-digital">20 watts</a> of power (an <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-supercomputer-idUSKCN0J11VV20141117">equivalently powerful computer</a> runs on 24,000,000 watts).</p>
<p>It’s also what MIT professor Polina Anikeeva <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qi5uoNYXqg">calls</a> “soft pudding you could scoop with a spoon.” Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described it to me more scientifically, as “somewhere between pudding and jello.” He explained that if you placed a brain on a table, gravity would make it lose its shape and flatten out a bit, kind of like a jellyfish. We often don’t think of the brain as so smooshy, because it’s normally suspended in water.</p>
<p>But this is what we all are. You look in the mirror and see your body and your face and you think that’s you—but that’s really just the machine you’re riding in. What you actually are is a zany-looking ball of jello. I hope that’s okay.</p>
<p>And given how weird that is, you can’t really blame Aristotle, or the ancient Egyptians, or many others, for assuming that the brain was somewhat-meaningless “cranial stuffing” (Aristotle believed the heart was the center of intelligence).<a href="#footnote2-7-6120">7</a>
</p><p>Eventually, humans figured out the deal. But only kind of.</p>
<p>Professor Krishna Shenoy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuATvhlcUU4">likens</a> our understanding of the brain to humanity’s grasp on the world map <a href="https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0309/images/maps_4.jpg">in the early 1500s</a>.</p>
<p>Another professor, <a href="http://lichtmanlab.fas.harvard.edu/people/jeff-lichtman">Jeff Lichtman</a>, is even harsher. He starts off his courses by asking his students the question, “If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?” He says students give answers like three-quarters of a mile, half a mile, a quarter of a mile, etc.—but that he believes the real answer is “about three inches.”<a href="#footnote2-8-6120">8</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-do-you-work-4.png"></a></p>
<p>A third professor, neuroscientist <a href="https://www.morancerf.com/">Moran Cerf</a>, shared with me an old neuroscience saying that points out why trying to master the brain is a bit of a catch-22: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”</p>
<p>Maybe with the help of the great knowledge tower our species is building, we can get there at some point. For now, let’s go through what we do currently know about the jellyfish in our heads—starting with the big picture.</p>
<p><strong>The brain, zoomed out</strong></p>
<p>Let’s look at the major sections of the brain using a hemisphere cross section. So this is what the brain looks like in your head:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/sh202-hs.png"></a></p>
<p>Now let’s take the brain out of the head and remove the left hemisphere, which gives us a good view of the inside.<a href="#footnote2-9-6120">9</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-cross-section.png"></a></p>
<p>Neurologist <a href="http://www.kheper.net/topics/intelligence/MacLean.htm">Paul MacLean</a> made a simple diagram that illustrates the basic idea we talked about earlier of the reptile brain coming first in evolution, then being built upon by mammals, and finally being built upon again to give us our brain trifecta.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/triune-brain-theory.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Here’s how this essentially maps out on our real brain:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-cross-section-LABELED.png"></a></p>
<p>Let’s take a look at each section:</p>
<p><strong>The Reptilian Brain: The Brain Stem (and Cerebellum)</strong></p>
<p>This is the most ancient part of our brain:<a href="#footnote2-10-6120">10</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/brainstem-v2.png"></a></p>
<p>That’s the section of our brain cross section above that the frog boss resides over. In fact, a frog’s entire brain is similar to this lower part of our brain. Here’s a real frog brain:<a href="#footnote2-11-6120">11</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/frogside107.jpg"></a></p>
<p>When you understand the function of these parts, the fact that they’re ancient makes sense—everything these parts do, frogs and lizards can do. These are the major sections (click any of these spinning images to see a high-res version):</p>
<p><strong>The</strong> <strong>medulla oblongata</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Medulla_oblongata-1.gif"></a></p>
<p>The medulla oblongata really just wants you to not die. It does the thankless tasks of controlling involuntary things like your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, along with making you vomit when it thinks you’ve been poisoned.</p>
<p><strong>The pons</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Pons-1.gif"></a></p>
<p>The pons’s thing is that it does a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It deals with swallowing, bladder control, facial expressions, chewing, saliva, tears, and posture—really just whatever it’s in the mood for.</p>
<p><strong>The midbrain</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Midbrain.gif"></a></p>
<p>The midbrain is dealing with an even bigger identity crisis than the pons. You know a brain part is going through some shit when almost all its functions are already another brain part’s thing. In the case of the midbrain, it deals with vision, hearing, motor control, alertness, temperature control, and a bunch of other things that other people in the brain already do. The rest of the brain doesn’t seem very into the midbrain either, given that they created a ridiculously uneven “forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain” divide that intentionally isolates the midbrain all by itself while everyone else hangs out.<a href="#footnote2-12-6120">12</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/CNX_Psych_03_04_FMHBrain.jpg"></a></p>
<p>One thing I’ll grant the pons and midbrain is that it’s the two of them that control your voluntary eye movement, which is a pretty legit job. So if right now you move your eyes around, that’s you doing something specifically with your pons and midbrain.<a href="#footnote-7-6120">7</a>
</p><p><strong>The cerebellum</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Cerebellum.gif"></a></p>
<p>The odd-looking thing that looks like your brain’s scrotum is your cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”), which makes sure you stay a balanced, coordinated, and normal-moving person. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrt0Gq0zS4g">Here’s that rad professor again</a> showing you what a real cerebellum looks like.<a href="#footnote-8-6120">8</a>
</p><p><strong>The Paleo-Mammalian Brain: The Limbic System</strong></p>
<p>Above the brain stem is the limbic system—the part of the brain that makes humans so insane.<a href="#footnote2-13-6120">13</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/limbic.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The limbic system is a survival system. A decent rule of thumb is that whenever you’re doing something that your dog might also do—eating, drinking, having sex, fighting, hiding or running away from something scary—your limbic system is probably behind the wheel. Whether it feels like it or not, when you’re doing any of those things, you’re in primitive survival mode.</p>
<p>The limbic system is also where your emotions live, and in the end, emotions are also all about survival—they’re the more advanced mechanisms of survival, necessary for animals living in a complex social structure.</p>
<p>In other posts, when I refer to your <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Instant Gratification Monkey</a>, your <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">Social Survival Mammoth</a>, and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">all your other animals</a>—I’m usually referring to your limbic system. Anytime there’s an internal battle going on in your head, it’s likely that the limbic system’s role is urging you to do the thing you’ll later regret doing.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that gaining control over your limbic system is both the definition of maturity and the core human struggle. It’s not that we would be better off without our limbic systems—limbic systems are half of what makes us distinctly human, and most of the fun of life is related to emotions and/or fulfilling your animal needs—it’s just that your limbic system doesn’t get that you live in a civilization, and if you let it run your life too much, it’ll quickly ruin your life.</p>
<p>Anyway, let’s take a closer look at it. There are a lot of little parts of the limbic system, but we’ll keep it to the biggest celebrities:</p>
<p><strong>The amygdala</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Amygdala.gif"></a></p>
<p>The amygdala is kind of an emotional wreck of a brain structure. It deals with anxiety, sadness, and our responses to fear. There are two amygdalae, and oddly, the left one has been shown to be more balanced, sometimes producing happy feelings in addition to the usual angsty ones, while the right one is always in a bad mood.</p>
<p><strong>The hippocampus</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Hippocampus.gif"></a></p>
<p>Your hippocampus (Greek for “seahorse” because it <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus#/media/File:Hippocampus_and_seahorse_cropped.JPG">looks like one</a>) is like a scratch board for memory. When rats start to memorize directions in a maze, the memory gets encoded in their hippocampus—quite literally. Different parts of the rat’s two hippocampi will fire during different parts of the maze, since each section of the maze is stored in its own section of the hippocampus. But if after learning one maze, the rat is given other tasks and is brought back to the original maze a year later, it will have a hard time remembering it, because the hippocampus scratch board has been mostly wiped of the memory so as to free itself up for new memories.</p>
<p>The condition in the movie <em>Memento</em> is a real thing—anterograde amnesia—and it’s caused by damage to the hippocampus. Alzheimer’s also starts in the hippocampus before working its way through many parts of the brain, which is why, of the slew of devastating effects of the disease, diminished memory happens first.</p>
<p><strong>The t</strong><strong>halamus</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Thalamus.gif"></a></p>
<p>In its central position in the brain, the thalamus also serves as a sensory middleman that receives information from your sensory organs and sends them to your cortex for processing. When you’re sleeping, the thalamus goes to sleep with you, which means the sensory middleman is off duty. That’s why in a deep sleep, some sound or light or touch often will not wake you up. If you want to wake someone up who’s in a deep sleep, you have to be aggressive enough to wake their thalamus up.</p>
<p>The exception is your sense of smell, which is the one sense that bypasses the thalamus. That’s why smelling salts are used to wake up a passed-out person. While we’re here, cool fact: smell is the function of the <strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_bulb#/media/File:Head_olfactory_nerve_-_olfactory_bulb_en.png">olfactory bulb</a> </strong>and is the most ancient of the senses. Unlike the other senses, smell is located deep in the limbic system, where it works closely with the hippocampus and amygdala—which is why smell is so closely tied to memory and emotion.</p>
<p><strong>The Neo-Mammalian Brain: The Cortex</strong></p>
<p>Finally, we arrive at the cortex. The cerebral cortex. The neocortex. The cerebrum. The pallium.</p>
<p>The most important part of the whole brain can’t figure out what its name is. Here’s what’s happening:</p>
<div>
<p><strong>The What the Hell is it Actually Called Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>The<strong> cerebrum </strong>is the whole big top/outside part of the brain but it also technically includes some of the internal parts too.</p>
<p><strong>Cortex </strong>means “bark” in Latin and is the word used for the outer layer of many organs, not just the brain. The outside of the cerebellum is the cerebellar cortex. And the outside of the cerebrum is the <strong>cerebral cortex.</strong> Only mammals have cerebral cortices. The equivalent part of the brain in reptiles is called the <strong>pallium. </strong></p>
<p>The <strong>neocortex </strong>is often used interchangeably with “cerebral cortex,” but it’s technically the outer layers of the cerebral cortex that are especially developed in more advanced mammals. The other parts are called the allocortex.</p>
<p>In the rest of this post, we’ll be mostly referring to the neocortex <strong>but we’ll just call it the cortex, </strong>since that’s the least annoying way to do it for everyone.</p>
</div>
<p>The cortex is in charge of basically everything—processing what you see, hear, and feel, along with language, movement, thinking, planning, and personality.</p>
<p>It’s divided into four lobes:<a href="#footnote2-14-6120">14</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/lobes2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>It’s pretty unsatisfying to describe what they each do, because they each do so many things and there’s a lot of overlap, but to oversimplify:</p>
<p>The <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Frontal_lobe.gif"><strong>frontal lobe </strong></a>(click the words to see a gif)<strong> </strong>handles your personality, along with a lot of what we think of as “thinking”—reasoning, planning, and executive function. In particular, a lot of your thinking takes place in the front part of the frontal lobe, called the <strong>prefrontal cortex</strong>—the adult in your head. The prefrontal cortex is the other character in those internal battles that go on in your life. The rational decision-maker trying to get you to do your work. The authentic voice trying to get you to stop worrying so much what others think and just be yourself. The higher being who wishes you’d stop sweating the small stuff.</p>
<p>As if that’s not enough to worry about, the frontal lobe is also in charge of your body’s movement. The top strip of the frontal lobe is your <strong>primary motor cortex.</strong><a href="#footnote2-15-6120">15</a>
</p><p><a href="https://www.getbodysmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Primary-Motor-Cortex-Labeled-713x550.png"></a></p>
<p>Then there’s the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Parietal_lobe_animation.gif"><strong>parietal lobe</strong></a> which, among other things, controls your sense of touch, particularly in the <strong>primary somatosensory cortex</strong>, the strip right next to the primary motor cortex.<a href="#footnote2-16-6120">16</a>
</p><p><a href="https://www.getbodysmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Primary-Other-Somatosenory-Cortex-Areas-695x550.png"></a></p>
<p>The motor and somatosensory cortices are fun because they’re well-mapped. Neuroscientists know exactly which part of each strip connects to each part of your body. Which leads us to the creepiest diagram of this post: the <em>homunculus</em>.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/152-KB-Homonculus-Sensory-and-Motor-Cortex.png"></a></p>
<p>The homunculus, created by pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, visually displays how the motor and somatosensory cortices are mapped. The larger the body part in the diagram, the more of the cortex is dedicated to its movement or sense of touch. A couple interesting things about this:</p>
<p>First, it’s amazing that more of your brain is dedicated to the movement and feeling of your face and hands than to the rest of your body combined. This makes sense though—you need to make incredibly nuanced facial expressions and your hands need to be unbelievably dexterous, while the rest of your body—your shoulder, your knee, your back—can move and feel things much more crudely. This is why people can play the piano with their fingers but not with their toes.</p>
<p>Second, it’s interesting how the two cortices are basically dedicated to the same body parts, in the same proportions. I never really thought about the fact that the same parts of your body you need to have a lot of movement control over tend to also be the most sensitive to touch.</p>
<p>Finally, I came across this shit and I’ve been living with it ever since—so now you have to too. A 3-dimensional homunculus man.<a href="#footnote2-17-6120">17</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Side-black.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Moving on—</p>
<p>The <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Temporal_lobe_animation2.gif">temporal lobe</a> </strong>is where a lot of your memory lives, and being right next to your ears, it’s also the home of your <strong>auditory cortex</strong><strong>. </strong></p>
<p>Last, at the back of your head is the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Occipital_lobe.gif"><strong>occipital lobe</strong></a><strong>, </strong>which houses your <strong>visual cortex</strong> and is almost entirely dedicated to vision.</p>
<p>Now for a long time, I thought these major lobes were <em>chunks</em> of the brain—like, segments of the whole 3D structure. But actually, the cortex is just the outer <em>two</em><em> millimeters </em>of the brain—the thickness of a nickel—and the meat of the space underneath is mostly just wiring.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>The Why Brains Are So Wrinkly Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>As we’ve discussed, the evolution of our brain happened by building outwards, adding newer, fancier features on top of the existing model. But building outwards has its limits, because the need for humans to emerge into the world through someone’s vagina puts a cap on how big our heads could be.<a href="#footnote-9-6120">9</a>
</p><p>So evolution got innovative. Because the cortex is so thin, it scales by increasing its surface area. That means that by creating lots of folds (including both sides <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Frontal_lobe_animation.gif">folding down into the gap</a> between the two hemispheres), you can more than triple the area of the brain’s surface without increasing the volume too much. When the brain first develops in the womb, the cortex is smooth—the folds form mostly in the last two months of pregnancy:<a href="#footnote2-18-6120">18</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FIGURE-2-Prenatal-development-of-the-human-brain-showing-a-series-of-embryonic-and-fetal.png"></a></p>
<p>Cool explainer of how the folds form <a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/03/d8/60/03d8603a8a23f473cda93722426cd9e5.jpg">here</a>.</p>
</div>
<p>If you could take the cortex off the brain, you’d end up with a 2mm-thick sheet with an area of 2,000-2,400cm<sup>2</sup>—about the size of a 48cm x 48cm (19in x 19in) square.<a href="#footnote-10-6120">10</a> A dinner napkin. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Guy-holding-napkin.png"></a></p>
<p>This napkin is where most of the action in your brain happens—it’s why you can think, move, feel, see, hear, remember, and speak and understand language. Best napkin ever.</p>
<p>And remember before when I said that you were a jello ball? Well the <em>you </em>you think of when you think of yourself—it’s really mainly your cortex. Which means you’re actually a napkin.</p>
<p>The magic of the folds in increasing the napkin’s size is clear when we put another brain on top of our stripped-off cortex:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-on-napkin.png"></a></p>
<p>So while it’s not perfect, modern science has a decent understanding of the big picture when it comes to the brain. We also have a decent understanding of the little picture. Let’s check it out:</p>
<p><strong>The brain, zoomed in</strong></p>
<p>Even though we figured out that the brain was the seat of our intelligence a long time ago, it wasn’t until pretty recently that science understood what the brain was made of. Scientists knew that the body was made of cells, but in the late 19th century, Italian physician Camillo Golgi figured out how to use a <a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnana.2016.00038/full">staining method</a> to see what brain cells actually looked like. The result was surprising:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/220px-GolgiStainedPyramidalCell.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That wasn’t what a cell was supposed to look like. Without quite realizing it yet,<a href="#footnote-11-6120">11</a> Golgi had discovered the neuron.</p>
<p>Scientists realized that the neuron was the core unit in the vast communication network that makes up the brains and nervous systems of nearly all animals.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists worked out <em>how </em>neurons communicate with each other.</p>
<p>An axon, the long strand of a neuron that carries information, is normally microscopic in diameter—too small for scientists to test on until recently. But in the 1930s, English zoologist J. Z. Young discovered that the squid, randomly, could change everything for our understanding, because squids have an unusually huge axon in their bodies that could be experimented on. A couple decades later, using the squid’s giant axon, scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley definitively figured out how neurons send information: the action potential. Here’s how it works.</p>
<p>So there are a lot of different kinds of neurons—<a href="#footnote2-19-6120">19</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/neuron_types.gif"></a></p>
<p>—but for simplicity, we’ll discuss the cliché textbook neuron—a pyramidal cell, like one you might find in your motor cortex. To make a neuron diagram, we can start with a guy:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuron-guy-1.png"></a></p>
<p>And then if we just give him a few extra legs, some hair, take his arms off, and stretch him out—we have a neuron.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuron-guy-2.png"></a></p>
<p>And let’s add in a few more neurons.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuron-guy-3.png"></a></p>
<p>Rather than launch into the full, detailed explanation for how action potentials work—which involves a lot of unnecessary and uninteresting technical information you already dealt with in 9th-grade biology—I’ll link to this great Khan Academy <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/neuron-nervous-system/a/the-synapse">explainer article</a> for those who want the full story. We’ll go through the very basic ideas that are relevant for our purposes.</p>
<p>So our guy’s body stem—the neuron’s <strong>axon</strong>—has a negative “resting potential,” which means that when it’s at rest, its electrical charge is slightly negative. At all times, a bunch of people’s feet keep touching<a href="#footnote-12-6120">12</a> our guy’s hair—the neuron’s <strong>dendrites</strong>—whether he likes it or not. Their feet drop chemicals called <strong>neurotransmitters</strong><a href="#footnote-13-6120">13</a> onto his hair—which pass through his head (the cell body, or<strong> soma</strong>) and, depending on the chemical, raise or lower the charge in his body a little bit. It’s a little unpleasant for our neuron guy, but not a huge deal—and nothing else happens.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuron-guy-4.png"></a></p>
<p>But if enough chemicals touch his hair to raise his charge over a certain point—the neuron’s “threshold potential”—then it triggers an <strong>action potential</strong>, and our guy is electrocuted.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuron-guy-5.png"></a></p>
<p>This is a binary situation—either <em>nothing </em>happens to our guy, or he’s fully electrocuted. He can’t be kind of electrocuted, or extra electrocuted—he’s either not electrocuted at all, or he’s fully electrocuted to the exact same degree every time.</p>
<p>When this happens, a pulse of electricity (in the form of a brief reversal of his body’s normal charge from negative to positive and then rapidly back down to his normal negative) zips down his body (the axon) and into his feet—the neuron’s <strong>axon terminals</strong>—which themselves touch a bunch of other people’s hair (the points of contact are called <strong>synapses</strong>). When the action potential reaches his feet, it causes them to release chemicals onto the people’s hair they’re touching, which may or may not cause those people to be electrocuted, just like he was.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuron-guy-6.png"></a></p>
<p>This is usually how info moves through the nervous system—chemical information sent in the tiny gap between neurons triggers electrical information to pass <em>through </em>the neuron—but sometimes, in situations when the body needs to move a signal extra quickly, neuron-to-neuron connections can themselves be electric.</p>
<p>Action potentials move at between 1 and 100 meters/second. Part of the reason for this large range is that another type of cell in the nervous system—a Schwann cell—acts like a super nurturing grandmother and constantly wraps some types of axons in layers of fat blankets called <strong>myelin sheath.</strong> Like this (takes a second to start):<a href="#footnote2-20-6120">20</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Myelinani.gif"></a></p>
<p>On top of its protection and insulation benefits, the myelin sheath is a major factor in the pace of communication—action potentials travel <em>much </em>faster through axons when they’re covered in myelin sheath:<a href="#footnote-14-6120">14</a><a href="#footnote2-21-6120">21</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ezgif.com-optimize-2.gif"></a></p>
<p>One nice example of the speed difference created by myelin: You know how when you stub your toe, your body gives you that one second of reflection time to think about what you just did and what you’re about to feel, before the pain actually kicks in? What’s happening is you feel both the sensation of your toe hitting against something and the sharp part of the pain right away, because sharp pain information is sent to the brain via types of axons that are myelinated. It takes a second or two for the dull pain to kick in because dull pain is sent via <em>unmyelinated</em> “C fibers”—at only around one meter/second.</p>
<p><strong>Neural Networks</strong></p>
<p>Neurons are similar to computer transistors in one way—they also transmit information in the binary language of 1’s (action potential firing) and 0’s (no action potential firing). But unlike computer transistors, the brain’s neurons are constantly changing.</p>
<p>You know how sometimes you learn a new skill and you get pretty good at it, and then the next day you try again and you suck again? That’s because what made you get good at the skill the day before was adjustments to the amount or concentration of the <em>chemicals</em> in the signaling between neurons. Repetition caused chemicals to adjust, which helped you improve, but the next day the chemicals were back to normal so the improvement went away.</p>
<p>But then if you <em>keep </em>practicing, you eventually get good at something in a lasting way. What’s happened is you’ve told the brain, “this isn’t just something I need in a one-off way,” and the brain’s neural network has responded by making <em>structural changes</em> to itself that last. Neurons have shifted shape and location and strengthened or weakened various connections in a way that has built a hard-wired set of pathways that know how to do that skill.</p>
<p>Neurons’ ability to alter themselves chemically, structurally, and even functionally, allow your brain’s neural network to optimize itself to the external world—a phenomenon called <em>neuroplasticity. </em>Babies’ brains are the most neuroplastic of all. When a baby is born, its brain has no idea if it needs to accommodate the life of a medieval warrior who will need to become incredibly adept at sword-fighting, a 17th-century musician who will need to develop fine-tuned muscle memory for playing the harpsichord, or a modern-day intellectual who will need to store and organize a tremendous amount of information and master a complex social fabric—but the baby’s brain is ready to shape itself to handle whatever life has in store for it.</p>
<p>Babies are the neuroplasticity superstars, but neuroplasticity remains throughout our whole lives, which is why humans can grow and change and learn new things. And it’s why we can form new habits and break old ones—your habits are reflective of the existing circuitry in your brain. If you want to change your habits, you need to exert a lot of willpower to override your brain’s neural pathways, but if you can keep it going long enough, your brain will eventually get the hint and alter those pathways, and the new behavior will stop requiring willpower. Your brain will have physically built the changes into a new habit.</p>
<p>Altogether, there are around 100 billion neurons in the brain that make up this unthinkably vast network—similar to the number of stars in the Milky Way and over 10 times the number of people in the world. Around 15 – 20 billion of those neurons are in the cortex, and the rest are in the animal parts of your brain (surprisingly, the random cerebellum has more than three times as many neurons as the cortex).</p>
<p>Let’s zoom back out and look at another cross section of the brain—this time cut not from front to back to show a single hemisphere, but from side to side:<a href="#footnote2-22-6120">22</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/brain-white-matter-grey-matter-cross-section.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Brain material can be divided into what’s called <strong>gray matter </strong>and <strong>white matter.</strong> Gray matter actually looks darker in color and is made up of the cell bodies (somas) of the brain’s neurons and their thicket of dendrites and axons—along with a lot of other stuff. White matter is made up primarily of wiring—axons carrying information from somas to other somas or to destinations in the body. White matter is white because those axons are usually wrapped in myelin sheath, which is fatty white tissue.</p>
<p>There are two main regions of gray matter in the brain—the internal cluster of limbic system and brain stem parts we discussed above, and the nickel-thick layer of cortex around the outside. The big chunk of white matter in between is made up mostly of the axons of cortical neurons. The cortex is like a great command center, and it beams many of its orders out through the mass of axons making up the white matter beneath it.</p>
<p>The coolest illustration of this concept that I’ve come across<a href="#footnote-15-6120">15</a> is a <a href="http://www.gregadunn.com/self-reflected/self-reflected-gallery/">beautiful set of artistic representations</a> done by Dr. Greg A. Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards. Check out the distinct difference between the structure of the outer layer of gray matter cortex and the white matter underneath it (click to view in high res):</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Self-Reflected-in-violets-1.jpg"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Motor-and-Parietal-cortex-2-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Those cortical axons might be taking information to another part of the cortex, to the lower part of the brain, or through the spinal cord—the nervous system’s superhighway—and into the rest of the body.<a href="#footnote-16-6120">16</a>
</p><p>Let’s look at the whole nervous system:<a href="#footnote2-23-6120">23</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/f7fa1bdddc896c2c635a1929c6578b745a6030c2.png"></a></p>
<p>The nervous system is divided into two parts: the <strong>central nervous system</strong>—your brain and spinal cord—and the <strong>peripheral nervous system</strong>—made up of the neurons that radiate outwards from the spinal cord into the rest of the body.</p>
<p>Most types of neurons are <strong>interneurons</strong>—neurons that communicate with other neurons. When you think, it’s a bunch of interneurons talking to each other. Interneurons are mostly contained to the brain.</p>
<p>The two other kinds of neurons are <strong>sensory neurons </strong>and <strong>motor neurons</strong>—those are the neurons that head down into your spinal cord and make up the peripheral nervous system. These neurons can be up to a <em>meter</em> long.<a href="#footnote-17-6120">17</a> Here’s a typical structure of each type:<a href="#footnote2-24-6120">24</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/afe8fa893b046e0dbd70425c079e2af3.511x537x1.png"></a></p>
<p>Remember our two strips?<a href="#footnote2-25-6120">25</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/motor-cortex-of-the-brain-1505972E27C6C96B962.png"></a></p>
<p>These strips are where your peripheral nervous system originates. The axons of sensory neurons head down from the somatosensory cortex, through the brain’s white matter, and into the spinal cord (which is just a massive bundle of axons). From the spinal cord, they head out to all parts of your body. Each part of your skin is lined with nerves that originate in the somatosensory cortex. A <strong>nerve</strong>, by the way, is a few bundles of axons wrapped together in a little cord. Here’s a nerve up close:<a href="#footnote2-26-6120">26</a>
</p><p></p>
<p>The nerve is the whole thing circled in purple, and those four big circles inside are bundles of many axons (here’s a helpful <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/main-qimg-3f670c6ad3bb29728c912a1abbec2d26.png">cartoony drawing</a>).</p>
<p>So if a fly lands on your arm, here’s what happens:</p>
<p>The fly touches your skin and stimulates a bunch of sensory nerves. The axon terminals in the nerves have a little fit and start action potential-ing, sending the signal up to the brain to tell on the fly. The signals head into the spinal cord and up to the somas in the somatosensory cortex.<a href="#footnote-18-6120">18</a> The somatosensory cortex then taps the motor cortex on the shoulder and tells it that there’s a fly on your arm and that it needs to deal with it (lazy). The particular somas in your motor cortex that connect to the muscles in your arm then start action potential-ing, sending the signals back into the spinal cord and then out to the muscles of the arm. The axon terminals at the end of those neurons stimulate your arm muscles, which constrict to shake your arm to get the fly off (by now the fly has already <a href="http://www.womansday.com/food-recipes/food-drinks/news/a50683/the-disgusting-reason-you-should-never-eat-something-a-fly-landed-on/">thrown up</a> on your arm), and the fly (whose nervous system now goes through its own whole thing) flies off.</p>
<p>Then your amygdala looks over and realizes there was a bug on you, and it tells your motor cortex to jump embarrassingly, and if it’s a spider instead of a fly, it also tells your vocal cords to yell out involuntarily and ruin your reputation.</p>
<p>So it seems so far like we do kind of actually understand the brain, right? But then why did that professor ask that question—<em>If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?</em>—and say the answer was <em>three inches?</em></p>
<p>Well here’s the thing.</p>
<p>You know how we totally get how an individual computer sends an email and we totally understand the broad concepts of the internet, like how many people are on it and what the biggest sites are and what the major trends are—but all the stuff in the middle—the inner workings of the internet—are pretty confusing?</p>
<p>And you know how economists can tell you all about how an individual consumer functions and they can also tell you about the major concepts of macroeconomics and the overarching forces at play—but no one can really tell you all the ins and outs of how the economy works or predict what will happen with the economy next month or next year?</p>
<p>The brain is kind of like those things. We get the little picture—we know all about how a neuron fires. And we get the big picture—we know how many neurons are in the brain and what the major lobes and structures control and how much energy the whole system uses. But the stuff in between—all that <em>middle </em>stuff about how each part of the brain actually does its thing?</p>
<p>Yeah we don’t get that.</p>
<p>What really makes it clear how confounded we are is hearing a neuroscientist talk about the parts of the brain we understand <em>best</em>.</p>
<p>Like the visual cortex. We understand the visual cortex pretty well because it’s easy to <em>map</em>.</p>
<p>Research scientist Paul Merolla described it to me:</p>
<p><em>The visual cortex has very nice anatomical function and structure. When you look at it, you literally see a map of the world. So when something in your visual field is in a certain region of space, you’ll see a little patch in the cortex that represents that region of space, and it’ll light up. And as that thing moves over, there’s a topographic mapping where the neighboring cells will represent that. It’s almost like having Cartesian coordinates of the real world that will map to polar coordinates in the visual cortex. And you can literally trace from your retina, through your thalamus, to your visual cortex, and you’ll see an actual mapping from this point in space to this point in the visual cortex.</em></p>
<p>So far so good. But then he went on:</p>
<p><em>So that mapping is really useful if you want to interact with certain parts of the visual cortex, but there’s many regions of vision, and as you get deeper into the visual cortex, it becomes a little bit more nebulous, and this topographic representation starts to break down. … There’s all these levels of things going on in the brain, and visual perception is a great example of that. We look at the world, and there’s just this physical 3D world out there—like you look at a cup, and you just see a cup—but what your eyes are seeing is really just a bunch of pixels. And when you look in the visual cortex, you see that there are roughly 20-40 different maps. V1 is the first area, where it’s tracking little edges and colors and things like that. And there’s other areas looking at more complicated objects, and there’s all these different visual representations on the surface of your brain, that you can see. And somehow all of that information is being bound together in this information stream that’s being coded in a way that makes you believe you’re just seeing a simple object.</em></p>
<p>And the motor cortex, another one of the best-understood areas of the brain, might be even more difficult to understand on a granular level than the visual cortex. Because even though we know which <em>general </em>areas of the motor cortex map to which areas of the body, the individual neurons in these motor cortex areas <em>aren’t</em> topographically set up, and the specific way they work together to create movement in the body is anything but clear. Here’s Paul again:</p>
<p><em>The neural chatter in everyone’s arm movement part of the brain is a little bit different—it’s not like the neurons speak English and say “move”—it’s a pattern of electrical activity, and in everyone it’s a little bit different. … And you want to be able to seamlessly understand that it means “Move the arm this way” or “move the arm toward the target” or “move the arm to the left, move it up, grasp, grasp with a certain kind of force, reach with a certain speed,” and so on. We don’t think about these things when we move—it just happens seamlessly. So each brain has a unique code with which it talks to the muscles in the arm and hand.</em></p>
<p>The <em>neuroplasticity </em>that makes our brains so useful to us also makes them incredibly difficult to understand—because the way each of our brains works is based on how that brain has shaped itself, based on its particular environment and life experience.</p>
<p>And again, those are the areas of the brain we understand the <em>best. </em>“When it comes to more sophisticated computation, like language, memory, mathematics,” one expert told me, “we really don’t understand how the brain works.” He lamented that, for example, the concept of one’s mother is coded in a different way, and in different parts of the brain, for every person. And in the<em> </em>frontal lobe—you know, that part of the brain where <em>you </em>really live—”there’s no topography at all.”<em> </em></p>
<p>But somehow, <em>none of this </em>is why building effective brain-computer interfaces is so hard, or so daunting. What makes BMIs so hard is that the engineering challenges are <em>monumental</em>. It’s <em>physically </em>working with the brain that makes BMIs among the hardest engineering endeavors in the world.</p>
<p>So with our brain background tree trunk built, we’re ready to head up to our first branch.</p>
<p><strong>Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-tree-Parts-3.png"></a></p>
<p>Let’s zip back in time for a second to 50,000 BC and kidnap someone and bring him back here to 2017.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok.png"></a></p>
<p>This is Bok. Bok, we’re really thankful that you and your people invented language.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-2.png"></a></p>
<p>As a way to thank you, we want to show you all the amazing things we were able to build because of your invention.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-3-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Alright, first let’s take Bok on a plane, and into a submarine, and to the top of the Burj Khalifa. Now we’ll show him a telescope and a TV and an iPhone. And now we’ll let him play around on the internet for a while.</p>
<p>Okay that was fun. How’d it go, Bok?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-4.png"></a></p>
<p>Yeah we figured that you’d be pretty surprised. To wrap up, let’s show him how we communicate with each other.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-5-1.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-6-1.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-7-2.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-8-2.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-9-1.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-10-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Bok would be shocked to learn that despite all the magical powers humans have gained as a result of having learned to speak to each other, when it comes to actually speaking to each other, we’re no more magical than the people of his day. When two people are together and talking, they’re using 50,000-year-old technology.</p>
<p>Bok might also be surprised that in a world run by fancy machines, the people who made all the machines are walking around with the same biological bodies that Bok and his friends walk around with. How can that be?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bok-11.png"></a></p>
<p>This is why brain-machine interfaces—a subset of the broader field of neural engineering, which itself is a subset of biotechnology—are such a tantalizing new industry. We’ve conquered the world many times over with our technology, but when it comes to our brains—our most central tool—the tech world has for the most part been too daunted to dive in.</p>
<p>That’s why we still communicate using technology Bok invented, it’s why I’m typing this sentence at about a 20th of the speed that I’m thinking it, and it’s why brain-related ailments still leave so many lives badly impaired or lost altogether.</p>
<p>But 50,000 years after the brain’s great “aha!” moment, that may finally be about to change. The brain’s next great frontier may be itself.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>There are many kinds of potential brain-machine interface (sometimes called a brain-computer interface) that will serve many different functions. But everyone working on BMIs is grappling with either one or both of these two questions:</p>
<p><strong>1) How do I get the right information out of the brain?</strong></p>
<p><strong>2) How do I send the right information into the brain?</strong></p>
<p>The first is about capturing the brain’s <em>output</em>—it’s about <strong>recording</strong> what neurons are saying.</p>
<p>The second is about <em>inputting </em>information into the brain’s natural flow or altering that natural flow in some other way—it’s about <strong>stimulating </strong>neurons.</p>
<p>These two things are happening naturally in your brain all the time. Right now, your eyes are making a specific set of horizontal movements that allow you to read this sentence. That’s the brain’s neurons outputting information to a machine (your eyes) and the machine receiving the command and responding. And as your eyes move in just the right way, the photons from the screen are entering your retinas and stimulating neurons in the occipital lobe of your cortex in a way that allows the image of the words to enter your mind’s eye. That image then stimulates neurons in another part of your brain that allows you to process the information embedded in the image and absorb the sentence’s meaning.</p>
<p>Inputting and outputting information is what the brain’s neurons <em>do</em>. All the BMI industry wants to do is get in on the action.</p>
<p>At first, this seems like maybe not <em>that </em>difficult a task? The brain is just a jello ball, right? And the cortex—the part of the brain in which we want to do most of our recording and stimulating—is just a napkin, located conveniently right on the outside of the brain where it can be easily accessed. Inside the cortex are around 20 billion firing neurons—20 billion oozy little transistors that if we can just learn to work with, will give us an entirely new level of control over our life, our health, and the world. Can’t we figure that out? Neurons are small, but we know how to split an atom. A neuron’s diameter is about 100,000 times as large as an atom’s—if an atom were a marble, a neuron would be a kilometer across—so we should probably be able to handle the smallness. Right?</p>
<p>So what’s the issue here?</p>
<p>Well on one hand, there’s something to that line of thinking, in that because of those facts, this <em>is </em>an industry where immense progress can happen. We <em>can </em>do this.</p>
<p>But only when you understand what actually goes on in the brain do you realize why this is probably the hardest human endeavor in the world.</p>
<p>So before we talk about BMIs themselves, we need to take a closer look at what the people trying to make BMIs are dealing with here. I find that the best way to illustrate things is to scale the brain up by exactly 1,000X and look at what’s going on.</p>
<p>Remember our cortex-is-a-napkin demonstration earlier?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-on-napkin.png"></a></p>
<p>Well if we scale that up by 1,000X, the cortex napkin—which was about 48cm / 19in on each side—now has a side the length of six Manhattan street blocks (or two avenue blocks). It would take you about 25 minutes to walk around the perimeter. And the brain as a whole would now fit snugly inside a two block by two block square—just about the size of Madison Square Garden (this works in length and width, but the brain would be about double the height of MSG).</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/outline-on-manhattan.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So let’s lay it out in the actual city. I’m sure the few hundred thousand people who live there will understand.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/brain-on-manhattan.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I chose 1,000X as our multiplier for a couple reasons. One is that we can all instantly convert the sizes in our heads. Every millimeter of the actual brain is now a meter. And in the much smaller world of neurons, every micron is now an easy-to-conceptualize millimeter. Secondly, it conveniently brings the cortex up to human size—its 2mm thickness is now two meters—the height of a tall (6’6”) man.</p>
<p>So we could walk up to 29th street, to the edge of our giant cortex napkin, and easily look at what was going on inside those two meters of thickness. For our demonstration, let’s pull out a cubic meter of our giant cortex to examine, which will show us what goes on in a typical cubic millimeter of real cortex.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-cube-1.png"></a></p>
<p>What we’d see in that cubic meter would be a <em>mess. </em>Let’s empty it out and put it back together.</p>
<p>First, let’s put the somas<a href="#footnote-19-6120">19</a> in—the little bodies of all the neurons that live in that cube.</p>
<p>Somas range in size, but the neuroscientists I spoke with said that the somas of neurons in the cortex are often around 10 or 15µm in diameter (µm = micrometer, or micron: 1/1,000th of a millimeter). That means that if you laid out 7 or 10 of them in a line, that line would be about the diameter of a human hair (which is about 100µm). On our scale, that makes a soma 1 – 1.5cm in diameter. A marble.</p>
<p>The volume of the whole cortex is in the ballpark of 500,000 cubic millimeters, and in that space are about 20 billion somas. That means an average cubic millimeter of cortex contains about 40,000 neurons. So there are 40,000 marbles in our cubic meter box. If we divide our box into about 40,000 cubic spaces, each with a side of 3cm (or about a cubic inch), it means each of our soma marbles is at the center of its own little 3cm cube, with other somas about 3cm away from it in all directions.</p>
<p>With me so far? Can you visualize our meter cube with those 40,000 floating marbles in it?</p>
<p>Here’s a microscope image of the somas in an actual cortex, using techniques that block out the other stuff around them:<a href="#footnote2-27-6120">27</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/B9781416050094500182_f10-06-9781416050094.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Okay not too crazy so far. But the soma is only a tiny piece of each neuron. Radiating out from each of our marble-sized somas are twisty, branchy dendrites that in our scaled-up brain can stretch out for three or four meters in many different directions, and from the other end an axon that can be over 100 meters long (when heading out laterally to another part of the cortex) or as long as a <em>kilometer</em> (when heading down into the spinal cord and body). Each of them only about a millimeter thick, these cords turn the cortex into a dense tangle of electrical spaghetti.</p>
<p>And there’s a lot going on in that mash of spaghetti. Each neuron has synaptic connections to as many as 1,000—sometimes as high as 10,000—other neurons. With around 20 billion neurons in the cortex, that means there are over 20 <em>trillion </em>individual neural connections in the cortex (and as high as a quadrillion connections in the entire brain). In our cubic meter alone, there will be over 20 million synapses.</p>
<p>To further complicate things, not only are there many spaghetti strands coming out of <em>each</em> of the 40,000 marbles in our cube, but there are thousands of other spaghetti strings passing through our cube from <em>other </em>parts of the cortex. That means that if we were trying to record signals or stimulate neurons in this particular cubic area, we’d have a lot of difficulty, because in the mess of spaghetti, it would be very hard to figure out which spaghetti strings belonged to <em>our </em>soma marbles (and god forbid there are <a href="http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Purkinje_cell_by_Cajal.png"><em>Purkinje</em> cells</a> in the mix).</p>
<p>And of course, there’s the whole neuroplasticity thing. The voltages of each neuron would be constantly changing, as many as hundreds of times per second. And the tens of millions of synapse connections in our cube would be regularly changing sizes, disappearing, and reappearing.</p>
<p>If only that were the end of it.</p>
<p>It turns out there are other cells in the brain called <strong>glial cells</strong>—cells that come in many different varieties and perform many different functions, like mopping up chemicals released into synapses, wrapping axons in myelin, and serving as the brain’s immune system. Here are some common types of glial cell:<a href="#footnote2-28-6120">28</a>
</p><p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/all_glia.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p>And how many glial cells are in the cortex? About the <em>same number as there are neurons.</em><a href="#footnote-20-6120">20</a> So add about 40,000 of these wacky things into our cube.</p>
<p>Finally, there are the blood vessels. In every cubic millimeter of cortex, there’s a total of a <em>meter </em>of tiny blood vessels. On our scale, that means that in our cubic meter, there’s a <em>kilometer</em> of blood vessels. Here’s what the blood vessels in a space about that size look like:<a href="#footnote2-29-6120">29</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nihms-666209-f0001.jpg"></a></p>
<div>
<p><strong>The Connectome Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>There’s an amazing project going on right now in the neuroscience world called the <a href="http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/">Human Connectome Project</a> (pronounced “connec-tome”) in which scientists are trying to create a complete detailed map of the entire human brain. Nothing close to this scale of brain mapping has ever been done.<a href="#footnote-21-6120">21</a>
</p><p>The project entails <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/science/28brain.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">slicing a human brain</a> into outrageously thin slices—around 30-<em>nano</em>meter-thick slices. That’s 1/33,000th of a millimeter (here’s a machine <a href="http://www.microscopedia.com/Content/Press/31977.jpg">slicing up</a> a mouse brain).</p>
<p>Anyway, in addition to producing some <a href="http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/gallery/">gorgeous images</a> of the “ribbon” formations axons with similar functions often form inside white matter, like—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/White-Matter-Fibers-HCP-Dataset-side-view-720x594.jpg"></a></p>
<p>—the connectome project has helped people visualize just how packed the brain is with all this stuff. Here’s a breakdown of all the different things going on in one tiny snippet of mouse brain (and this doesn’t even include the blood vessels):<a href="#footnote2-30-6120">30</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/gr3.jpg"></a></p>
<p>(In the image, E is the complete brain snippet, and F–N show the separate components that make up E.)</p>
</div>
<p>So our meter box is a jam-packed, oozy, electrified mound of dense complexity—now let’s recall that in reality, everything in our box actually fits in a cubic <em>millimeter.</em></p>
<p>And the brain-machine interface engineers need to figure out what the microscopic somas buried in that millimeter are saying, and other times, to stimulate <em>just </em>the right somas to get them to do what the engineers want. <em>Good luck with that.</em></p>
<p><em>We’d </em>have a super hard time doing that on our 1,000X brain. Our 1,000X brain that also happens to be a nice flat napkin. That’s not how it normally works—usually, the napkin is up on top of our Madison Square Garden brain and full of deep folds (on our scale, between five and 30 meters deep). In fact, less than a <em>third </em>of the cortex napkin is up on the surface of the brain—most is buried inside the folds.</p>
<p>Also, engineers are not operating on a bunch of brains in a lab. The brain is covered with all those Russian doll layers, including the skull—which at 1,000X would be around seven meters thick. And since most people don’t really want you opening up their skull for very long—and ideally not at all—you have to try to work with those tiny marbles as non-invasively as possible.</p>
<p>And this is all assuming you’re dealing with the cortex—but a lot of cool BMI ideas deal with the structures down below, which if you’re standing on top of our MSG brain, are buried 50 or 100 meters under the surface.</p>
<p>The 1,000X game also hammers home the sheer scope of the brain. Think about how much was going on in our cube—and now remember that that’s only<em> one 500,000th of the cortex</em>. If we broke our whole giant cortex into similar meter cubes and lined them up, they’d stretch 500km / 310mi—all the way to Boston and beyond. And if you made the trek—which would take over 100 hours of brisk walking—at any point you could pause and look at the cube you happened to be passing by and it would have all of this complexity inside of it. <em>All </em>of this is currently in your brain.</p>
<p><strong>Part 3A: How Happy Are You That This Isn’t Your Problem</strong></p>
<p>Totes.</p>
<p><strong>Back to Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces</strong></p>
<p>So how do scientists and engineers begin to manage this situation?</p>
<p>Well they do the best they can with the tools they currently have—tools used to record or stimulate neurons (we’ll focus on the recording side for the time being). Let’s take a look at the options:</p>
<p><strong>BMI Tools</strong></p>
<p>With the current work that’s being done, three broad criteria seem to stand out when evaluating a type of recording tool’s pros and cons:</p>
<p><strong>1) Scale </strong>– how many neurons can be simultaneously recorded</p>
<p><strong>2) Resolution </strong>– how detailed is the information the tool receives—there are two types of resolution, <strong>spatial</strong> (how closely your recordings come to telling you how individual neurons are firing) and <strong>temporal </strong>(how well you can determine <em>when </em>the activity you record happened)</p>
<p><strong>3) Invasiveness </strong>– is surgery needed, and if so, how extensively</p>
<p>The long-term goal is to have all three of your cakes and eat them all. But for now, it’s always a question of “which one (or two) of these criteria are you willing to completely fail?” Going from one tool to another isn’t an overall upgrade or downgrade—it’s a tradeoff.</p>
<p>Let’s examine the types of tools currently being used:</p>
<p><strong>fMRI</strong></p>
<p><strong>Scale: </strong>high (it shows you information across the whole brain)</p>
<p><strong>Resolution: </strong>medium-low spatial, very low temporal</p>
<p><strong>Invasiveness: </strong>non-invasive</p>
<p>fMRI isn’t typically used for BMIs, but it is a classic <em>recording </em>tool—it gives you information about what’s going on inside the brain.</p>
<p>fMRI uses MRI—magnetic resonance imaging—technology. MRIs, invented in the 1970s, were an evolution of the x-ray-based CAT scan. Instead of using x-rays, MRIs use magnetic fields (along with radio waves and other signals) to generate images of the body and brain. Like this:<a href="#footnote2-31-6120">31</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/f.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And this full set of cross sections, allowing you to see through an entire head.</p>
<p>Pretty amazing technology.</p>
<p>fMRI (“functional” MRI) uses similar technology to track changes in <em>blood flow</em>. Why? Because when areas of the brain become more active, they use more energy, so they need more oxygen—so blood flow increases to the area to deliver that oxygen. Blood flow indirectly indicates where activity is happening. Here’s what an fMRI scan might show:<a href="#footnote2-32-6120">32</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/7728527_f520.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Of course, there’s always blood throughout the brain—what this image shows is where blood flow has <em>increased</em> (red/orange/yellow) and where it has <em>decreased </em>(blue). And because fMRI can scan through the whole brain, results are 3-dimensional:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/fmriHeadCrossSection.gif"></a></p>
<p>fMRI has many medical uses, like informing doctors whether or not certain parts of the brain are functioning properly after a stroke, and fMRI has taught neuroscientists a ton about which regions of the brain are involved with which functions. Scans also have the benefit of providing info about what’s going on in the whole brain at any given time, and it’s safe and totally non-invasive.</p>
<p>The big drawback is resolution. fMRI scans have a literal resolution, like a computer screen has with pixels, except the pixels are three-dimensional, cubic volume pixels—or “voxels.”</p>
<p>fMRI voxels have gotten smaller as the technology has improved, bringing the spatial resolution up. Today’s fMRI voxels can be as small as a cubic millimeter. The brain has a volume of about 1,200,000mm<sup>3</sup>, so a high-resolution fMRI scan divides the brain into about one million little cubes. The problem is that on neuron scale, that’s still pretty huge (the same size as our scaled-up cubic meter above)—each voxel contains tens of thousands of neurons. So what the fMRI is showing you, at best, is the average blood flow drawn in by each group of 40,000 or so neurons.</p>
<p>The even bigger problem is temporal resolution. fMRI tracks blood flow, which is both imprecise and comes with a delay of about a second—an eternity in the world of neurons.</p>
<p><strong>EEG</strong></p>
<p><strong>Scale: </strong>high</p>
<p><strong>Resolution: </strong>very low spatial, medium-high temporal</p>
<p><strong>Invasiveness: </strong>non-invasive</p>
<p>Dating back almost a century, EEG (electroencephalography) puts an array of electrodes on your head. You know, this whole thing:<a href="#footnote2-33-6120">33</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/EEG-cap-262x300.jpg"></a></p>
<p>EEG is definitely technology that will look hilariously primitive to a 2050 person, but for now, it’s one of the only tools that can be used with BMIs that’s totally non-invasive. EEGs record electrical activity in different regions of the brain, displaying the findings like this:<a href="#footnote2-34-6120">34</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Human_EEG_with_prominent_alpha-rhythm.png"></a></p>
<p>EEG graphs can uncover information about medical issues like epilepsy, track sleep patterns, or be used to determine something like the status of a dose of anesthesia.</p>
<p>And unlike fMRI, EEG has pretty good temporal resolution, getting electrical signals from the brain right as they happen—though the skull blurs the temporal accuracy considerably (bone is a bad conductor).</p>
<p>The major drawback is spatial resolution. EEG has none. Each electrode only records a broad average—a vector sum of the charges from millions or billions of neurons (and a blurred one because of the skull).</p>
<p>Imagine that the brain is a baseball stadium, its neurons are the members of the crowd, and the information we want is, instead of electrical activity, vocal cord activity. In that case, EEG would be like a group of microphones placed outside the stadium, against the stadium’s outer walls. You’d be able to hear when the crowd was cheering and maybe predict the type of thing they were cheering about. You’d be able to hear telltale signs that it was between innings and maybe whether or not it was a close game. You could probably detect when something abnormal happened. But that’s about it.</p>
<p><strong>ECoG</strong></p>
<p><strong>Scale: </strong>high</p>
<p><strong>Resolution: </strong>low spatial, high temporal</p>
<p><strong>Invasiveness: </strong>kind of invasive</p>
<p>ECoG (electrocorticography) is a similar idea to EEG, also using surface electrodes—except they put them <em>under </em>the skull, on the surface of the brain.<a href="#footnote2-35-6120">35</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Intracranial_electrode_grid_for_electrocorticography.png"></a></p>
<p>Ick. But effective—at least much more effective than EEG. Without the interference of the skull blurring things, ECoG picks up both higher spatial (about 1cm) and temporal resolution (5 milliseconds). ECoG electrodes can either be placed above or below the dura:<a href="#footnote2-36-6120">36</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/layersofthebrain.png"></a></p>
<p>Bringing back our stadium analogy, ECoG microphones are <em>inside </em>the stadium and a bit closer to the crowd. So the sound is much crisper than what EEG mics get from outside the stadium, and ECoG mics can better distinguish the sounds of individual sections of the crowd. But the improvement comes at a cost—it requires invasive surgery. In the scheme of invasive surgeries, though, it’s not so bad. As one neurosurgeon described to me, “You can slide stuff underneath the dura relatively non-invasively. You still have to make a hole in the head, but it’s relatively non-invasive.”</p>
<p><strong>Local Field Potential</strong></p>
<p><strong>Scale: </strong>low</p>
<p><strong>Resolution: </strong>medium-low spatial, high temporal</p>
<p><strong>Invasiveness: </strong>very invasive</p>
<p>Okay here’s where we shift from surface electrode discs to microelectrodes—tiny needles surgeons stick into the brain.</p>
<p>Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described to me how his father (a neurologist) used to make microelectrodes:</p>
<p><em>When my father was making electrodes, he’d make them by hand. He’d take a very fine wire—like a gold or platinum or iridium wire, that was 10-30 microns in diameter, and he’d insert that wire in a glass capillary tube that was maybe a millimeter in diameter. Then they’d take that piece of glass over a flame and rotate it until the glass became soft. They’d stretch out the capillary tube until it’s incredibly thin, and then take it out of the flame and break it. Now the capillary tube is flush with and pinching the wire. The glass is an insulator and the wire is a conductor. So what you end up with is a glass-insulated stiff electrode that is maybe a few 10s of microns at the tip.</em></p>
<p>Today, while some electrodes are still made by hand, newer techniques use silicon wafers and manufacturing technology borrowed from the integrated circuits industry.</p>
<p>The way local field potentials (LFP) work is simple—you take one of these super thin needles with an electrode tip and stick it one or two millimeters into the cortex. There it picks up the average of the electrical charges from all of the neurons within a certain radius of the electrode.</p>
<p>LFP gives you the not-that-bad spatial resolution of the fMRI combined with the instant temporal resolution of an ECoG. Kind of the best of all the worlds described above when it comes to resolution.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it does badly on both other criteria.</p>
<p>Unlike fMRI, EEG, and ECoG, microelectrode LFP does not have scale—it <em>only</em> tells you what the little sphere surrounding it is doing. And it’s far more invasive, actually entering the brain.</p>
<p>In the baseball stadium, LFP is a single microphone hanging over a single section of seats, picking up a crisp feed of the sounds in that area, and maybe picking out an individual voice for a second here and there—but otherwise only getting the general vibe.</p>
<p>A more recent development is the <strong>multielectrode array, </strong>which is the same idea as the LFP except it’s about 100 LFPs all at once, in a single area of the cortex. A multielectrode array looks like this:<a href="#footnote2-37-6120">37</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Focus-stack-penny_sm.jpg"></a></p>
<p>A tiny 4mm x 4mm square with 100 tiny silicon electrodes on it. Here’s another image where you can see just how sharp the electrodes are—just a few microns across at the very tip:<a href="#footnote2-38-6120">38</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/jmm294120fig01.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>Single-Unit Recording</strong></p>
<p><strong>Scale: </strong>tiny</p>
<p><strong>Resolution: </strong>super high</p>
<p><strong>Invasiveness: </strong>very invasive</p>
<p>To record a broader LFP, the electrode tip is a bit rounded to give the electrode more surface area, and they turn the resistance down with the intent of allowing very faint signals from a wide range of locations to be picked up. The end result is the electrode picks up a chorus of activity from the local field.</p>
<p>Single-unit recording also uses a needle electrode, but they make the tip super sharp and crank up the resistance. This wipes out most of the noise and leaves the electrode picking up almost nothing—until it finds itself <em>so </em>close to a neuron (maybe 50µm away) that the signal from that neuron is strong enough to make it past the electrode’s high resistance wall. With distinct signals from one neuron and no background noise, this electrode can now voyeur in on the private life of a single neuron. Lowest possible scale, highest possible resolution.</p>
<p>By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxpz-YEuao">here</a> (what you’re actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio).</p>
<p>Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the <strong>patch clamp</strong>, whereby it’ll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette,<a href="#footnote-22-6120">22</a> and it’ll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a “patch” of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements:<a href="#footnote2-39-6120">39</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2009_06a.jpg"></a></p>
<p>A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we’ve discussed, because it’s physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but <em>stimulate </em>the neuron,<a href="#footnote-23-6120">23</a> injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together).</p>
<p>Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called <strong>sharp electrode recording. </strong>If the tip is sharp enough, this won’t destroy the cell—the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique—a punctured neuron won’t survive long.</p>
<p>In our stadium, a single unit recording is a one-directional microphone clipped to a single crowd member’s collar. A patch clamp or sharp recording is a mic in someone’s throat, registering the exact movement of their vocal cords. This is a great way to learn about that person’s experience at the game, but it also gives you no context, and you can’t really tell if the sounds and reactions of that person are representative of what’s going on in the game.</p>
<p>And that’s about what we’ve got, at least in common usage. These tools are simultaneously unbelievably advanced and what will seem like Stone Age technology to future humans, who won’t believe you had to choose <em>either </em>high-res <em>or </em>a wide field and that you actually had to open someone’s <em>skull </em>to get high-quality brain readouts or write-ins.</p>
<p>But given their limitations, these tools have taught us worlds about the brain and led to the creation of some amazing early BMIs. Here’s what’s already out there—</p>
<p><strong>The BMIs we already have</strong></p>
<p>In 1969, a researcher named Eberhard Fetz connected a single neuron in a monkey’s brain to a dial in front of the monkey’s face. The dial would move when the neuron was fired. When the monkey would think in a way that fired the neuron and the dial would move, he’d get a banana-flavored pellet. Over time, the monkey started getting <em>better </em>at the game because he wanted more delicious pellets. The monkey had learned to make the neuron fire and inadvertently became the subject of the first real brain-machine interface.</p>
<p>Progress was slow over the next few decades, but by the mid-90s, things had started to move, and it’s been quietly accelerating ever since.</p>
<p>Given that both our understanding of the brain and the electrode hardware we’ve built are pretty primitive, our efforts have typically focused on building straightforward interfaces to be used with the areas of the brain we understand the best, like the motor cortex and the visual cortex.</p>
<p>And given that human experimentation is only really possible for people who are trying to use BMIs to alleviate an impairment—and because that’s currently where the market demand is—our efforts have focused so far almost entirely on restoring lost function to people with disabilities.</p>
<p>The major BMI industries of the future that will give all humans magical superpowers and transform the world are in their fetal stage right now—and we should look at what’s being worked on as a set of clues about what the mind-boggling worlds of 2040 and 2060 and 2100 might be like.</p>
<p>Like, check this out:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NV_0215_Hood_alan-turing-first-computer.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s a computer built by Alan Turing in 1950 called the Pilot ACE. Truly cutting edge in its time.</p>
<p>Now check this out:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/iphone-7BLACK.png"></a></p>
<p>As you read through the examples below, I want you to think about this analogy—</p>
<p><strong>Pilot ACE</strong> is to <strong>iPhone 7 </strong></p>
<p>as </p>
<p><strong>Each BMI example below</strong> is to <strong>_____</strong></p>
<p>—and try to imagine what the blank looks like. And we’ll come back to the blank later in the post.</p>
<p>Anyway, from everything I’ve read about and discussed with people in the field, there seem to be three major categories of brain-machine interface being heavily worked on right now:</p>
<p><strong>Early BMI type #1: Using the motor cortex as a remote control</strong></p>
<p>In case you forgot this from 9,000 words ago, the motor cortex is this guy:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ucNSNTDc4yMxayeRNXNlpw_m.jpg"></a></p>
<p>All areas of the brain confuse us, but the motor cortex confuses us less than almost all the other areas. And most importantly, it’s <em>well-mapped</em>, meaning specific parts of it control specific parts of the body (remember the upsetting <a href="http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/152-KB-Homonculus-Sensory-and-Motor-Cortex.png">homunculus?</a>).</p>
<p>Also importantly, it’s one of the major areas of the brain in charge of our <em>output</em>. When a human <em>does </em>something, the motor cortex is almost always the one pulling the strings (at least for the physical part of the doing). So the human brain doesn’t really have to <em>learn </em>to use the motor cortex as a remote control, because the brain already uses the motor cortex as its remote control.</p>
<p>Lift your hand up. Now put it down. See? Your hand is like a little toy drone, and your brain just picked up the motor cortex remote control and used it to make the drone fly up and then back down.</p>
<p>The goal of motor cortex-based BMIs is to tap into the motor cortex, and then when the remote control fires a command, to <em>hear </em>that command and then send it to some kind of machine that can respond to it the way, say, your hand would. A bundle of nerves is the middleman between your motor cortex and your hand. BMIs are the middleman between your motor cortex and a computer. Simple.</p>
<p>One barebones type of interface allows a human—often a person paralyzed from the neck down or someone who has had a limb amputated—to move a cursor on a screen with only their thoughts.</p>
<p>This begins with a 100-pin multielectrode array being implanted in the person’s motor cortex. The motor cortex in a paralyzed person usually works just fine—it’s just that the spinal cord, which had served as the middleman between the cortex and the body, stopped doing its job. So with the electrode array implanted, researchers have the person <em>try </em>to move their arm in different directions. Even though they can’t do that, the motor cortex still fires normally, as if they can.</p>
<p>When someone moves their arm, their motor cortex bursts into a flurry of activity—but each neuron is usually only interested in one type of movement. So one neuron might fire whenever the person moves their arm to the right—but it’s bored by other directions and is less active in those cases. That neuron alone, then, could tell a computer when the person wants to move their arm to the right and when they don’t. But that’s all. But with an electrode <em>array</em>, 100 single-unit electrodes each listen to a different neuron.<a href="#footnote-24-6120">24</a> So when they do testing, they’ll ask the person to try to move their arm to the right, and maybe 38 of the 100 electrodes detect their neuron firing. When the person tries to go left with their arm, maybe 41 others fire. After going through a bunch of different movements and directions and speeds, a computer takes the data from the electrodes and synthesizes it into a general understanding of which firing patterns correspond to which movement intentions on an X-Y axis.</p>
<p>Then when they link up that data to a computer screen, the person can use their mind, via “trying” to move the cursor, to really control the cursor. And this actually works. Through the work of motor-cortex-BMI pioneer company <a href="https://www.braingate.org/">BrainGate</a>, here’s a guy playing a video game using only his mind.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And if 100 neurons can tell you where they want to move a cursor, why couldn’t they tell you when they want to pick up a mug of coffee and take a sip? That’s what this quadriplegic woman did:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Another quadriplegic woman <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/03/03/a-paralyzed-woman-flew-a-f-35-fighter-jet-in-a-simulator-using-only-her-mind/?utm_term=.d76217b806c6">flew an F-35 fighter jet</a> in a simulation, and a monkey recently used his mind to <a href="https://medschool.duke.edu/about-us/news-and-communications/med-school-blog/monkeys-drive-wheelchairs-using-only-their-thoughts">ride around in a wheelchair</a>.</p>
<p>And why stop with arms? Brazilian BMI pioneer <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/miguel_nicolelis_brain_to_brain_communication_has_arrived_how_we_did_it">Miguel Nicolelis</a> and his team built an entire <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=76&amp;v=mg8TAJdQKyY">exoskeleton</a> that allowed a paralyzed man to make the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inCvbDLfXBo">opening kick</a> of the World Cup.<a href="#footnote-25-6120">25</a>
</p><div>
<p><strong>The Proprioception Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>Moving these kinds of “neuroprosthetics” is all about the recording of neurons, but for these devices to be truly effective, this needs to not be a one-way street, but a <em>loop </em>that includes recording <em>and </em>stimulation pathways. We don’t really think about this, but a huge part of your ability to pick up an object is all of the incoming sensory information your hand’s skin and muscles send back in (called “proprioception”). In one video I saw, a woman with numbed fingers tried to light a match, and it was almost impossible for her to do it, despite having no other disabilities. And the beginning of <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x12647t_the-man-who-lost-his-body-bbc-documentary_tech">this video</a> shows the physical struggles of a man with a perfectly functional motor cortex but impaired proprioception. So for something like a bionic arm to really feel like an arm, and to really be useful, it needs to be able to send sensory information back in.</p>
<p>Stimulating neurons is even harder than recording them. As researcher Flip Sabes explained to me:</p>
<p><em>If I record a pattern of activity, it doesn’t mean I can readily recreate that pattern of activity by just playing it back. You can compare it to the planets in the Solar System. You can watch the planets move around and record their movements. But then if you jumble them all up and later want to recreate the original motion of one of the planets, you can’t just take that one planet and put it back into its orbit, because it’ll be influenced by all the other planets. Likewise, neurons aren’t just working in isolation—so there’s a fundamental irreversibility there. On top of that, with all of the axons and dendrites, it’s hard to just stimulate the neurons you want to—because when you try, you’ll hit a whole jumble of them.</em></p>
<p>Flip’s lab tries to deal with these challenges by getting the brain to help out. It turns out that if you reward a monkey with a succulent sip of orange juice when a single neuron fires, eventually the monkey will learn to make the neuron fire on demand. The neuron could then act as another kind of remote control. This means that normal motor cortex commands are only one possibility as a control mechanism. Likewise, until BMI technology gets good enough to perfect stimulation, you can use the brain’s neuroplasticity as a shortcut. If it’s too hard to make someone’s bionic fingertip touch something and send back information that feels just like the kind of sensation their own fingertip used to give them, the arm could instead send some <em>other </em>signal into the brain. At first, this would seem odd to the patient—but eventually the brain can learn to treat that signal as a new sense of touch. This concept is called “sensory substitution” and makes the brain a collaborator in BMI efforts.</p>
</div>
<p>In these developments are the seeds of other future breakthrough technologies—like brain-to-brain communication.</p>
<p>Nicolelis created an <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584574/">experiment</a> where the motor cortex of one rat in Brazil was wired, via the internet, to the motor cortex of another rat in the US. The rat in Brazil was presented with two transparent boxes, each with a lever attached to it, and inside one of the boxes would be a treat. To attempt to get the treat, the rat would press the lever of the box that held the treat. Meanwhile, the rat in the US was in a similar cage with two similar boxes, except unlike the rat in Brazil, the boxes weren’t transparent and offered him no information about which of his two levers would yield a treat and which wouldn’t. The only info the US rat had were the signals his brain received from the Brazil rat’s motor cortex. The Brazil rat had the key knowledge—but the way the experiment worked, the rats only received treats when the US rat pressed the correct lever. If he pulled the wrong one, neither would. The amazing thing is that over time, the rats got <em>better</em> at this and began to work together, almost like a single nervous system—even though neither had any idea the other rat existed. The US rat’s success rate at choosing the correct lever with no information would have been 50%. With the signals coming from the Brazil rat’s brain, the success rate jumped to 64%. (Here’s a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2_1dzwnNwE">video</a> of the rats doing their thing.)</p>
<p>This has even worked, crudely, in people. Two people, in separate buildings, <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111332">worked together</a> to play a video game. One could <em>see </em>the game, the other had the controller. Using simple EEG headsets, the player who could see the game would, without moving his hand, <em>think </em>about moving his hand to press the “shoot” button on a controller. Because their brains’ devices were communicating with each other, the player with the controller would then feel a twitch in his finger and press the shoot button.</p>
<p><strong>Early BMI type #2: Artificial ears and eyes</strong></p>
<p>There are a couple reasons giving sound to the deaf and sight to the blind is among the more manageable BMI categories.</p>
<p>The first is that like the motor cortex, the sensory cortices are parts of the brain we tend to understand pretty well, partly because they too tend to be well-mapped.</p>
<p>The second is that in many early applications, we don’t <em>really </em>need to deal with the brain—we can just deal with the place where ears and eyes <em>connect </em>to the brain, since that’s often where the impairment is based.</p>
<p>And while the motor cortex stuff was mostly about <em>recording </em>neurons to get information <em>out</em> of the brain, artificial senses go the other way—<em>stimulation</em> of neurons to send information <em>in.</em></p>
<p>On the ears side of things, recent decades have seen the development of the groundbreaking <strong>cochlear implant</strong>. <strong> </strong></p>
<div>
<p><strong>The How Hearing Works Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>When you think you’re “hearing” “sound,” here’s what’s actually happening:</p>
<p>What we think of as sound is actually patterns of vibrations in the air molecules around your head. When a guitar string or someone’s vocal cords or the wind or anything else makes a sound, it’s because it’s vibrating, which pushes nearby air molecules into a similar vibration and that pattern expands outward in a sphere, kind of like the surface of water expands outward in a circular ripple when something touches it.<a href="#footnote-26-6120">26</a>
</p><p>Your ear is a machine that converts those air vibrations into electrical impulses. Whenever air (or water, or any other medium whose molecules can vibrate) enters your ear, your ear translates the precise way it’s vibrating into an electrical code that it sends into the nerve endings that touch it. This causes those nerves to fire a pattern of action potentials that send the code into your auditory cortex for processing. Your brain receives the information, and we call the experience of receiving that particular type of information “hearing.”</p>
<p>Most people who are deaf or hard of hearing don’t have a nerve problem or an auditory cortex problem—they usually have an ear problem. Their brain is as ready as anyone else’s to turn electrical impulses into hearing—it’s just that their auditory cortex isn’t <em>receiving</em> any electrical impulses in the first place, because the machine that converts air vibrations into those impulses isn’t doing its job.</p>
<p>The ear has a lot of parts, but it’s the cochlea in particular that makes the key conversion. When vibrations enter the fluid in the cochlea, it causes thousands of tiny hairs lining the cochlea to vibrate, and the cells those hairs are attached to transform the mechanical energy of the vibrations into electrical signals that then excite the auditory nerve. Here’s what it all looks like:<a href="#footnote2-40-6120">40</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/otitis-interna.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The cochlea also sorts the incoming sound by frequency. Here’s a cool chart that shows why lower sounds are processed at the end of the cochlea and high sounds are processed at the beginning (and also why there’s a minimum and maximum frequency on what the ear can hear):<a href="#footnote2-41-6120">41</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tmp512613186340388865.png"></a></p>
</div>
<p>A cochlear implant is a little computer that has a microphone coming out of one end (which sits on the ear) and a wire coming out of the other that connects to an array of electrodes that line the cochlea. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/62036062.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So sound comes into the microphone (the little hook on top of the ear), and goes into the brown thing, which processes the sound to filter out the less useful frequencies. Then the brown thing transmits the information through the skin, through electrical induction, to the computer’s other component, which converts the info into electric impulses and sends them into the cochlea. The electrodes filter the impulses by frequency just like the cochlea and stimulate the auditory nerve just like the hairs on the cochlea do. This is what it looks like from the outside:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/processor-on-ear.jpg"></a></p>
<p>In other words, an artificial ear, performing the same sound-to-impulses-to-auditory-nerve function the ear does.</p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/00WOao4kpwM?t=3m15s">Check out what sound sounds</a> like to someone with the implant.</p>
<p>Not great. Why? Because to send sound into the brain with the richness the ear hears with, you’d need 3,500 electrodes. Most cochlear implants have about 16.<a href="#footnote-27-6120">27</a> Crude.</p>
<p>But we’re in the Pilot ACE era—so of course it’s crude.</p>
<p>Still, today’s cochlear implant allows deaf people to hear <em>speech</em> and have conversations, which is a groundbreaking development.<a href="#footnote-28-6120">28</a>
</p><p>Many parents of deaf babies are now having a cochlear implant put in when the baby’s about one year old. Like this baby, whose reaction to hearing for the first time is <em>cute</em>.</p>
<p></p>
<p>There’s a similar revolution underway in the world of blindness, in the form of the <strong>retinal implant</strong>.</p>
<p>Blindness is often the result of a retinal disease. When this is the case, a retinal implant can perform a similar function for sight as a cochlear implant does for hearing (though less directly). It performs the normal duties of the eye and hands things off to nerves in the form of electrical impulses, just like the eye does.</p>
<p>A more complicated interface than the cochlear implant, the first retinal implant was approved by the FDA in 2011—the Argus II implant, made by <a href="http://www.secondsight.com/">Second Sight</a>. The retinal implant looks like this:<a href="#footnote2-42-6120">42</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/6x6-argus-retinal-implant_2d.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And it works like this:</p>
<p></p>
<p>The retinal implant has 60 sensors. The retina has around a million neurons. Crude. But seeing vague edges and shapes and patterns of light and dark sure beats seeing nothing at all. What’s encouraging is that you don’t need a million sensors to gain a reasonable amount of sight—simulations suggest that 600-1,000 electrodes would be enough for reading and facial recognition.</p>
<p><strong>Early BMI type #3: Deep brain stimulation</strong></p>
<p>Dating back to the late 1980s, deep brain stimulation is yet another crude tool that is also still pretty life-changing for a lot of people.</p>
<p>It’s also a type of category of BMI that doesn’t involve communication with the outside world—it’s about using brain-machine interfaces to treat or enhance yourself by altering something internally.</p>
<p>What happens here is one or two electrode wires, usually with <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ieee_pilot/articles/96jproc07/96jproc07-liker/assets/img/article_1/fig_2/small.jpg">four separate electrode sites</a>, are inserted into the brain, often ending up somewhere in the limbic system. Then a little pacemaker computer is implanted in the upper chest and wired to the electrodes. Like this unpleasant man:<a href="#footnote2-43-6120">43</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/StJudeMedicalDBSStory.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The electrodes can then give a little zap when called for, which can do a variety of important things. Like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Reduce the tremors of people with Parkinson’s Disease</li>
<li>Reduce the severity of seizures</li>
<li>Chill people with OCD out</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s also experimentally (not yet FDA approved) been able to mitigate certain kinds of chronic pain like migraines or phantom limb pain, treat anxiety or depression or PTSD, or even be combined with muscle stimulation elsewhere in the body to restore and retrain circuits that were broken down from stroke or a neurological disease.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><a></a>This is the state of the early BMI industry, and it’s the moment when Elon Musk is stepping into it. For him, and for Neuralink, today’s BMI industry is Point A. We’ve spent the whole post so far in the past, building up to the present moment. Now it’s time to step into the future—to figure out what Point B is and how we’re going to get there.</p>
<p><strong>Part 4: Neuralink’s Challenge</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-tree-Parts-4.png"></a></p>
<p>Having already written about two of Elon Musk’s companies—<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">Tesla</a> and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">SpaceX</a>—I think I understand his formula. It looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Elon-company-formula-1.png"></a></p>
<p>And his initial thinking about a new company always starts on the right and works its way left.</p>
<p>He decides that some specific change in the world will increase the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. He knows that large-scale world change happens quickest when the whole world—the Human Colossus—is working on it. And he knows that the Human Colossus will work toward a goal if (and only if) there’s an economic forcing function in place—if it’s a good business decision to spend resources innovating toward that goal.</p>
<p>Often, before a booming industry starts booming, it’s like a pile of logs—it has all the ingredients of a fire and it’s ready to go—but there’s no match. There’s some technological shortcoming that’s preventing the industry from taking off.</p>
<p>So when Elon builds a company, its core initial strategy is usually to create the match that will ignite the industry and get the Human Colossus working on the cause. This, in turn, Elon believes, will lead to developments that will change the world in the way that increases the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. But you have to look at his companies from a zoomed-out perspective to see all of this. If you don’t, you’ll mistake what they do as their business for what they <em>do</em>—when in fact, what they do as their business is usually a mechanism to sustain the company while it innovates to try to make that critical match.</p>
<p>Back when I was working on the Tesla and SpaceX posts, I asked Elon why he went into engineering and not science, and he explained that when it comes to progress, “engineering is the limiting factor.” In other words, the progress of science, business, and industry are all at the whim of the progress of engineering. If you look at history, this makes sense—behind each of the greatest revolutions in human progress is an engineering breakthrough. A match.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Matches-small-2.png"></a></p>
<p>So to understand an Elon Musk company, you need to think about the match he’s trying to create—along with three other variables:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Elon-company-formula-variables.png"></a></p>
<p>I know what’s in these boxes with the other companies:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Tesla-formula-1.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Tesla-formula.png"><br />
</a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SpaceX-Formula-1.png"></a></p>
<p>And when I started trying to figure out what Neuralink was all about, I knew those were the variables I needed to fill in. At the time, I had only had the chance to get a very vague idea of one of the variables—that the goal of the company was “to accelerate the advent of a whole-brain interface.” Or what I’ve come to think of as a wizard hat.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuralink-formula-1-1.png"></a></p>
<p>As I understood it, a whole-brain interface was what a brain-machine interface would be in an ideal world—a super-advanced concept where essentially all the neurons in your brain are able to communicate seamlessly with the outside world. It was a concept loosely based on the science fiction idea of a “neural lace,”<em> </em>described in Iain Banks’ <em>Culture</em> series<em>—</em>a massless, volumeless, whole-brain interface that can be teleported into the brain.</p>
<p>I had a lot of questions.</p>
<p>Luckily, I was on my way to San Francisco, where I had plans to sit down with half of Neuralink’s founding team and be the dumbest person in the room.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/dumbest-person-1.png"></a></p>
<div>
<p><strong>The I’m Not Being Self-Deprecating I Really Was Definitely the Dumbest Person in the Room Just Look at This Shit Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>The Neuralink team:</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://paulmerolla.com/">Paul Merolla</a></strong>, who spent the last seven years as the lead chip designer at IBM on their SyNAPSE program, where he led the development of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNorth">TrueNorth chip</a>—one of the largest CMOS devices ever designed by transistor count nbd. Paul told me his field was called <em>neuromorphic, </em>where the goal is to design transistor circuits based on principles of brain architecture.</p>
<p><a href="https://neurotech.llnl.gov/people/vanessa-tolosa"><strong>Vanessa Tolosa</strong></a>, Neuralink’s microfabrication expert and one of the world’s foremost researchers on biocompatible materials. Vanessa’s work involves designing biocompatible materials based on principles from the integrated circuits industry.</p>
<p><strong>Max Hodak</strong>, who worked on the development of some groundbreaking BMI technology at Miguel Nicolelis’s lab at Duke while also commuting across the country twice a week in college to run <a href="https://www.transcriptic.com/">Transcriptic</a>, the “robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences” he founded.</p>
<p><a href="https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~djseo/"><strong>DJ Seo</strong></a>, who while at UC Berkeley in his mid-20s designed a cutting-edge new BMI concept called <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/08/03/sprinkling-of-neural-dust-opens-door-to-electroceuticals/">neural dust</a>—tiny ultrasound sensors that could provide a new way to record brain activity.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://www-bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/directory/zoom?PersonID=1376947129&amp;URLnode=70">Tim Hanson</a></strong>, whom a colleague described as “one of the best all-around engineers on the planet” and who self-taught himself enough about materials science and microfabrication methods to develop some of the core technology that’ll be used at Neuralink.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://profiles.ucsf.edu/philip.sabes">Flip Sabes</a></strong>, a leading researcher whose lab at UCSF<strong> </strong>has pioneered new ground in BMIs by combining “cortical physiology, computational and theoretical modeling, and human psychophysics and physiology.”</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://www.bu.edu/biology/people/profiles/tim-gardner/">Tim Gardner</a></strong>, a leading researcher at BU, whose lab works on implanting BMIs in <em>birds</em>, in order to study “how complex songs are assembled from elementary neural units” and learn about “the relationships between patterns of neural activity on different time-scales.” Both Tim and Flip have left tenured positions to join the Neuralink team—pretty good testament to the promise they believe this company has.</p>
<p>And then there’s Elon, both as their CEO/Founder and a fellow team member. Elon being CEO makes this different from other recent things he’s started and puts Neuralink on the top tier for him, where only SpaceX and Tesla have lived. When it comes to neuroscience, Elon has the least technical knowledge on the team—but he also started SpaceX without very much technical knowledge and quickly became a certifiable rocket science expert by reading and by asking questions of the experts on the team. That’ll probably happen again here. (And for good reason—he pointed out: “Without a strong technical understanding, I think it’s hard to make the right decisions.”)</p>
</div>
<p>I asked Elon about how he brought this team together. He said that he met with literally over 1,000 people in order to assemble this group, and that part of the challenge was the large number of totally separate areas of expertise required when you’re working on technology that involves neuroscience, brain surgery, microscopic electronics, clinical trials, etc. Because it was such a cross-disciplinary area, he looked for cross-disciplinary experts. And you can see that in those bios—everyone brings their own unique crossover combination to a group that together has the rare ability to think as a single mega-expert. Elon also wanted to find people who were totally on board with the zoomed-out mission—who were more focused on industrial results than producing white papers. Not an easy group to assemble.</p>
<p>But there they were, sitting around the table looking at me, as it hit me 40 seconds in that I should have done a lot more research before coming here.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/dumbest-person-2.png"></a></p>
<p>They took the hint and dumbed it down about four notches, and as the discussion went on, I started to wrap my head around things. Throughout the next few weeks, I met with each of the remaining Neuralink team members as well, each time playing the role of the dumbest person in the room. In these meetings, I focused on trying to form a comprehensive picture of the challenges at hand and what the road to a wizard hat might look like. I really wanted to understand these two boxes:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuralink-formula-v2_02.png"></a></p>
<p>The first one was easy. The <em>business </em>side of Neuralink is a brain-machine interface development company. They want to create cutting-edge BMIs—what one of them referred to as “micron-sized devices.” Doing this will support the growth of the company while also providing a perfect vehicle for putting their innovations into practice (the same way SpaceX uses their launches both to sustain the company and experiment with their newest engineering developments).</p>
<p>As for what kind of interface they’re planning to work on first, here’s what Elon said:</p>
<p><em>We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years. </em></p>
<p>The second box was a lot hazier. It seems obvious to us today that using steam engine technology to harness the power of fire was the thing that had to happen to ignite the Industrial Revolution. But if you talked to someone in 1760 about it, they would have had a lot less clarity—on exactly which hurdles they were trying to get past, what kinds of innovations would allow them to leap over those hurdles, or how long any of this would take. And that’s where we are here—trying to figure out what the match looks like that will ignite the neuro revolution and how to create it.</p>
<p>The starting place for a discussion about innovation is a discussion about hurdles—what are you even trying to innovate <em>past? </em>In Neuralink’s case, a whole lot of things. But given that, here too, engineering will likely prove to be the limiting factor, here are some seemingly large challenges that probably <em>won’t</em> end up being the major roadblock:</p>
<p><strong>Public skepticism </strong></p>
<p>Pew recently conducted a <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/07/26/u-s-public-wary-of-biomedical-technologies-to-enhance-human-abilities/">survey</a> asking Americans about which future biotechnologies give them the shits the most. It turns out BMIs worry Americans even more than gene editing:<a href="#footnote2-44-6120">44</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PS_2016.07.26_Human-Enhancement-Survey_0-01.png"></a></p>
<p>Flip Sabes, one of Neuralink’s ground floor members, doesn’t get it.</p>
<p><em>To a scientist, to think about changing the fundamental nature of life—creating viruses, eugenics, etc.—it raises a specter that many biologists find quite worrisome, whereas the neuroscientists that I know, when they think about chips in the brain, it doesn’t seem that foreign, because we already have chips in the brain. We have deep brain stimulation to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, we have early trials of chips to restore vision, we have the cochlear implant—so to us it doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch to put devices into a brain to read information out and to read information back in.</em></p>
<p>And after learning all about chips in the brain, I agree—and when Americans eventually learn about it, I think they’ll change their minds.</p>
<p>History supports this prediction. People were super timid about Lasik eye surgery when it first became a thing—20 years ago, 20,000 people a year had the procedure done. Then everyone got used to it and now 2,000,000 people a year get laser eye surgery. Similar story with pacemakers. And defibrillators. And organ transplants—which people at first considered a freakish Frankenstein-esque concept. Brain implants will probably be the same story.</p>
<p><strong>Our non-understanding of the brain</strong></p>
<p>You know, the whole “if understanding the brain is a mile, we’re currently three inches in” thing. Flip weighed in on this topic too:</p>
<p><em>If it were a prerequisite to understand the brain in order to interact with the brain in a substantive way, we’d have trouble. But it’s possible to decode all of those things in the brain without truly understanding the dynamics of the computation in the brain. Being able to read it out is an engineering problem. Being able to understand its origin and the organization of the neurons in fine detail in a way that would satisfy a neuroscientist to the core—that’s a separate problem. And we don’t need to solve all of those scientific problems in order to make progress.</em></p>
<p>If we can just use engineering to get neurons to talk to computers, we’ll have done our job, and machine learning can do much of the rest. Which then, ironically, <em>will </em>teach us about the brain. As Flip points out:</p>
<p><em>The flip side of saying, “We don’t need to understand the brain to make engineering progress,” is that making engineering progress will almost certainly advance our scientific knowledge—kind of like the way Alpha Go ended up teaching the world’s best players better strategies for the game. Then this scientific progress can lead to more engineering progress. The engineering and the science are gonna ratchet each other up here.</em></p>
<p><strong>Angry giants</strong></p>
<p>Tesla and SpaceX are both stepping on some very big toes (like the auto industry, the oil and gas industry, and the military-industrial complex). Big toes don’t like being stepped on, so they’ll usually do whatever they can to hinder the stepper’s progress. Luckily, Neuralink doesn’t really have this problem. There aren’t any massive industries that Neuralink is disrupting (at least not in the foreseeable future—an eventual neuro revolution would disrupt almost <em>every </em>industry).</p>
<p>Neuralink’s hurdles are technology hurdles—and there are many. But two challenges stand out as the largest—challenges that, if conquered, may be impactful enough to trigger all the other hurdles to fall and totally change the trajectory of our future.</p>
<p><strong>Major Hurdle 1: Bandwidth</strong></p>
<p>There have never been more than a couple hundred electrodes in a human brain at once. When it comes to vision, that equals a super low-res image. When it comes to motor, that limits the possibilities to simple commands with little control. When it comes to your thoughts, a few hundred electrodes won’t be enough to communicate more than the simplest spelled-out message.</p>
<p>We need higher bandwidth if this is gonna become a big thing. <em>Way</em> higher bandwidth.</p>
<p>The Neuralink team threw out the number “one million simultaneously recorded neurons” when talking about an interface that could really change the world. I’ve also heard 100,000 as a number that would allow for the creation of a wide range of incredibly useful BMIs with a variety of applications.</p>
<p>Early computers had a similar problem. Primitive transistors took up a lot of space and didn’t scale easily. Then in 1959 came the integrated circuit—the computer chip. Now there was a way to scale the number of transistors in a computer, and Moore’s Law—the concept that the number of transistors that can fit onto a computer chip doubles every 18 months—was born.</p>
<p>Until the 90s, electrodes for BMIs were all made by hand. Then we started figuring out how to manufacture those little 100-electrode <a href="https://d267cvn3rvuq91.cloudfront.net/i/images/electrodex299.jpg?sw=280">multielectrode arrays</a> using conventional semiconductor technologies. Neurosurgeon Ben Rapoport believes that “the move from hand manufacturing to Utah Array electrodes was the first hint that BMIs were entering a realm where Moore’s Law could become relevant.”</p>
<p>This is everything for the industry’s potential. Our maximum today is a couple hundred electrodes able to measure about 500 neurons at once—which is either super far from a million or really close, depending on the kind of growth pattern we’re in. If we add 500 more neurons to our maximum every 18 months, we’ll get to a million in the year 5017. If we <em>double </em>our total every 18 months, like we do with computer transistors, we’ll get to a million in the year 2034.</p>
<p>Currently, we seem to be somewhere in between. Ian Stevenson and Konrad Kording published a <a href="http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/abs/nn.2731.html">paper</a> that looked at the maximum number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded at various points throughout the last 50 years (in <em>any </em>animal), and put the results on this graph:<a href="#footnote2-45-6120">45</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mooreslaw.chartx2400.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Sometimes called Stevenson’s Law, this research suggests that the number of neurons we can simultaneously record seems to consistently double every 7.4 years. If that rate continues, it’ll take us till the end of this century to reach a million, and until 2225 to record every neuron in the brain and get our totally complete wizard hat.</p>
<p>Whatever the equivalent of the integrated circuit is for BMIs isn’t here yet, because 7.4 years is too big a number to start a revolution. The breakthrough here isn’t the device that can record a million neurons—it’s the paradigm shift that makes the future of that graph look more like Moore’s Law and less like Stevenson’s Law. Once that happens, a million neurons will follow.</p>
<p><strong>Major Hurdle 2: Implantation</strong></p>
<p>BMIs won’t sweep the world as long as you need to go in for skull-opening surgery to get involved.</p>
<p>This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team.</p>
<p>On top of being both a major barrier to entry and a major safety issue, invasive brain surgery is expensive and in limited supply. Elon talked about an eventual BMI implantation process that could be automated: “The machine to accomplish this would need to be something like Lasik, an automated process—because otherwise you just get constrained by the limited number of neural surgeons, and the costs are very high. You’d need a Lasik-like machine ultimately to be able to do this at scale.”</p>
<p>Making BMIs high-bandwidth alone would be a huge deal, as would developing a way to non-invasively implant devices. But doing <em>both </em>would start a revolution.</p>
<p><strong>Other hurdles</strong></p>
<p>Today’s BMI patients have a wire coming out of their head. In the future, that certainly won’t fly. Neuralink plans to work on devices that will be wireless. But that brings a lot of new challenges with it. You’ll now need your device to be able to send and receive a lot of data wirelessly. Which means the implant also has to take care of things like signal amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and data compression on its own. Oh and it needs to be powered inductively.</p>
<p>Another big one—biocompatibility. Delicate electronics tend to not do well inside a jello ball. And the human body tends to not like having foreign objects in it. But the brain interfaces of the future are intended to last forever without any problems. This means that the device will likely need to be hermetically sealed and robust enough to survive decades of the oozing and shifting of the neurons around it. And the brain—which treats today’s devices like invaders and eventually covers them in scar tissue—will need to somehow be tricked into thinking the device is just a normal brain part doing its thing.<a href="#footnote-29-6120">29</a>
</p><p>Then there’s the space issue. Where exactly are you gonna put your device that can interface with a million neurons in a skull that’s already dealing with making space for 100 billion neurons? A million electrodes using today’s multielectrode arrays would be the size of a baseball. So further miniaturization is another dramatic innovation to add to the list.</p>
<p>There’s also the fact that today’s electrodes are mostly optimized for simple electrical recording or simple electrical stimulation. If we really want an effective brain interface, we’ll need something other than single-function, stiff electrodes—something with the mechanical complexity of neural circuits, that can both record and stimulate, and that can interact with neurons chemically and mechanically as well as electrically.</p>
<p>And just say all of this comes together perfectly—a high-bandwidth, long-lasting, biocompatible, bidirectional communicative, non-invasively-implanted device. Now we can speak back and forth with a million neurons at once! Except this little thing where we actually don’t know how to talk to neurons. It’s complicated enough to decode the static-like firings of 100 neurons, but all we’re really doing is learning what a set of specific firings corresponds to and matching them up to simple commands. That won’t work with millions of signals. It’s like how Google Translate essentially uses two dictionaries to swap words from one dictionary to another—which is very different than <em>understanding language. </em>We’ll need a pretty big leap in machine learning before a computer will be able to actually know a language, and we’ll need just as big a leap for machines to understand the language of the brain—because humans certainly won’t be learning to decipher the code of millions of simultaneously chattering neurons.</p>
<p>How easy does colonizing Mars seem right now.</p>
<p>But I bet the telephone and the car and the moon landing would have seemed like insurmountable technological challenges to people a few decades earlier. Just like I bet this—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/iphone-7BLACK.png"></a></p>
<p>—would have seemed utterly inconceivable to people at the time of this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/NV_0215_Hood_alan-turing-first-computer.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And yet, there it is in your pocket. If there’s one thing we should learn from the past, it’s that there will <em>always </em>be ubiquitous technology of the future that’s inconceivable to people of the past. We don’t know <em>which </em>technologies that seem positively impossible to us will turn out to be ubiquitous later in our lives—but there will be some. People always underestimate the Human Colossus.</p>
<p>If everyone you know in 40 years has electronics in their skull, it’ll be because a paradigm shift took place that caused a fundamental shift in this industry. That shift is what the Neuralink team will try to figure out. Other teams are working on it too, and some cool ideas are being developed:</p>
<p><strong>Current BMI innovations</strong></p>
<p>A team at the University of Illinois is developing an interface made of silk:<a href="#footnote2-46-6120">46</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/brain_silk_2s-660x440.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Silk can be rolled up into a thin bundle and inserted into the brain relatively non-invasively. There, it would theoretically spread out around the brain and melt into the contours like shrink wrap. On the silk would be flexible silicon transistor arrays.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jRNY_JcBpg">TEDx Talk</a>, Hong Yeo demonstrated an electrode array printed on his skin, like a temporary tattoo, and <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/02/skin-printed-electrodes/">researchers say</a> this kind of technique could potentially be used on the brain:<a href="#footnote2-47-6120">47</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/3a.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Another group is working on a kind of nano-scale, electrode-lined <strong><a href="https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207848-injectable-neuro-mesh-covers-the-brain-can-control-individual-neurons">neural mesh</a></strong> so tiny it can be injected into the brain with a syringe:<a href="#footnote2-48-6120">48</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1298870262105595053.jpg"></a></p>
<p>For scale—that red tube on the right is the tip of a syringe. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/522137a">Nature Magazine</a> has a nice graphic illustrating the concept:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/brainmesh-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Other non-invasive techniques involve going in through veins and arteries. Elon mentioned this: “The least invasive way would be something that comes in like a heart stent like through a femoral artery and ultimately unfolds in the vascular system to interface with the neurons. Neurons use a lot of energy, so there’s basically a road network to every neuron.”</p>
<p>DARPA, the technology innovation arm of the US military,<a href="#footnote-30-6120">30</a> through their recently funded <a href="http://www.darpa.mil/program/our-research/darpa-and-the-brain-initiative">BRAIN program</a>, is working on tiny, “closed-loop” neural implants that could replace medication.<a href="#footnote2-49-6120">49</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/stanford-microimplant-mid-field.jpg"></a></p>
<p>A second DARPA project aims to fit a million electrodes into a device the size of two nickels stacked.</p>
<p>Another idea being worked on is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which a magnetic coil outside the head can create electrical pulses inside the brain.<a href="#footnote2-50-6120">50</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The pulses can stimulate targeted neuron areas, providing a type of deep brain stimulation that’s totally non-invasive.</p>
<p>One of Neuralink’s ground floor members, DJ Seo, led an effort to design an even cooler interface called “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.2196">neural dust</a>.” Neural dust refers to tiny, 100µm silicon sensors (about the same as the width of a hair) that would be sprinkled through the cortex. Right nearby, above the pia, would be a 3mm-sized device that could communicate with the dust sensors via ultrasound.</p>
<p>This is another example of the innovation benefits that come from an interdisciplinary team. DJ explained to me that “there are technologies that are not really thought about in this domain, but we can bring in some principles of their work.” He says that neural dust is inspired both by microchip technology and RFID (the thing that allows hotel key cards to communicate with the door lock without making physical contact) principles. And you can easily see the multi-field influence in how it works:<a href="#footnote2-51-6120">51</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/018u3meqmg2ruijpg.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Others are working on even more out-there ideas, like <strong><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optogenetics-controlling/">optogenetics</a></strong> (where you inject a virus that attaches to a brain cell, causing it to thereafter be stimulated by light) or even using <strong><a href="http://news.rice.edu/2015/03/25/carbon-nanotube-fibers-make-superior-links-to-brain-2/">carbon nanotubes</a></strong>—a million of which could be bundled together and sent to the brain via the bloodstream.</p>
<p>These people are all working on this arrow:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuralink-formula-v2_03.png"></a></p>
<p>It’s a relatively small group right now, but when the breakthrough spark happens, that’ll quickly change. Developments will begin to happen rapidly. Brain interface bandwidth will get better and better as the procedures to implant them become simpler and cheaper. Public interest will pick up. And when public interest picks up, the Human Colossus notices an opportunity—and then the rate of development skyrockets. Just like the breakthroughs in computer hardware caused the software industry to explode, major industries will pop up working on cutting-edge machines and intelligent apps to be used in conjunction with brain interfaces, and you’ll tell some little kid in 2052 all about how when you grew up, no one could do any of the things she can do with her brain, and she’ll be bored.</p>
<p>I tried to get the Neuralink team to talk about 2052 with me. I wanted to know what life was going to be like once this all became a thing. I wanted to know what went in the [Pilot ACE : iPhone 7 :: Early BMIs : ____] blank. But it wasn’t easy—this was a team built specifically because of their focus on concrete results, not hype, and I was doing the equivalent of talking to people in the late 1700s who were feverishly trying to create a breakthrough steam engine and prodding them about when they thought there would be airplanes.</p>
<p>But I’d keep pulling teeth until they’d finally talk about their thoughts on the far future to get my hand off their tooth. I also focused a large portion of my talks with Elon on the far future possibilities and had other helpful discussions with Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist friend of mine who <a href="http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-if-we-could-look-inside-human-brains-moran-cerf">works on BMIs</a> and thinks a lot about the long-term outlook. Finally, one reluctant-to-talk-about-his-predictions Neuralink team member told me that of course, he and his colleagues <em>were</em> dreamers—otherwise they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing—and that many of them were inspired to get into this industry by science fiction. He recommended I talk to Ramez Naam, writer of the popular <a href="http://amzn.to/2pqeLNy"><em>Nexus Trilogy</em></a>, a series all about the future of BMIs, and also someone with a hard tech background that includes 19 software-related patents. So I had a chat with Ramez to round out the picture and ask him the 435 remaining questions I had about everything.</p>
<p>And I came out of all of it utterly blown away. I wrote <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">once</a> about how I think if you went back to 1750—a time when there was no electricity or motorized vehicles or telecommunication—and retrieved, say, George Washington, and brought him to today and showed him our world, he’d be so shocked by everything that he’d die. You’d have killed George Washington and messed everything up. Which got me thinking about the concept of how many years one would need to go into the future such that the ensuing shock from the level of progress would kill you. I called it a Die Progress Unit, or DPU.</p>
<p>Ever since the Human Colossus was born, our world has had a weird property to it—it gets more <em>magical</em> as time goes on. That’s why DPUs are a thing. And because advancement begets more rapid advancement, the trend is that as time passes, the DPUs get <em>shorter</em>. For George Washington, a DPU was a couple hundred years, which is outrageously short in the scheme of human history. But we now live in a time where things are moving <em>so </em>fast that we might experience one or even multiple DPUs <em>in our lifetime</em>. The amount that changed between 1750 and 2017 might happen again between now and another time when you’re still alive. This is a <em>ridiculous</em> time to be alive—it’s just hard for us to notice because we live life so zoomed in.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think about DPUs a lot and I always wonder what it would feel like to go forward in a time machine and experience what George would experience coming here. What kind of future could blow my mind so hard that it would kill me? We can talk about things like AI and gene editing—and I have no doubt that progress in those areas could make me die of shock—but it’s always, “Who knows what it’ll be like!” Never a descriptive picture.</p>
<p><a></a>I think I might finally have a descriptive picture of a piece of our shocking future. Let me paint it for you.</p>
<p><strong>Part 5: The Wizard Era</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-tree-Parts-5.png"></a></p>
<p>The budding industry of brain-machine interfaces is the seed of a revolution that will change just about everything. But in many ways, the brain-interface future isn’t really a new <em>thing</em> that’s happening. If you take a step back, it looks more like the next big chapter in a trend that’s been going on for a long time. Language took forever to turn into writing, which then took forever to turn into printing, and that’s where things were when George Washington was around. Then came electricity and the pace picked up. Telephone. Radio. Television. Computers. And just like that, everyone’s homes became magical. Then phones became cordless. Then mobile. Computers went from being devices for work and games to windows into a digital world we all became a part of. Then phones and computers merged into an everything device that brought the magic out of our homes and put it into our hands. And on our wrists. We’re now in the early stages of a virtual and augmented reality revolution that will wrap the magic around our eyes and ears and bring our whole being into the digital world.</p>
<p>You don’t need to be a futurist to see where this is going.</p>
<p>Magic has worked its way from industrial facilities to our homes to our hands and soon it’ll be around our heads. And then it’ll take the next natural step. The magic is heading into our brains.</p>
<p>It will happen by way of a “whole-brain interface,” or what I’ve been calling a wizard hat—a brain interface so complete, so smooth, so biocompatible, and so high-bandwidth that it feels as much a part of you as your cortex and limbic system. A whole-brain interface would give your brain the ability to communicate wirelessly with the cloud, with computers, and with the brains of anyone with a similar interface in their head. This flow of information between your brain and the outside world would be so effortless, it would feel similar to the thinking that goes on in your head today. And though we’ve used the term brain-machine interface so far, I kind of think of a BMI as a specific brain interface to be used for a specific purpose, and the term doesn’t quite capture the everything-of-everything concept of the whole-brain interface. So I’ll call that a wizard hat instead.</p>
<p>Now, to fully absorb the implications of having a wizard hat installed in your head and what that would change about you, you’ll need to wrap your head around (no pun intended) two things:</p>
<p><strong>1) The intensely <strong>mind-bending</strong> idea</strong></p>
<p><strong>2) The super ridiculously intensely <strong>mind-bending</strong> idea</strong></p>
<p>We’ll tackle #1 in this section and save #2 for the last section after you’ve had time to absorb #1.</p>
<p>Elon calls the whole-brain interface and its many capabilities a “digital tertiary layer,” a term that has two levels of meaning that correspond to our two mind-bending ideas above.</p>
<p>The first meaning gets at the idea of physical brain parts. We discussed three layers of brain parts—the brain stem (run by the frog), the limbic system (run by the monkey), and the cortex (run by the rational thinker). We were being thorough, but for the rest of this post, we’re going to leave the frog out of the discussion, since he’s entirely functional and lives mostly behind the scenes.</p>
<p>When Elon refers to a “digital tertiary layer,” he’s considering our existing brain having two layers—our animal limbic system (which could be called our primary layer) and our advanced cortex (which could be called our secondary layer). The wizard hat interface, then, would be our tertiary layer—a new physical brain part to complement the other two.</p>
<p>If thinking about this concept is giving you the willies, Elon has news for you:</p>
<p><em>We already have a digital tertiary layer in a sense, in that you have your computer or your phone or your applications. You can ask a question via Google and get an answer instantly. You can access any book or any music. With a spreadsheet, you can do incredible calculations. If you had an Empire State building filled with people—even if they had calculators, let alone if they had to do it with a pencil and paper—one person with a laptop could outdo the Empire State Building filled with people with calculators. You can video chat with someone in freaking Timbuktu for free. This would’ve gotten you burnt for witchcraft in the old days. You can record as much video with sound as you want, take a zillion pictures, have them tagged with who they are and when it took place. You can broadcast communications through social media to millions of people simultaneously for free. These are incredible superpowers that the President of the United States didn’t have twenty years ago.</em></p>
<p><em>The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.</em></p>
<p>This is a hard point to really absorb, because we don’t <em>feel </em>like cyborgs. We feel like humans who use devices to do things. But think about your digital self—you when you’re interacting with someone on the internet or over FaceTime or when you’re in a YouTube video. Digital you is fully you—as much as in-person you is you—right? The only difference is that you’re not there in person—you’re using magic powers to send yourself to somewhere far away, at light speed, through wires and satellites and electromagnetic waves. The difference is the medium.</p>
<p>Before language, there wasn’t a good way to get a thought from your brain into my brain. Then early humans invented the technology of language, transforming vocal cords and ears into the world’s first communication devices and air as the first communication medium. We use these devices every time we talk to each other in person. It goes:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Flow-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Then we built upon that with another leap, inventing a second layer of devices, with its own medium, allowing us to talk long distance:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Flow-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Or maybe:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Flow-3.png"></a></p>
<p>In that sense, your phone is as much “you” as your vocal cords or your ears or your eyes. All of these things are simply tools to move thoughts from brain to brain—so who cares if the tool is held in your hand, your throat, or your eye sockets? The digital age has made us a dual entity—a physical creature who interacts with its physical environment using its biological parts and a digital creature whose digital devices—whose digital <em>parts</em>—allow it to interact with the digital world.</p>
<p>But because we don’t think of it like that, we’d consider someone with a phone in their head or throat a cyborg and someone else with a phone in their hand, pressed up against their head, not a cyborg. Elon’s point is that the thing that makes a cyborg a cyborg is their capabilities—not from which side of the skull those capabilities are generated.</p>
<p>We’re already a cyborg, we already have superpowers, and we already spend a huge part of our lives in the digital world. And when you think of it like that, you realize how obvious it is to want to upgrade the medium that connects us to that world. This is the change Elon believes is actually happening when the magic goes into our brains:</p>
<p><em>You’re already digitally superhuman. The thing that would change is the interface—having a high-bandwidth interface to your digital enhancements. The thing is that today, the interface all necks down to this tiny straw, which is, particularly in terms of output, it’s like poking things with your meat sticks, or using words—either speaking or tapping things with fingers. And in fact, output has gone backwards. It used to be, in your most frequent form, output would be ten-finger typing. Now, it’s like, two-thumb typing. </em><em>That’s crazy slow communication. We should be able to improve that by many orders of magnitude with a direct neural interface.</em></p>
<p>In other words, putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we <em>are </em>cyborgs and we will <em>continue </em>to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.</p>
<p>A whole-brain interface is that upgrade. It changes us from creatures whose primary and secondary layers live inside their heads and whose tertiary layer lives in their pocket, in their hand, or on their desk—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Human-using-computer-1.png"></a></p>
<p>—to creatures whose three layers all live together.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Human-brain-using-computer.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Your life is full of devices, including the one you’re currently using to read this. A wizard hat makes your <em>brain </em>into the device, allowing your thoughts to go straight from your head into the digital world.</p>
<p>Which doesn’t only revolutionize human-<em>computer </em>communication.</p>
<p>Right now humans communicate with each other like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-2.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-3.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-4.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-5.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-6.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-7.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-8-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-9.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-10-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-11-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-12.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-14.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-15.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-16.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-17.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-18.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-19.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-20-2.png"></a></p>
<p>And that’s how it’s been ever since we could communicate. But in a wizard hat world, it would look more like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-2.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-22.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Elon always emphasizes bandwidth when he talks about Neuralink’s wizard hat goals. Interface bandwidth allows incoming images to be HD, incoming sound to be hi-fi, and motor movement commands to be tightly controlled—but it’s also a huge factor in communication. If information were a milkshake, bandwidth would be the width of the straw. Today, the bandwidth-of-communication graph looks something like this:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Speed-GRAPH-1.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>So computers can suck up the milkshake through a giant pipe, a human thinking would be using a large, pleasant-to-use straw, while language would be a frustratingly tiny coffee stirrer straw and typing (let alone texting) would be like trying to drink a milkshake through a syringe needle—you might be able to get a drop out once a minute.</p>
<p>Moran Cerf has gathered data on the actual bandwidth of different parts of the nervous system and on this graph, he compares them to equivalent bandwidths in the computer world:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html/bandwidth-v2"></a></p>
<p>You can see here on Moran’s graph that the disparity in bandwidth between the ways we communicate and our thinking (which is at 30 bits/second on this graph) is even starker than my graph above depicts.</p>
<p>But making our brains the device cuts out those tiny straws, turning all of these:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Flow-ALL.png"></a></p>
<p>To this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Flow-Condensed.png"></a></p>
<p>Which preserves all the meaning with none of the fuss—and changes the graph to this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communication-Speed-GRAPH-2.png"></a></p>
<p>We’d still be using straws, but <em>far </em>bigger, more effective ones.</p>
<p>But it’s not just about the speed of communication. As Elon points out, it’s about the <em>nuance </em>and <em>accuracy</em> of communication as well:</p>
<p><em>There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is—your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you. … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person.</em></p>
<p>This makes sense—nuance is like a <em>high-resolution thought</em>, which makes the file simply too big to transfer quickly through a coffee straw. The coffee straw gives you two bad options when it comes to nuance: take a <em>lot </em>of time saying a lot of words to really depict the nuanced thought or imagery you want to convey to me, or save time by using succinct language—but inevitably fail to transfer over the nuance. Compounding the effect is the fact that language itself is a low-resolution medium. A word is simply an <em>approximation</em> of a thought—buckets that a whole category of similar-but-distinct thoughts can all be shoved into. If I watch a horror movie and want to describe it to you in words, I’m stuck with a few simple low-res buckets—“scary” or “creepy” or “chilling” or “intense.” My actual impression of that movie is very specific and not exactly like any other movie I’ve seen—but the crude tools of language force my brain to “round to the nearest bucket” and choose the word that most closely resembles my actual impression, and that’s the information you’ll receive from me. You won’t receive the thought—you’ll receive the <em>bucket</em>—and now you’ll have to guess which of the <em>many </em>nuanced impressions that all approximate to that bucket is the most similar to my impression of the movie. You’ll decompress my description—“scary as shit”—into a high-res, nuanced thought that <em>you </em>associate with “scary as shit,” which will inevitably be based on your own experience watching other horror movies, and your own personality. The end result is that a lot has been lost in translation—which is exactly what you’d expect when you try to transfer a high-res file over a low-bandwidth medium, quickly, using low-res tools. That’s why Elon calls language data transfer “lossy.”</p>
<p>We do the best we can with these limitations—and over time, we’ve supplemented language with slightly higher-resolution formats like video to better convey nuanced imagery, or music to better convey nuanced emotion. But compared to the richness and uniqueness of the ideas in our heads, and the large-bandwidth straw our internal <em>thoughts</em> flow through, all human-to-human communication is very lossy.</p>
<p>Thinking about the phenomenon of communication as what it is—brains trying to share things with each other—you see the history of communication not as this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communcation-Hacks-1.png"></a></p>
<p>As much as this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communcation-Hacks-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Or it could be put this way:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communcation-Hacks-3.png"></a></p>
<p>It really may be that the second major era of communication—the 100,000-year Era of Indirect Communication—is in its very last moments. If we zoom out on the timeline, it’s possible the entire last 150 years, during which we’ve suddenly been <em>rapidly </em>improving our communication media, will look to far-future humans like one concept: the transition from Era 2 to Era 3. We might be living <em>on </em>the line that divides timeline sections.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Communications-hacks-timeline.png"></a></p>
<p>And because indirect communication requires third-party body parts or digital parts, the end of Era 2 may be looked back upon as the era of physical devices. In an era where your brain is the device, there will be no need to carry anything around. You’ll have your body and, if you want, clothes—and that’s it.</p>
<p>When Elon thinks about wizard hats, this is usually the stuff he’s thinking about—communication bandwidth and resolution. And we’ll explore why in Part 6 of this post.</p>
<p>First, let’s dig into the mind-boggling concept of your brain becoming a device and talk about what a wizard hat world might be like.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind as we think about all of this is that none of it will take you by surprise. You won’t go from having nothing in your brain to a digital tertiary layer in your head, just like people didn’t go from the Apple IIGS to using Tinder overnight. The Wizard Era will come gradually, and by the time the shift actually begins to happen, we’ll all be very used to the technology, and it’ll seem normal.</p>
<p>Supporting this point is the fact the staircase up to the Wizard Era has already started, and you haven’t even noticed. But there are thousands of people currently walking around with electrodes in their brain, like those with cochlear implants, retinal implants, and deep brain implants—all benefiting from early BMIs.</p>
<p>The next few steps on the staircase will continue to focus on restoring lost function in different parts of the body—the first people to have their lives transformed by digital brain technology will be the disabled. As specialized BMIs serve more and more forms of disability, the concept of brain implants will work its way in from the fringes and become something we’re all used to—just like no one blinks an eye when you say your friend just got Lasik surgery or your grandmother just got a pacemaker installed.</p>
<p>Elon talks about some types of people early BMIs could help:</p>
<p><em>The first use of the technology will be to repair brain injuries as a result of stroke or cutting out a cancer lesion, where somebody’s fundamentally lost a certain cognitive element. It could help with people who are quadriplegics or paraplegics by providing a neural shunt from the motor cortex down to where the muscles are activated. It can help with people who, as they get older, have memory problems and can’t remember the names of their kids, through memory enhancement, which could allow them to function well to a much later time in life—the medically advantageous elements of this for dealing with mental disablement of one kind or another, which of course happens to all of us when we get old enough, are very significant.</em></p>
<p>As someone who lost a grandfather to dementia five years before losing him to death, I’m excited to hear this.</p>
<p>And as interface bandwidth improves, disabilities that hinder millions today will start to drop like flies. The concepts of complete blindness and deafness—whether centered in the sensory organs or in the brain<a href="#footnote-31-6120">31</a>—are already on the way out. And with enough time, perfect vision or hearing will be restorable.</p>
<p>Prosthetic limbs—and eventually sleek, full-body exoskeletons underneath your clothes—will work so well, providing both outgoing motor functions and an incoming sense of touch, that paralysis or amputations will only have a minor long-term effect on people’s lives.</p>
<p>In Alzheimer’s patients, memories themselves are often not lost—only the bridge to those memories. Advanced BMIs could help restore that bridge or serve as a new one.</p>
<p>While this is happening, BMIs will begin to emerge that people <em>without</em> disabilities want. The very early adopters will probably be pretty rich. But so were the early cell phone adopters.<a href="#footnote2-52-6120">52</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/gordon-gekko-RS.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s Gordon Gekko, and that 1983, two-pound cell phone cost almost <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2010/09/23/gordon_gekko_s_cell_phone.html">$9,000</a> in today’s dollars. And now over half of living humans own a mobile phone—all of them far less shitty than Gordon Gekko’s.</p>
<p>As mobile phones got cheaper, and better, they went from new and fancy and futuristic to ubiquitous. As we go down the same road with brain interfaces, things are going to get <em>really </em>cool.</p>
<p>Based on what I learned from my conversations with Elon, Ramez, and a dozen neuroscientists, let’s look at what the world might look like in a few decades. The timeline is uncertain, including the order in which the below developments may become a reality. And, of course, some of the below predictions are sure to be way off the mark, just as there will be other developments in this field that won’t be mentioned here because people today literally can’t imagine them yet.</p>
<p>But some version of a lot of this stuff probably<em> will</em> happen, at <em>some </em>point, and a lot of it could be in your lifetime.</p>
<p>Looking at all the predictions I heard, they seemed to fall into two broad categories: communication capabilities and internal enhancements.</p>
<p><strong>The Wizard Era: Communication</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Wizard-Communication-Heading.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>Motor communication</strong></p>
<p>“Communication” in this section can mean human-to-human or human-to-computer. Motor communication is all about human-to-computer—the whole “motor cortex as remote control” thing from earlier, but now the unbelievably rad version.</p>
<p>Like many future categories of brain interface possibility, motor communication will start with restoration applications for the disabled, and as those development efforts continually advance the possibilities, the technology will begin to be used to create <em>augmentation </em>applications for the non-disabled as well. The same technologies that will allow a quadriplegic to use their thoughts as a remote control to move a bionic limb can let anyone use their thoughts as a remote control…to move anything. Well not <em>anything—</em>I’m not talking about telekinesis—anything built to be used with a brain remote. But in the Wizard Era, <em>lots </em>of things will be built that way.</p>
<p>Your car (or whatever people use for transportation at that point) will pull up to your house and your mind will open the car door. You’ll walk up to the house and your mind will unlock and open the front door (all doors at that point will be built with sensors to receive motor cortex commands). You’ll think about wanting coffee and the coffee maker will get that going. As you head to the fridge the door will open and after getting what you need it’ll close as you walk away. When it’s time for bed, you’ll decide you want the heat turned down and the lights turned off, and those systems will feel you make that decision and adjust themselves.</p>
<p>None of this stuff will take any effort or thought—we’ll all get very good at it and it’ll feel as automatic and subconscious as moving your eyes to read this sentence does to you now.</p>
<p>People will play the piano with their thoughts. And do building construction. And steer vehicles. In fact, today, if you’re driving somewhere and something jumps out in the road in front of you, what neuroscientists know is that your brain sees it and begins to react well before your consciousness knows what’s going on or your arms move to steer out of the way. But when your brain is the one steering the car, you’ll have swerved out of the way before you even realize what happened.</p>
<p><strong>Thought communication</strong></p>
<p>This is what we discussed up above—but you have to resist the natural instinct to equate a thought conversation with a normal language conversation where you simply hear each other’s voices in your head. As we discussed, words are compressed approximations of uncompressed thoughts, so why would you ever bother with any of that, or deal with lossiness, if you didn’t have to? When you watch a movie, your head is buzzing with thoughts—but do you have a compressed spoken word dialogue going on in your head? Probably not—you’re just <em>thinking</em>. Thought conversations will be like <em>that</em>.</p>
<p>Elon says:</p>
<p><em>If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now.</em></p>
<p>That’s the thing—it’s difficult to really understand what it would be like to <em>think </em>with someone. We’ve never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that’s all we can imagine.</p>
<p>Even weirder is the concept of a <em>group </em>thinking together. This is what a group brainstorm could look like in the Wizard Era.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thinking-brainstorm-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thinking-brainstorm-2.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thinking-brainstorm-3.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thinking-brainstorm-4.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thinking-brainstorm-5.png"></a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/thinking-brainstorm-6-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Thinking-brainstorm-7.png"></a></p>
<p>And of course, they wouldn’t need to be in the same room. This group could have been in four different countries while this was happening—with no external devices in sight.</p>
<p>Ramez has <a href="http://rameznaam.com/2015/05/15/the-ultimate-interface-your-brain/">written about</a> the effect group thinking might have on the world:</p>
<p><em>That type of communication would have a huge impact on the pace of innovation, as scientists and engineers could work more fluidly together. And it’s just as likely to have a transformative effect on the public sphere, in the same way that email, blogs, and Twitter have successively changed public discourse.</em></p>
<p>The idea of collaboration today is <em>supposed </em>to be two or more brains working together to come up with things none of them could have on their own. And a lot of the time, it works pretty well—but when you consider the “lost in transmission” phenomenon that happens with language, you realize how much more effective group thinking would be.</p>
<p>I asked Elon a question that pops into everyone’s mind when they first hear about thought communication:</p>
<p>“So, um, will everyone be able to know what I’m thinking?”</p>
<p>He assured me they would not. “People won’t be able to read your thoughts—you would have to will it. If you don’t will it, it doesn’t happen. Just like if you don’t will your mouth to talk, it doesn’t talk.” Phew.</p>
<p>You can also think with a computer. Not just to issue a command, but to actually brainstorm something with a computer. You and a computer could strategize something together. You could compose a piece of music together. Ramez talked about using a computer as an imagination collaborator: “You could imagine something, and the computer, which can better forward predict or analyze physical models, could fill in constraints—and that allows you to get feedback.”</p>
<p>One concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts I talked to believed it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it served us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality. Think of how much easier it is for people today to express their individuality and customize life to themselves than it was 50 or 100 or 500 years ago. There’s no reason to believe that trend won’t continue with more progress.</p>
<p><strong>Multimedia communication</strong></p>
<p>Similar to thought communication, but imagine how much easier it would be to describe a dream you had or a piece of music stuck in your head or a memory you’re thinking about if you could just beam the thing into someone’s head, like showing them on your computer screen. Or as Elon said, “I could think of a bouquet of flowers and have a very clear picture in my head of what that is. It would take a lot of words for you to even have an approximation of what that bouquet of flowers looks like.”</p>
<p>How much faster could a team of engineers or architects or designers plan out a new bridge or a new building or a new dress if they could beam the vision in their head onto a screen and others could adjust it with their minds, versus sketching things out—which not only takes far longer, but probably is inevitably lossy?</p>
<p>How many symphonies could Mozart have written if he had been able to think the music in his head onto the page? How many Mozarts are out there right now who never learned how to play instruments well enough to get their talent out?</p>
<p>I watched this <em>delightful</em> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_MSFkZHNi4">animated short movie</a> the other day, and below the video the creator, Felix Colgrave, said the video took him two years. How much of that time was spent dreaming up the art versus painstakingly getting it from his head into the software? Maybe in a few decades, I’ll be able to watch animation streaming live out of Felix’s head.</p>
<p><strong>Emotional communication</strong></p>
<p>Emotions are the quintessential example of a concept that words are poorly-equipped to accurately describe. If ten people say, “I’m sad,” it actually means ten different things. In the Wizard Era, we’ll probably learn pretty quickly that the specific emotions people feel are as unique to people as their appearance or sense of humor.</p>
<p>This could work as communication—when one person communicates just what they’re feeling, the other person would be able to access the feeling in their own emotional centers. Obvious implications for a future of heightened empathy. But emotional communication could also be used for things like entertainment, where a movie, say, could also project out to the audience—directly into their limbic systems—certain feelings it wants the audience to feel as they watch. This is already what the film score does—another hack—and now it could be done directly.</p>
<p><strong>Sensory communication</strong></p>
<p>This one is intense.</p>
<p>Right now, the only two microphones that can act as inputs for the “speaker” in your head—your auditory cortex—are your two ears. The only two cameras that can be hooked up to the projector in your head—your visual cortex—are your two eyes. The only sensory surface that you can feel is your skin. The only thing that lets you experience taste is your tongue.</p>
<p>But in the same way we can currently hook an implant, for example, into someone’s cochlea—which connects a <em>different </em>mic to their auditory cortex—down the road we’ll be able to let sensory input information stream into your wizard hat wirelessly, from anywhere, and channel right into your sensory cortices the same way your bodily sensory organs do today. In the future, sensory organs will be only one set of inputs into your senses—and compared to what our senses will have access to, not a very exciting one.</p>
<p>Now what about output?</p>
<p>Currently, the only speaker your ear inputs can play <em>out</em> of is your auditory cortex. Only <em>you</em> can see what your eye cameras capture and only you can feel what touches your skin—because only you have access to the particular cortices those inputs are wired to. With a wizard hat, it would be a breeze for your brain to beam those input signals out of your head.</p>
<p>So you’ll have sensory input capabilities and sensory output capabilities—or both at the same time. This will open up all <em>kinds </em>of amazing possibilities.</p>
<p>Say you’re on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem—just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he’s there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze and smells the trees and jumps when a bug lands on your arm. You two share the equivalent of a five-minute discussion about the scene—your favorite parts, which other places it reminds you of, etc. along with a shared story from his day—in a 30-second thought session. He says he has to get back to what he was working on, so he cuts off the sense connections except for vision, which he reduces to a little picture-in-picture window on the side of his visual field so he can check out more of the hike from time to time.</p>
<p>A surgeon could control a machine scalpel with her motor cortex instead of holding one in her hand, and she could receive sensory input from that scalpel so that it would feel like an 11th finger to her. So it would be as if one of her fingers <em>was </em>a scalpel and she could do the surgery without holding any tools, giving her much finer control over her incisions. An inexperienced surgeon performing a tough operation could bring a couple of her mentors into the scene as she operates to watch her work through her eyes and think instructions or advice to her. And if something goes really wrong, one of them could “take the wheel” and connect their motor cortex to her outputs to take control of her hands.</p>
<p>There would be no more need for screens of course—because you could just make a virtual screen appear in your visual cortex. Or jump into a VR movie with all your senses. Speaking of VR—Facebook, the maker of the Oculus Rift, is diving into this too. In an interview with Mark Zuckerberg about VR (for an upcoming post), the conversation at one point turned to BMIs. He said: “Touch gives you input and it’s a little bit of haptic feedback. Over the long term, it’s not clear that we won’t just like to have our hands in no controller, and maybe, instead of having buttons that we press, we would just <em>think</em> something.”</p>
<p>The ability to record sensory input means you can also record your memories, or share them—since a memory in the first place is just a not-so-accurate playback of previous sensory input. Or you could play them back as live experiences. In other words, that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3GIR70HAY">Black Mirror episode</a> will probably actually happen.</p>
<p>An NBA player could send out a livestream invitation to his fans before a game, which would let them see and hear through his eyes and ears while he plays. Those who miss it could jump into the recording later.</p>
<p>You could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later—or, if you’re not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience. (Needless to say, the porn industry will thrive in the digital brain world.)</p>
<p>Right now, you can go on YouTube and watch a first-hand account of almost anything, for free. This would have blown George Washington’s mind—but in the Wizard Era, you’ll be able to actually<em> experience</em> almost anything for free. The days of fancy experiences being limited to rich people will be long over.</p>
<p>Another idea, via the imagination of Moran Cerf: Maybe player brain injuries will drive the NFL to alter the rules so that the players’ biological bodies stay on the sidelines, while they play the game with an artificial body whose motor cortex they control and whose eyes and ears they see and hear through. I like this idea and think it would be closer to the current NFL than it seems at first. In one way, you’ll still need to be a great athlete to play, since most of what makes a great athlete great is their motor cortex, their muscle memory, and their decision-making. But the other component of being a great athlete—the physical body itself—would now be artificial. The NFL could make all of the artificial playing bodies identical—this would be a cool way to see whose skills were actually best—or they could insist that artificial body matches in every way the biological body of the athlete, to mimic as closely as possible how the game would go if players used their biological bodies like in the old days. Either way, if this rule change happened, you can imagine how <em>crazy</em> it would seem to people that players used to have their actual, fragile brains <em>on the field</em>.</p>
<p>I could go on. The communication possibilities in a wizard hat world, especially when you combine them with each other, are endless—and damn fun to think about.</p>
<p><strong>The Wizard Era: Internal Control</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Wizard-Tinkering-Heading.png"></a></p>
<p>Communication—the flow of information into and out of your brain—is only one way your wizard hat will be able to serve you.</p>
<p>A whole-brain interface can stimulate any part of your brain in any way—it has to have this capability for the input half of all the communication examples above. But that capability also gives you a whole new level of control over your brain. Here are some ways people of the future might take advantage of that:</p>
<p><strong>Win the battle in your head for both sides</strong></p>
<p>Often, the battle in our heads between our prefrontal cortex and limbic system comes down to the fact that both parties are trying to do what’s best for us—it’s just that our limbic system is wrong about what’s best for us because it thinks we live in a tribe 50,000 years ago.</p>
<p>Your limbic system isn’t making you eat your ninth Starburst candy in a row because it’s a dick—it’s making you eat it because it thinks that A) any fruit that sweet and densely chewy must be <em>super </em>rich in calories and B) you might not find food again for the next four days so it’s a good idea to load up on a high-calorie food whenever the opportunity arises.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex is just watching in horror like “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS.”</p>
<p>But Moran believes that a good brain interface could fix this problem:<a href="#footnote2-53-6120">53</a>
</p><p><em>Consider eating a chocolate cake. While eating, we feed data to our cognitive apparatus. These data provide the enjoyment of the cake. The enjoyment isn’t in the cake, per se, but in our neural experience of it. Decoupling our sensory desire (the experience of cake) from the underlying survival purpose (nutrition) will soon be within our reach.</em></p>
<p>This concept of “sensory decoupling” would make <em>so </em>much sense if we could pull it off. You could get the <em>enjoyment </em>of eating like shit without actually putting shit in your body. Instead, Moran says, what would go in your body would be “nutrition inputs customized for each person based on genomes, microbiomes or other factors. Physical diets released from the tyranny of desire.”<a href="#footnote2-54-6120">54</a>
</p><p>The same principle could apply to things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and other pleasures that get people into trouble, healthwise or otherwise.</p>
<p>Ramez Naam talks about how a brain interface could also help us win the discipline battle when it comes to time:<a href="#footnote2-55-6120">55</a>
</p><p><em>We know that stimulating the right centers in the brain can induce sleep or alertness, hunger or satiation, ease or stimulation, as quick as the flip of a switch. Or, if you’re running code, on a schedule. (Siri: Put me to sleep until 7:30, high priority interruptions only. And let’s get hungry for lunch around noon. Turn down the sugar cravings, though.)</em></p>
<p><strong>Take control of mood disorders</strong></p>
<p>Ramez also emphasized that a great deal of scientific evidence suggests that moods and disorders are tied to what the chemicals in your brain are doing. Right now, we take drugs to alter those chemicals, and Ramez explains why direct neural stimulation is a far better option:<a href="#footnote2-56-6120">56</a>
</p><p><em>Pharmaceuticals enter the brain and then spread out randomly, hitting whatever receptor they work on all across your brain. Neural interfaces, by contrast, can stimulate just one area at a time, can be tuned in real-time, and can carry information out about what’s happening.</em></p>
<p>Depression, anxiety, OCD, and other disorders may be easy to eradicate once we can take better control of what goes on in our brain.</p>
<p><strong>Mess with your senses</strong></p>
<p>Want to hear what a dog hears? That’s easy. The pitch range we can hear is limited by the dimensions of our cochlea—but pitches out of the ear’s range can be sent straight into our auditory nerve.<a href="#footnote-32-6120">32</a>
</p><p>Or maybe you want a new sense. You love bird watching and want to be able to sense when there’s a bird nearby. So you buy an infrared camera that can detect bird locations by their heat signals and you link it to your brain interface, which stimulates neurons in a certain way to alert you to the presence of a bird and tell you its location. I can’t describe what you’d experience when it alerts you, so I’ll just say words like “feel” or “see,” because I can only imagine the five senses we have. But in the future, there will be more words for new, useful types of senses.</p>
<p>You could also dim or shut off parts of a sense, like pain perhaps. Pain is the body’s way of telling us we need to address something, but in the future, we’ll elect to get that information in much less unpleasant formats.<a href="#footnote-33-6120">33</a>
</p><p><strong>Increase your knowledge </strong></p>
<p>There’s evidence from experiments with rats that it’s possible to boost how fast a brain can learn—sometimes by 2x or even 3x—just by priming certain neurons to prepare to make a long-term connection.</p>
<p>Your brain would also have access to all the knowledge in the world, at all times. I talked to Ramez about how accessing information in the cloud might work. We parsed it out into four layers of capability, each requiring a more advanced brain interface than the last:</p>
<p><strong>Level 1:</strong> I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info—like Googling something with my brain—and the answer, in text, appears in my mind’s eye. Basically what I do now except it all happens in my head.</p>
<p><strong>Level 2: </strong>I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info, and then a second later I just <em>know </em>it. No reading was involved—it was more like the way I’d recall something from memory.</p>
<p><strong>Level 3: </strong>I just know the fact I want to know the second I want it. I don’t even know if it came from the cloud or if it was stored in my brain. I can essentially treat the whole cloud like my brain. I don’t know all the info—my brain could never fit it all—but any time I want to know something it downloads into my consciousness so seamlessly and quickly, it’s as if it were there all along.</p>
<p><strong>Level 4: </strong>Beyond just knowing facts, I can deeply <em>understand</em> anything I want to, in a complex way. We discussed the example of <em>Moby Dick</em>. Could I download <em>Moby Dick</em> from the cloud into my memory and then suddenly have it be the same as if I had read the whole book? Where I’d have thoughts and opinions and I could cite passages and have discussions about the themes?</p>
<p>Ramez thinks all four of these are possible with enough time, but that the fourth in particular will take a very long time to happen, if ever.</p>
<p>So there are about 50 delightful potential things about putting a wizard hat on your brain. Now for the undelightful part.</p>
<p><strong>The scary thing about wizard hats</strong></p>
<p>As is always the case with the advent of new technologies, when the Wizard Era rolls around, the dicks of the world will do their best to ruin everything.</p>
<p>And this time, the stakes are extra high. Here are some things that could suck:</p>
<p><strong>Trolls can have an even fielder day. </strong>The troll-type personalities of the world have been having a field day ever since the internet came out. They literally can’t believe their luck. But with brain interfaces, they’ll have an even fielder day. Being more connected to each other means a lot of good things—like empathy going up as a result of more exposure to all kinds of people—but it also means a lot of bad things. Just like the internet. Bad guys will have more opportunity to spread hate or build hateful coalitions. The internet has been a godsend for ISIS, and a brain-connected world would be an even more helpful recruiting tool.</p>
<p><strong>Computers crash. </strong>And they have bugs. And normally that’s not the end of the world, because you can try restarting, and if it’s really being a piece of shit, you can just get a new computer. You can’t get a new head. There will have to be a way <em>way </em>higher number of precautions taken here.</p>
<p><strong>Computers can be hacked. </strong>Except this time they have access to your thoughts, sensory input, and memories. Bad times.</p>
<p><strong>Holy shit computers can be hacked. </strong>In the last item I was thinking about bad guys using hacking to <em>steal</em> information from my brain. But brain interfaces <em>can also put information in. </em>Meaning a clever hacker might be able to change your thoughts or your vote or your identity or make you want to do something terrible you normally wouldn’t ever consider. And you wouldn’t know it ever happened. You could feel strongly about voting for a candidate and a little part of you would wonder if someone manipulated your thoughts so you’d feel that way. The darkest possible scenario would be an ISIS-type organization actually influencing millions of people to join their cause by altering their thoughts. This is definitely the scariest paragraph in this post. Let’s get out of here.</p>
<p><strong>Why the Wizard Era will be a good thing anyway even though there are a lot of dicks</strong></p>
<p>Physics advancements allow bad guys to make nuclear bombs. Biological advancements allow bad guys to make bioweapons. The invention of cars and planes led to crashes that kill over a million people a year. The internet enabled the spread of fake news, made us vulnerable to cyberattack, made terrorist recruiting efforts easier, and allowed predators to flourish.</p>
<p>And yet—</p>
<p>Would people choose to reverse our understanding of science, go back to the days of riding horses across land and boats across the ocean, or get rid of the internet?</p>
<p>Probably not.</p>
<p>New technology also comes along with real dangers and it always <em>does </em>end up harming a lot of people. But it also always seems to help a lot <em>more </em>people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive.</p>
<p>People also love to hate the <em>concept</em> of new technology—because they worry it’s unhealthy and makes us less human. But those same people, if given the option, usually wouldn’t consider going back to George Washington’s time, when half of children died before the age of 5, when traveling to other parts of the world was impossible for almost everyone, when a far greater number of humanitarian atrocities were being committed than there are today, when women and ethnic minorities had <em>far </em>fewer rights across the world than they do today, when far more people were illiterate and far more people were living under the poverty line than there are today. They wouldn’t go back 250 years—a time right before <em>the biggest explosion of technology in human history</em> <em>happened.</em> Sounds like people who are immensely <em>grateful </em>for technology. And yet their opinion holds—our technology is ruining our lives, people in the old days were much wiser, our world’s going to shit, etc. I don’t think they’ve thought about it hard enough.</p>
<p>So when it comes to what will be a long list of dangers of the Wizard Era—they suck, and they’ll continue to suck as some of them play out into sickening atrocities and catastrophes. But a vastly larger group of good guys will wage war back, as they always do, and a giant “brain security” industry will be born. And I bet, if given the option, people in the Wizard Era wouldn’t for a second consider coming back to 2017.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>The Timeline</strong></p>
<p>I always know when humanity doesn’t know what the hell is going on with something when all the experts are contradicting each other about it.<a href="#footnote-34-6120">34</a>
</p><p>The timeline for our road to the Wizard Era is one of those times—in large part because no one knows to what extent we’ll be able to make Stevenson’s Law look more like Moore’s Law.</p>
<p>My conversations yielded a wide range of opinions on the timeline. One neuroscientist predicted that I’d have a whole-brain interface in my lifetime. Mark Zuckerberg said: “I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.” One prediction on the longer end came from Ramez Naam, who thought the time of people beginning to install BMIs for reasons other than disability might not come for 50 years and that mass adoption would take even longer.</p>
<p>“I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope that Elon bends the curve on this.”</p>
<p>When I asked Elon about his timeline, he said:</p>
<p><em>I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities.</em></p>
<p>During another discussion, I had asked him about why he went into this branch of biotech and not into genetics. He responded:</p>
<p><em>Genetics is just too slow, that’s the problem. For a human to become an adult takes twenty years. We just don’t have that amount of time.</em></p>
<p>A lot of people working on this challenge have a lot of different motivations for doing so, but rarely did I talk to people who felt motivated by <em>urgency.</em></p>
<p>Elon’s urgency to get us into the Wizard Era is the final piece of the Neuralink puzzle. Our last box to fill in:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuralink-formula-v2_04.png"></a></p>
<p>With Elon’s companies, there’s always some “result of the goal” that’s his real reason for starting the company—the piece that ties the company’s goal into humanity’s better future. In the case of Neuralink, it’s a piece that takes a lot of tree climbing to understand. But with the view from all the way up here, we’ve got everything we need for our final stretch of the road.</p>
<p><strong>Part 6: The Great Merger</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Brain-tree-Parts-6.png"></a></p>
<p>Imagine an alien explorer is visiting a new star and finds three planets circling it, all with life on them. The first happens to be identical to the way Earth was in 10 million BC. The second happens to be identical to Earth in 50,000 BC. And the third happens to be identical to Earth in 2017 AD.</p>
<p>The alien is no expert on primitive biological life but circles around all three planets, peering down at each with his telescope. On the first, he sees lots of water and trees and mountains and some little signs of animal life. He makes out a herd of elephants on an African plain, a group of dolphins skipping along the ocean’s surface, and a few other scattered critters living out their Tuesday.</p>
<p>He moves on to the second planet and looks around. More critters, not too much different. He notices one new thing—occasional little points of flickering light dotting the land.</p>
<p>Bored, he moves on to the third planet. Whoa. He sees planes crawling around above the land, vast patches of gray land with towering buildings on them, ships of all kinds sprinkled across the seas, long railways stretching across continents, and he has to jerk his spaceship out of the way when a satellite soars by him.</p>
<p>When he heads home, he reports on what he found: “Two planets with primitive life and one planet with intelligent life.”</p>
<p>You can understand why that would be his conclusion—but he’d be wrong.</p>
<p>In fact, it’s the first planet that’s the odd one out. Both the second and third planets have intelligent life on them—equally intelligent life. So equal that you could kidnap a newborn baby from Planet 2 and swap it with a newborn on Planet 3 and both would grow up as normal people on the other’s planet, fitting in seamlessly. Same people.</p>
<p>And yet, how could that be?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Exoplanets.png"></a></p>
<p>The Human Colossus. That’s how.</p>
<p>Ever wonder why you’re so often unimpressed by humans and yet so blown away by the accomplishments of humanity?</p>
<p>It’s because <em>humans</em> are still, deep down, those people on Planet 2.</p>
<p>Plop a baby human into a group of chimps and ask them to raise him, Tarzan style, and the human as an adult will know how to run around the forest, climb trees, find food, and masturbate. That’s who each of us actually is.</p>
<p><em>Humanity</em>, on the other hand, is a superintelligent, tremendously-knowledgeable, millennia-old Colossus, with 7.5 billion neurons. And that’s who built Planet 3.</p>
<p>The invention of language allowed each human brain to dump its knowledge onto a pile before its death, and the pile became a tower and grew taller and taller until one day, it became the brain of a great Colossus that built us a civilization. The Human Colossus has been inventing things ever since, getting continually better at it with time. Driven only by the desire to create value, the Colossus is now moving at an unprecedented pace—which is why we live in an unprecedented and completely anomalous time in history.</p>
<p>You know how I said we might be living literally <em>on </em>the line between two vast eras of communication?</p>
<p>Well the truth is, we seem to be on a <em>lot </em>of historic timeline boundaries. After 1,000 centuries of human life and 3.8 billion years of Earthly life, it seems like <em>this </em>century will be the one where Earth life makes the leap from the Single-Planetary Era to the Multi-Planetary Era. This century may be the one when an Earthly species finally manages to wrest the genetic code from the forces of evolution and learns to reprogram itself. People alive today could witness the moment when biotechnology finally frees the human lifespan from the will of nature and hands it over to the will of each individual.</p>
<p>The Human Colossus has reached an entirely new level of power—the kind of power that can overthrow 3.8-billion-year eras—positioning us on the verge of <em>multiple </em>tipping points that will lead to unimaginable change. And if our alien friend finds a fourth planet one day that happens to be identical to Earth in 2100, you can be pretty damn sure it’ll look nothing to him like Planet 3.</p>
<p>I hope you enjoyed Planet 3, because we’re leaving it. Planet 4 is where we’re headed, whether we like it or not.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Exoplanet-4.png"></a></p>
<p>__________</p>
<p>If I had to sum up the driving theme behind everything Elon Musk does, it would be pretty simple:</p>
<p>He wants to prepare us for Planet 4.</p>
<p>He lives in the big picture, and his only lens is the maximum zoom-out. That’s why he’s such an unusual visionary. It’s also why he’s so worried.</p>
<p>It’s not that he thinks Planet 4 is definitely a bad place—it’s that he thinks it <em>could be </em>a bad place, and he recognizes that the generations alive today, whether they realize it or not, are the first in history to face real, hardcore existential risk.</p>
<p>At the same time, the people alive today also are the first who can live with the actually realistic hope for a genuinely utopian future—one that defies even death and taxes. Planet 4 could be our promised land.</p>
<p>When you zoom way out, you realize how unfathomably high the stakes actually are.</p>
<p>And the outcome isn’t at the whim of chance—it’s at the whim of the Human Colossus. Planet 4 is only coming because the Colossus is building it. And whether that future is like heaven or hell depends on what the Colossus does—maybe over the next 150 years, maybe over only the next 50. Or 25.</p>
<p>But the unfortunate thing is that the Human Colossus isn’t optimized to maximize the chances of a safe transition to the best possible Planet 4 for the most possible humans—it’s optimized to build Planet 4, in any way possible, as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>Understanding all of this, Elon has dedicated his life to trying to influence the Human Colossus to bring its motivation more in line with the long-term interests of humans. He knows it’s not possible to rewire the Human Colossus—not unless existential risk were suddenly directly in front of each human’s face, which normally doesn’t happen until it’s already too late—so he treats the Colossus like a pet.</p>
<p>If you want your dog to sit, you correlate sitting on command with getting a treat. For the Human Colossus, a treat is a ripe new industry simultaneously exploding in both supply and demand.</p>
<p>Elon saw the Human Colossus dog peeing on the floor in the form of continually adding ancient, deeply-buried carbon into the carbon cycle—and rather than plead with the Colossus to stop peeing on the floor (which a lot of people waste their breath doing) or try to threaten the Colossus into behaving (which governments try to do, with limited success), he’s creating an electric car so rad that everyone will want one. The auto industry sees the shift in consumer preferences this is beginning to create, and in the nine years since Tesla released its first car, the number of major car companies with an electric car in their line went from zero to almost all of them. The Colossus seems to be taking the treat, and a change in behavior may follow.</p>
<p>Elon saw the Human Colossus dog running into traffic in the form of humanity keeping all of its eggs on one planet, despite all of those tipping points on the horizon, so he built SpaceX to learn to land a rocket, which will cut the cost of space travel by about 99% and make dedicating resources to the space industry a much tastier morsel for the Colossus. His plan with Mars isn’t to try to convince humanity that it’s a good idea to build a civilization there in order to buy life insurance for the species—it’s to create an affordable regular cargo and human transit route to Mars, knowing that once that happens, there will be enough value-creation opportunity in Mars development that the Colossus will become determined to make it happen.</p>
<p>But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think. To Elon, and many others, the development of superintelligent AI poses by far the greatest existential threat to humanity. It’s not that hard to see why. Intelligence gives us godlike powers over all other creatures on Earth—which has not been a fun time for the creatures. If any of their body parts are possible value creators, we have major industries processing and selling those body parts. We sometimes kill them for sport. But we’re probably the least fun all the times we’re just doing our thing, for our own reasons, with no hate in our hearts or desire to hurt anyone, and there are creatures, or ecosystems, that just <em>happen </em>to be in our way or in the line of fire of the side effects of what we’re doing. People like to get all mad at humanity about this, but really, we’re just doing what species do—being selfish, first and foremost.</p>
<p>The issue for other creatures isn’t our selfishness—it’s the immense damage our selfishness can do because of the tremendous power we have over them. Power that comes from our intelligence advantage.</p>
<p>So it’s pretty logical to be apprehensive about the prospect of intentionally creating something that will have (perhaps far) more intelligence than we do—especially since every human on the planet is an amateur at creating something like that, because no one has ever done it before.</p>
<p>And things are progressing quickly. Elon talked about the rapid progress made by Google’s game-playing AI:</p>
<p><em>I mean, you’ve got these two things where AlphaGo crushes these human players head-on-head, beats Lee Sedol 4 out of 5 games and now it will beat a human every game all the time, while playing the 50 best players, and beating them always, all the time. You know, that’s like one year later. </em></p>
<p><em>And it’s on a harmless thing like AlphaGo right now. But the degrees of freedom at which the AI can win are increasing. So, Go has many more degrees of freedom than Chess, but if you take something like one of the real-time strategy competitive games like League of Legends or Dota 2, that has vastly more degrees of freedom than Go, so it can’t win at that yet. But it will be able to. And then there’s reality, which has the ultimate number of degrees of freedom.</em><a href="#footnote-35-6120">35</a>
</p><p>And for reasons discussed above, that kind of thing worries him:</p>
<p><em>What I came to realize in recent years—the last couple years—is that AI is obviously going to surpass human intelligence by a lot. … There’s some risk at that point that something bad happens, something that we can’t control, that humanity can’t control after that point—either a small group of people monopolize AI power, or the AI goes rogue, or something like that. It may not, but it could.</em></p>
<p>But in typical Human Colossus form, “the collective will is not attuned to the danger of AI.”</p>
<p>When I interviewed Elon in 2015, I asked him if he would ever join the effort to build superintelligent AI. He said, “My honest opinion is that we shouldn’t build it.” And when I later commented that building something smarter than yourself did seem like a basic Darwinian error (a phrase I stole from Nick Bostrom), Elon responded, “We’re gonna win the Darwin Award, collectively.”</p>
<p>Now, two years later, here’s what he says:</p>
<p><em>I was trying to really sound the alarm on the AI front for quite a while, but it was clearly having no impact (laughs) so I was like, “Oh fine, okay, then we’ll have to try to help develop it in a way that’s good.”</em></p>
<p>He’s accepted reality—the Human Colossus is not going to quit until the Computer Colossus, one day, wakes up. This is happening.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Computer-Colossus-tinker.png"></a></p>
<p>No matter what anyone tells you, no one knows what will happen when the Computer Colossus learns to think. In my <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">long AI explainer</a>, I explored the reasoning of both those who are convinced that superintelligent AI will be the solution to every problem we have, and those who see humanity as a bunch of kids playing with a bomb they don’t understand. I’m personally still torn about which camp I find more convincing, but it seems pretty rational to plan for the worst and do whatever we can to increase our odds. Many experts agree with that logic, but there’s little consensus on the best strategy for creating superintelligent AI safely—just a whole lot of ideas from people who acknowledge they don’t really know the answer. How could anyone know how to take precautions for a future world they have no way to understand?</p>
<p>Elon also acknowledges he doesn’t know the answer—but he’s working on a plan he thinks will give us our best shot.</p>
<p><strong>Elon’s Plan</strong></p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln was pleased with himself when he came up with the line:</p>
<p><em>—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.</em></p>
<p>Fair—it’s a good line.</p>
<p>The whole idea of “of the people, by the people, for the people” is the centerpiece of democracy.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, “the people” are unpleasant. So democracy ends up being unpleasant. But unpleasant tends to be a dream compared to the alternatives. Elon talked about this:</p>
<p><em>I think that the protection of the collective is important. I think it was Churchill who said, “Democracy’s the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others.” It’s fine if you have Plato’s incredible philosopher king as the king, sure. That would be fine. Now, most dictators do not turn out that way. They tend to be quite horrible.</em></p>
<p>In other words, democracy is like escaping from a monster by hiding in a sewer.</p>
<p>There are plenty of times in life when it’s a good strategy to take a risk in order to give yourself a chance for the best possible outcome, but when the stakes are at their absolute highest, the right move is usually to play it safe. Power is one of those times. That’s why, even though democracy essentially guarantees a certain level of mediocrity, Elon says, “I think you’re hard-pressed to find many people in the United States who, no matter what they think of any given president, would advocate for a dictatorship.”</p>
<p>And since Elon sees AI as the ultimate power, he sees AI development as the ultimate “play it safe” situation. Which is why his strategy for minimizing existential AI risk seems to essentially be that AI power needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people.</p>
<p>To try to implement that concept in the realm of AI, Elon has approached the situation from multiple angles.</p>
<p>For the<strong> by the people</strong> and <strong>for the people</strong><strong> </strong>parts, he and Sam Altman created <a href="https://openai.com/">OpenAI</a>—a self-described “non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.”</p>
<p>Normally, when humanity is working on something new, it starts with the work of a few innovative pioneers. When they succeed, an industry is born and the Human Colossus jumps on board to build upon what the pioneers started, en masse.</p>
<p>But what if the thing those pioneers were working on was a magic wand that might give whoever owned it immense, unbreakable power over everyone else—including the power to prevent anyone else from making a magic wand? That would be kinda stressful, right?</p>
<p>Well that’s how Elon views today’s early AI development efforts. And since he can’t stop people from trying to make a magic wand, his solution is to create an open, collaborative, transparent magic wand development lab. When a new breakthrough innovation is discovered in the lab, instead of making it a tightly-kept secret like the other magic wand companies, the lab publishes the innovation for anyone to see or borrow for their own magic-wand-making efforts.</p>
<p>On one hand, this could have drawbacks. Bad guys are out there trying to make a magic wand too, and you <em>really </em>don’t want the first magic wand to end up in the hands of a bad guy. And now the bad guys’ development efforts can benefit from all of the innovations being published by the lab. This is a serious concern.</p>
<p>But the lab also boosts the efforts of millions of other people trying to create magic wands. This generates a ton of competition for the secretive early pioneers, and it becomes less likely that any one inventor can create a magic wand long before others also do. More likely is that when the first magic wand is eventually created, there are thousands of others near completion as well—different wands, with different capabilities, made by different people, for different reasons. If we have to have magic wands on Earth, Elon thinks, let’s at least make sure they’re in the hands of a large number of people across the world—not one all-powerful sorcerer. Or as he puts it:</p>
<p><em>Essentially, if everyone’s from planet Krypton, that’s great. But if only one of them is Superman and Superman also has the personality of Hitler, then we’ve got a problem.</em></p>
<p>More broadly, a single pioneer’s magic wand would likely have been built to serve that inventor’s own needs and purposes. But by turning the future magic wand industry into a collective effort, a wide variety of needs and purposes will have a wand made for them, making it more likely that the capabilities of the world’s aggregate mass of magic wands will overarchingly represent the needs of the masses.</p>
<p>You know, like democracy.</p>
<p>It worked fine for Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers and Alan Turing to jump-start revolutions by jumping way out ahead of the pack. But when you’re dealing with the invention of something <em>unthinkably</em> powerful, you can’t sit back and let the pioneers kick things off—it’s leaving too much to chance.</p>
<p>OpenAI is an effort to democratize the creation of AI, to get the entire Human Colossus working on it during its pioneer phase. Elon sums it up:</p>
<p><em>AI is definitely going to vastly surpass human abilities. To the degree that it is linked to human will, particularly the sum of a large number of humans, it would be an outcome that is desired by a large number of humans, because it would be a function of their will.</em></p>
<p>So now you’ve maybe got early human-level-or-higher AI superpower being made by the people, for the people—which brings down the likelihood that the world’s AI ends up in the hands of a single bad guy or a tightly-controlled monopoly.</p>
<p>Now all we’ve got left is <strong>of the people.</strong></p>
<p>This one should be easy. Remember, the Human Colossus is creating superintelligent AI for the same reason it created cars, factory machines, and computers—to serve as an extension of itself to which it can outsource work. Cars do our walking, factory machines do our manufacturing, and computers take care of information storage, organization, and computation.</p>
<p>Creating computers that can think will be our greatest invention yet—they’ll allow us to outsource our most important and high-impact work. Thinking is what built everything we have, so just imagine the power that will come from building ourselves a superintelligent thinking <em>extension. </em>And extensions of the people by definition belong to the people—they’re <em>of </em>the people.</p>
<p>There’s just this one thing—</p>
<p>High-caliber AI isn’t quite like those other inventions. The rest of our technology is great at the thing it’s built to do, but in the end, it’s a mindless machine with narrow intelligence. The AI we’re trying to build will be <em>smart, </em>like a person—like a <em>ridiculously </em>smart person. It’s a fundamentally different thing than we’ve ever made before—so why would we expect normal rules to apply?</p>
<p>It’s always been an automatic thing that the technology we make inherently belongs to us—it’s such an obvious point that it almost seems silly to make it. But could it be that if we make something smarter than a person, it might not be so easy to control?</p>
<p>Could it be that a creation that’s better at thinking than any human on Earth might not be fully content to serve as a human extension, even if that’s what it was built to do?</p>
<p>We don’t know how issues will actually manifest—but it seems pretty safe to say that yes, these possibilities <em>could be.</em></p>
<p>And if what could be turns out to <em>actually </em>be<em>, </em>we may have a serious problem on our hands.</p>
<p>Because, as the human history case study suggests, when there’s something on the planet way smarter than everyone else, it can be a really bad thing for everyone else. And if AI becomes the new thing on the planet that’s way smarter than everyone else, and it turns out <em>not </em>to clearly belong to us—it means that it’s its <em>own thing</em>. Which drops us into the category of “everyone else.”</p>
<p>So <em>people </em>gaining monopolistic control of AI is its own problem—and one that OpenAI is hoping to solve. But it’s a problem that may pale in comparison to the prospect of AI being uncontrollable.</p>
<p>This is what keeps Elon up at night. He sees it as only a matter of time before superintelligent AI rises up on this planet—and when that happens, he believes that it’s critical that we don’t end up as part of “everyone else.”</p>
<p>That’s why, in a future world made up of AI and everyone else, he thinks we have only one good option:</p>
<p>To be AI.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Remember before when I said that there were two things about wizard hats we had to wrap our heads around?</p>
<p><strong>1) The intensely <strong>mind-bending</strong> idea</strong></p>
<p><strong>2) The super ridiculously intensely <strong>mind-bending</strong> idea</strong></p>
<p>This is where #2 comes in.</p>
<p>These two ideas are the two things Elon means when he refers to the wizard hat as a digital tertiary layer in our brains. The first, as we discussed, is the concept that a whole-brain interface is kind of the same thing as putting our devices in our heads—effectively making your <em>brain </em>the device. Like this: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Human-brain-using-computer-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Your devices give you cyborg superpowers and a window into the digital world. Your brain’s wizard hat electrode array is a new brain structure, joining your limbic system and cortex.</p>
<p>But your limbic system, cortex, and wizard hat are just the hardware systems. When you experience your limbic system, it’s not the physical system you’re interacting with—it’s the <em>information flow </em>within it. It’s the <em>activity</em> of the physical system that bubbles up in your consciousness, making you feel angry, scared, horny, or hungry.</p>
<p>Same thing for your cortex. The napkin wrapped around your brain stores and organizes information, but it’s the information itself that you experience when you think something, see something, hear something, or feel something. The visual cortex in itself does nothing for you—it’s the stream of photon information flowing through it that gives you the experience of having a visual cortex. When you dig in your memory to find something, you’re not searching for <em>neurons</em>, you’re searching for information stored in the neurons.</p>
<p>The limbic system and cortex themselves are just gray matter. The flow of activity within the gray matter is what forms your familiar internal characters, the monkey brain and the rational human brain.</p>
<p>So what does that mean about your digital tertiary layer?</p>
<p>It means that while what’s actually in your brain is the physical device—the electrode array itself—the component of the tertiary layer that you’ll experience and get to know as a character is the information that flows through the array.</p>
<p>And just like the feelings and urges of the limbic system and the thoughts and chattering voice of the cortex all feel to you like <em>parts </em>of you—like your inner essence—the activity that flows through your wizard hat will feel like a part of you and your essence.</p>
<p>Elon’s vision for the Wizard Era is that among the wizard hat’s many uses, one of its core purposes will be to serve as the interface between your brain and a cloud-based customized AI system. That AI system, he believes, will become as present a character in your mind as your monkey and your human characters—and it will feel like <em>you </em>every bit as much as the others do. He says:</p>
<p><em>I think that, conceivably, there’s a way for there to be a tertiary layer that feels like it’s part of you. It’s not some thing that you offload to, it’s you.</em></p>
<p>This makes sense on paper. You do most of your “thinking” with your cortex, but then when you get hungry, you don’t say, “My limbic system is hungry,” you say, “I’m hungry.” Likewise, Elon thinks, when you’re trying to figure out the solution to a problem and your AI comes up with the answer, you won’t say, “My AI got it,” you’ll say, “Aha! I got it.” When your limbic system wants to procrastinate and your cortex wants to work, a situation I <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">might</a> be familiar with, it doesn’t feel like you’re<em> </em>arguing with some external being, it feels like a singular <em>you</em> is struggling to be disciplined. Likewise, when you think up a strategy at work and your AI disagrees, that’ll be a genuine disagreement and a debate will ensue—but it will feel like an <em>internal </em>debate, not a debate between you and someone else that just happens to take place in your thoughts. The debate will feel like <em>thinking. </em></p>
<p>It makes sense on paper.</p>
<p>But when I first heard Elon talk about this concept, it didn’t really feel right. No matter how hard I tried to get it, I kept framing the idea as something familiar—like an AI system whose <em>voice </em>I could hear in my head, or even one that I could think together with. But in those instances, the AI still seemed like an external system I was communicating with. It didn’t seem like <em>me</em>.</p>
<p>But then, one night while working on the post, I was rereading some of Elon’s quotes about this, and it suddenly <em>clicked. </em>The AI <em>would </em>be me. <em>Fully</em>. I <em>got </em>it.</p>
<p>Then I lost it. The next day, I tried to explain the epiphany to a friend and I left us both confused. I was back in “Wait, but it kind of wouldn’t really <em>be </em>me, it would be <em>communicating </em>with me” land. Since then, I’ve dipped into and out of the idea, never quite able to hold it for long. The best thing I can compare it to is having a moment when it actually makes <em>sense </em>that time is relative and space-time is a single fabric. For a second, it seems <em>intuitive </em>that time moves slower when you’re moving really fast. And then I lose it. As I typed those sentences just now, it did <em>not </em>seem intuitive.</p>
<p>The idea of <em>being </em>AI is especially tough because it combines <em>two </em>mind-numbing concepts—the brain interface and the abilities it would give you, and artificial general intelligence. Humans today are simply not equipped to understand either of those things, because as imaginative as we think we are, our imaginations only really have our life experience as their toolkit, and these concepts are both totally novel. It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen.</p>
<p>That’s why when I hear Elon talk with conviction about this stuff, I’m somewhere in between deeply believing it myself and taking his word for it. I go back and forth. But given that he’s someone who probably found space-time intuitive when he was seven, and given that he’s someone who knows how to colonize Mars, I’m inclined to listen hard to what he says.</p>
<p>And what he says is that this is all about bandwidth. It’s obvious why bandwidth matters when it comes to making a wizard hat useful. But Elon believes that when it comes to interfacing with AI, high bandwidth isn’t just <em>preferred,</em> but actually <em>fundamental </em>to the prospect of being AI, versus simply <em>using </em>AI. Here he is walking me through his thoughts:</p>
<p><em>The challenge is the communication bandwidth is extremely slow, particularly output. When you’re outputting on a phone, you’re moving two thumbs very slowly. That’s crazy slow communication. … If the bandwidth is too low, then your integration with AI would be very weak. Given the limits of very low bandwidth, it’s kind of pointless. The AI is just going to go by itself, because it’s too slow to talk to. The faster the communication, the more you’ll be integrated—the slower the communication, the less. And the more separate we are—the more the AI is “other”—the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate, and vastly more intelligent than us, how do you ensure that they don’t have optimization functions that are contrary to the best interests of humanity? … If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and with a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system.</em></p>
<p>Elon sees communication bandwidth as the key factor in determining our level of integration with AI, and he sees that level of integration as the key factor in how we’ll fare in the AI world of our future:</p>
<p><em>We’re going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet—you know, like a house cat or something—or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI.</em></p>
<p>Then, a second later:</p>
<p><em>A house cat’s a good outcome, by the way.</em></p>
<p>Without really understanding what kinds of AI will be around when we reach the age of superintelligent AI, the idea that human-AI integration will lend itself to the protection of the species makes intuitive sense. Our vulnerabilities in the AI era will come from bad people in control of AI or rogue AI not aligned with human values. In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world’s aggregate AI power—people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it—humans are less vulnerable. People will be a lot more powerful, which is scary, but like Elon said, if everyone is Superman, it’s harder for any one Superman to cause harm on a mass scale—there are lots of checks and balances. And we’re less likely to lose control of AI in general because the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals. </p>
<p>But time is of the essence here—something Elon emphasized:</p>
<p><em>The pace of progress in this direction matters a lot. We don’t want to develop digital superintelligence too far before being able to do a merged brain-computer interface.</em></p>
<p>When I thought about all of this, one reservation I had was whether a whole-brain interface would be enough of a change to make integration likely. I brought this up with Elon, noting that there would still be a vast difference between our thinking speed and a computer’s thinking speed. He said:</p>
<p><em>Yes, but increasing bandwidth by orders of magnitude would make it better. And it’s directionally correct. Does it solve all problems? No. But is it directionally correct? Yes. If you’re going to go in some direction, well, why would you go in any direction other than this?</em></p>
<p>And that’s why Elon started Neuralink.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Neuralink-formula-5-1.png"></a></p>
<p>He started Neuralink to accelerate our pace into the Wizard Era—into a world where he says that “everyone who wants to have this AI extension of themselves could have one, so there would be billions of individual human-AI symbiotes who, collectively, make decisions about the future.” A world where AI really could be of the people, by the people, for the people.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Human-Colossus-with-hat-1.png"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>I’ll guess that right now, some part of you believes this insane world we’ve been living in for the past 38,000 words could really maybe be the future—and another part of you refuses to believe it. I’ve got a little of both of those going on too.</p>
<p>But the <em>insanity</em> part of it shouldn’t be the reason it’s hard to believe. Remember—George Washington died when he saw 2017. And our future <em>will </em>be unfathomably shocking to us. The only difference is that things are moving even faster now than they were in George’s time.</p>
<p>The concept of being blown away by the future speaks to the magic of our collective intelligence—but it also speaks to the naivety of our intuition. Our minds evolved in a time when progress moved at a snail’s pace, so that’s what our hardware is calibrated to. And if we don’t actively override our intuition—the part of us that reads about a future this outlandish and refuses to believe it’s possible—we’re living in denial.</p>
<p>The reality is that we’re whizzing down a <em>very </em>intense road to a very intense place, and no one knows what it’ll be like when we get there. A lot of people find it scary to think about, but I think it’s exciting. Because of when we happened to be born, instead of just living in a normal world like normal people, we’re living inside of a <em>thriller </em>movie. Some people take this information and decide to be like Elon, doing whatever they can to help the movie have a happy ending—and thank god they do. Because I’d rather just be a gawking member of the audience, watching the movie from the edge of my seat and rooting for the good guys.</p>
<p>Either way, I think it’s good to climb a tree from time to time to look out at the view and remind ourselves what a time this is to be alive. And there are a <em>lot</em> of trees around here. Meet you at another one sometime soon.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a>Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. That’s the only thing we use the list for—and since my posting schedule isn’t exactly…regular…this is the best way to stay up-to-date with WBW posts.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>The clean version of this post, appropriate for all ages, is free to read <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/07/neuralink-cleanversion.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>To print this post or read it offline, <a href="https://gum.co/neuralink">try the PDF</a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More Wait But Why stuff:</strong></p>
<p>If you want to understand AI better, <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">here’s my big AI explainer</a>.</strong></p>
<p>And here’s the full Elon Musk post series:</p>
<p><strong>Part 1, on Elon: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man</a></strong><br />
<strong>Part 2, on Tesla:</strong> <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">How Tesla Will Change the World</a></strong><br />
<strong>Part 3, on SpaceX: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars<br />
</a>Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce</a></strong></p>
<p>If you’re sick of science and tech, check these out instead:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">Religion for the Nonreligious</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html">The Tail End</a></strong></p>
<p>Thanks to the Neuralink team for answering my 1,200 questions and explaining things to me like I’m five. Extra thanks to Ben Rapoport, Flip Sabes, and Moran Cerf for being my question-asking go-tos in my many dark moments of despair.</p>
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 Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

 April 20, 2017 By Tim Urban


 Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.
 And here’s a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages.

 _______________________

 Last month, I got a phone call.

 Okay maybe that’s not exactly how it happened, and maybe those weren’t his exact words. But after learning about the new company Elon Musk was starting, I’ve come to realize that that’s exactly what he’s trying to do.

 When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in and way, way out. In, on the technical challenges facing the engineers, out on the existential challenges facing our species. In on a snapshot of the world right now, out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like.

 Not only is Elon’s new venture—Neuralink—the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do—Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will be.

 The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.

 But before I can bring you in the time machine to show you what I found, we need to get in our zoom machine—because as I learned the hard way, Elon’s wizard hat plans cannot be properly understood until your head’s in the right place.

 So wipe your brain clean of what it thinks it knows about itself and its future, put on soft clothes, and let’s jump into the vortex.

 ___________

 Contents

 Part 1: The Human Colossus

 Part 2: The Brain

 Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces

 Part 4: Neuralink’s Challenge

 Part 5: The Wizard Era

 Part 6: The Great Merger

 Part 1: The Human Colossus

 600 million years ago, no one really did anything, ever.

 The problem is that no one had any nerves. Without nerves, you can’t move, or think, or process information of any kind. So you just had to kind of exist and wait there until you died.

 But then came the jellyfish.

 The jellyfish was the first animal to figure out that nerves were an obvious thing to make sure you had, and it had the world’s first nervous system—a nerve net.

 The jellyfish’s nerve net allowed it to collect important information from the world around it—like where there were objects, predators, or food—and pass that information along, through a big game of telephone, to all parts of its body. Being able to receive and process information meant that the jellyfish could actually react to changes in its environment in order to increase the odds of life going well, rather than just floating aimlessly and hoping for the best.

 A little later, a new animal came around who had an even cooler idea.

 The flatworm figured out that you could get a lot more done if there was someone in the nervous system who was in charge of everything—a nervous system boss. The boss lived in the flatworm’s head and had a rule that all nerves in the body had to report any new information directly to him. So instead of arranging themselves in a net shape, the flatworm’s nervous system all revolved around a central highway of messenger nerves that would pass messages back and forth between the boss and everyone else:

 The flatworm’s boss-highway system was the world’s first central nervous system, and the boss in the flatworm’s head was the world’s first brain.

 The idea of a nervous system boss quickly caught on with others, and soon, there were thousands of species on Earth with brains.

 As time passed and Earth’s animals started inventing intricate new body systems, the bosses got busier.

 A little while later came the arrival of mammals. For the Millennials of the Animal Kingdom, life was complicated. Yes, their hearts needed to beat and their lungs needed to breathe, but mammals were about a lot more than survival functions—they were in touch with complex feelings like love, anger, and fear.

 For the reptilian brain, which had only had to deal with reptiles and other simpler creatures so far, mammals were just…a lot. So a second boss developed in mammals to pair up with the reptilian brain and take care of all of these new needs—the world’s first limbic system.

 Over the next 100 million years, the lives of mammals grew more and more complex, and one day, the two bosses noticed a new resident in the cockpit with them.

 What appeared to be a random infant was actually the early version of the neocortex, and though he didn’t say much at first, as evolution gave rise to primates and then great apes and then early hominids, this new boss grew from a baby into a child and eventually into a teenager with his own idea of how things should be run.

 The new boss’s ideas turned out to be really helpful, and he became the hominid’s go-to boss for things like tool-making, hunting strategy, and cooperation with other hominids.

 Over the next few million years, the new boss grew older and wiser, and his ideas kept getting better. He figured out how to not be naked. He figured out how to control fire. He learned how to make a spear.

 But his coolest trick was thinking. He turned each human’s head into a little world of its own, making humans the first animal that could think complex thoughts, reason through decisions, and make long-term plans.

 And then, maybe about 100,000 years ago, he came up with a breakthrough.

 The human brain had advanced to the point where it could understand that even though the sound “rock” was not itself a rock, it could be used as a symbol of a rock—it was a sound that referred to a rock. The early human had invented language.

 Soon there were words for all kinds of things, and by 50,000 BC, humans were speaking in full, complex language with each other.

 The neocortex had turned humans into magicians. Not only had he made the human head a wondrous internal ocean of complex thoughts, his latest breakthrough had found a way to translate those thoughts into a symbolic set of sounds and send them vibrating through the air into the heads of other humans, who could then decode the sounds and absorb the embedded idea into their own internal thought oceans. The human neocortex had been thinking about things for a long time—and he finally had someone to talk about it all with.

 A neocortex party ensued. Neocortexes—fine—neocortices shared everything with each other—stories from their past, funny jokes they had thought of, opinions they had formed, plans for the future.

 But most useful was sharing what they had learned. If one human learned through trial and error that a certain type of berry led to 48 hours of your life being run by diarrhea, they could use language to share the hard-earned lesson with the rest of their tribe, like photocopying the lesson and handing it to everyone else. Tribe members would then use language to pass along that lesson to their children, and their children would pass it to their own children. Rather than the same mistake being made again and again by many different people, one person’s “stay away from that berry” wisdom could travel through space and time to protect everyone else from having their bad experience.

 The same thing would happen when one human figured out a new clever trick. One unusually-intelligent hunter particularly attuned to both star constellations and the annual migration patterns of wildebeest1 herds could share a system he devised that used the night sky to determine exactly how many days remained until the herd would return. Even though very few hunters would have been able to come up with that system on their own, through word-of-mouth, all future hunters in the tribe would now benefit from the ingenuity of one ancestor, with that one hunter’s crowning discovery serving as every future hunter’s starting point of knowledge.

 And let’s say this knowledge advancement makes the hunting season more efficient, which gives tribe members more time to work on their weapons—which allows one extra-clever hunter a few generations later to discover a method for making lighter, denser spears that can be thrown more accurately. And just like that, every present and future hunter in the tribe hunts with a more effective spear.

 Language allows the best epiphanies of the very smartest people, through the generations, to accumulate into a little collective tower of tribal knowledge—a “greatest hits” of their ancestors’ best “aha!” moments. Every new generation has this knowledge tower installed in their heads as their starting point in life, leading them to new, even better discoveries that build on what their ancestors learned, as the tribe’s knowledge continues to grow bigger and wiser. Language is the difference between this:

 And this:

 The major trajectory upgrade happens for two reasons. Each generation can learn a lot more new things when they can talk to each other, compare notes, and combine their individual learnings (that’s why the blue bars are so much higher in the second graph). And each generation can successfully pass a higher percentage of their learnings on to the next generation, so knowledge sticks better through time.

 Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration. Hundreds of generations later, what started as a pro tip about a certain berry to avoid has become an intricate system of planting long rows of the stomach-friendly berry bushes and harvesting them annually. The initial stroke of genius about wildebeest migrations has turned into a system of goat domestication. The spear innovation, through hundreds of incremental tweaks over tens of thousands of years, has become the bow and arrow.

 Language gives a group of humans a collective intelligence far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself. We think of the bow and arrow as a primitive technology, but raise Einstein in the woods with no existing knowledge and tell him to come up with the best hunting device he can, and he won’t be nearly intelligent or skilled or knowledgeable enough to invent the bow and arrow. Only a collective human effort can pull that off.

 Being able to speak to each other also allowed humans to form complex social structures which, along with advanced technologies like farming and animal domestication, led tribes over time to begin to settle into permanent locations and merge into organized super-tribes. When this happened, each tribe’s tower of accumulated knowledge could be shared with the larger super-tribe, forming a super-tower. Mass cooperation raised the quality of life for everyone, and by 10,000 BC, the first cities had formed.

 According to Wikipedia, there’s something called Metcalfe’s law, which states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” And they include this little chart of old telephones:1

 But the same idea applies to people. Two people can have one conversation. Three people have four unique conversation groups (three different two-person conversations and a fourth conversation between all three as a group). Five people have 26. Twenty people have 1,048,555.

 So not only did the members of a city benefit from a huge knowledge tower as a foundation, but Metcalfe’s law means that the number of conversation possibilities now skyrocketed to an unprecedented amount of variety. More conversations meant more ideas bumping up against each other, which led to many more discoveries clicking together, and the pace of innovation soared.

 Humans soon mastered agriculture, which freed many people up to think about all kinds of other ideas, and it wasn’t long before they stumbled upon a new, giant breakthrough: writing.

 Historians think humans first started writing things down about 5 – 6,000 years ago. Up until that point, the collective knowledge tower was stored only in a network of people’s memories and accessed only through livestream word-of-mouth communication. This system worked in small tribes, but with a vastly larger body of knowledge shared among a vastly larger group of people, memories alone would have had a hard time supporting it all, and most of it would have ended up lost.

 If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical object, like a stone, where it could live forever. When people began writing on thin sheets of parchment or paper, huge fields of knowledge that would take weeks to be conveyed by word of mouth could be compressed into a book or a scroll you could hold in your hand. The human collective knowledge tower now lived in physical form, neatly organized on the shelves of city libraries and universities.

 These shelves became humanity’s grand instruction manual on everything. They guided humanity toward new inventions and discoveries, and those would in turn become new books on the shelves, as the grand instruction manual built upon itself. The manual taught us the intricacies of trade and currency, of shipbuilding and architecture, of medicine and astronomy. Each generation began life with a higher floor of knowledge and technology than the last, and progress continued to accelerate.

 But painstakingly handwritten books were treated like treasures,2 and likely only accessible to the extreme elite (in the mid 15th century, there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe). And then came another breakthrough: the printing press.

 In the 15th century, the beardy Johannes Gutenberg came up with a way to create multiple identical copies of the same book, much more quickly and cheaply than ever before. (Or, more accurately, when Gutenberg was born, humanity had already figured out the first 95% of how to invent the printing press, and Gutenberg, with that knowledge as his starting point, invented the last 5%.) (Oh, also, Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press, the Chinese did a bunch of centuries earlier. Pretty reliable rule is that everything you think was invented somewhere other than China was probably actually invented in China.) Here’s how it worked:

 It Turns Out Gutenberg Isn’t Actually Impressive Blue Box

 To prepare to write this blue box, I found this video explaining how Gutenberg’s press worked and was surprised to find myself unimpressed. I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. While he had the letters all set up for that page, he’d make a bunch of copies. Then he’d spend forever manually rearranging the stamps (this is the “movable type” part) into the next page, and then do a bunch of copies of that. His first project was 180 copies of the Bible,3 which took him and his employees two years.

 That‘s Gutenberg’s thing? A bunch of stamps? I feel like I could have come up with that pretty easily. Not really clear why it took humanity 5,000 years to go from figuring out how to write to creating a bunch of manual stamps. I guess it’s not that I’m unimpressed with Gutenberg—I’m neutral on Gutenberg, he’s fine—it’s that I’m unimpressed with everyone else.

 Anyway, despite how disappointing Gutenberg’s press turned out to be, it was a huge leap forward for humanity’s ability to spread information. Over the coming centuries, printing technology rapidly improved, bringing the number of pages a machine could print in an hour from about 25 in Gutenberg’s time4 up 100-fold to 2,400 by the early 19th century.2

 Mass-produced books allowed information to spread like wildfire, and with books being made increasingly affordable, no longer was education an elite privilege—millions now had access to books, and literacy rates shot upwards. One person’s thoughts could now reach millions of people. The era of mass communication had begun.

 The avalanche of books allowed knowledge to transcend borders, as the world’s regional knowledge towers finally merged into one species-wide knowledge tower that stretched into the stratosphere.

 The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.

 With the entire body of collective human knowledge in its brain, the Human Colossus began inventing things no human could have dreamed of inventing on their own—things that would have seemed like absurd science fiction to people only a few generations before.

 It turned our ox-drawn carts into speedy locomotives and our horse-and-buggies into shiny metal cars. It turned our lanterns into lightbulbs and written letters into telephone calls and factory workers into industrial machines. It sent us soaring through the skies and out into space. It redefined the meaning of “mass communication” by giving us radio and TV, opening up a world where a thought in someone’s head could be beamed instantly into the brains of a billion people.

 If an individual human’s core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus’s core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff even faster.

 And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious invention yet.

 The Colossus had figured out a long time ago that the best way to create value was to invent value-creating machines. Machines were better than humans at doing many kinds of work, which generated a flood of new resources that could be put towards value creation. Perhaps even more importantly, machine labor freed up huge portions of human time and energy—i.e. huge portions of the Colossus itself—to focus on innovation. It had already outsourced the work of our arms to factory machines and the work of our legs to driving machines, and it had done so through the power of its brain—now what if, somehow, it could outsource the work of the brain itself to a machine?

 The first digital computers sprung up in the 1940s.

 One kind of brain labor computers could do was the work of information storage—they were remembering machines. But we already knew how to outsource our memories using books, just like we had been outsourcing our leg labor to horses long before cars provided a far better solution. Computers were simply a memory-outsourcing upgrade.

 Information-processing was a different story—a type of brain labor we had never figured out how to outsource. The Human Colossus had always had to do all of its own computing. Computers changed that.

 Factory machines allowed us to outsource a physical process—we put a material in, the machines physically processed it and spit out the results. Computers could do the same thing for information processing. A software program was like a factory machine for information processes.

 These new information-storage/organizing/processing machines proved to be useful. Computers began to play a central role in the day-to-day operation of companies and governments. By the late 1980s, it was common for individual people to own their own personal brain assistant.

 Then came another leap.

 In the early 90s, we taught millions of isolated machine-brains how to communicate with one another. They formed a worldwide computer network, and a new giant was born—the Computer Colossus.

 The Computer Colossus and the great network it formed were like popeye spinach for the Human Colossus.

 If individual human brains are the nerves and muscle fibers of the Human Colossus, the internet gave the giant its first legit nervous system. Each of its nodes was now interconnected to all of its other nodes, and information could travel through the system with light speed. This made the Human Colossus a faster, more fluid thinker.

 The internet gave billions of humans instant, free, easily-searchable access to the entire human knowledge tower (which by now stretched past the moon). This made the Human Colossus a smarter, faster learner.

 And if individual computers had served as brain extensions for individual people, companies, or governments, the Computer Colossus was a brain extension for the entire Human Colossus itself.

 With its first real nervous system, an upgraded brain, and a powerful new tool, the Human Colossus took inventing to a whole new level—and noticing how useful its new computer friend was, it focused a large portion of its efforts on advancing computer technology.

 It figured out how to make computers faster and cheaper. It made internet faster and wireless. It made computing chips smaller and smaller until there was a powerful computer in everyone’s pocket.

 Each innovation was like a new truckload of spinach for the Human Colossus.

 But today, the Human Colossus has its eyes set on an even bigger idea than more spinach. Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism. But there’s one kind of brain labor computers still can’t quite do. Thinking.

 Computers can compute and organize and run complex software—software that can even learn on its own. But they can’t think in the way humans can. The Human Colossus knows that everything it’s built has originated with its ability to reason creatively and independently—and it knows that the ultimate brain extension tool would be one that can really, actually, legitimately think. It has no idea what it will be like when the Computer Colossus can think for itself—when it one day opens its eyes and becomes a real colossus—but with its core goal to create value and push technology to its limits, the Human Colossus is determined to find out.

 ___________

 We’ll come back here in a bit. First, we have some learning to do.

 As we’ve discussed before, knowledge works like a tree. If you try to learn a branch or a leaf of a topic before you have a solid tree trunk foundation of understanding in your head, it won’t work. The branches and leaves will have nothing to stick to, so they’ll fall right out of your head.

 We’ve established that Elon Musk wants to build a wizard hat for the brain, and understanding why he wants to do that is the key to understanding Neuralink—and to understanding what our future might actually be like.

 But none of that will make much sense until we really get into the truly mind-blowing concept of what a wizard hat is, what it might be like to wear one, and how we get there from where we are today.

 The foundation for that discussion is an understanding of what brain-machine interfaces are, how they work, and where the technology is today.

 Finally, BMIs themselves are just a larger branch—not the tree’s trunk. In order to really understand BMIs and how they work, we need to understand the brain. Getting how the brain works is our tree trunk.

 So we’ll start with the brain, which will prepare us to learn about BMIs, which will teach us about what it’ll take to build a wizard hat, and that’ll set things up for an insane discussion about the future—which will get our heads right where they need to be to wrap themselves around why Elon thinks a wizard hat is such a critical piece of our future. And by the time we reach the end, this whole thing should click into place.

 Part 2: The Brain

 This post was a nice reminder of why I like working with a brain that looks nice and cute like this:

 Because the real brain is extremely uncute and upsetting-looking. People are gross.

 But I’ve been living in a shimmery, oozy, blood-vessel-lined Google Images hell for the past month, and now you have to deal with it too. So just settle in.

 We’ll start outside the head. One thing I will give to biology is that it’s sometimes very satisfying,5 and the brain has some satisfying things going on. The first of which is that there’s a real Russian doll situation going on with your head.

 You have your hair, and under that is your scalp, and then you think your skull comes next—but it’s actually like 19 things and then your skull:3

 Then below your skull,6 another whole bunch of things are going on before you get to the brain4:

 Your brain has three membranes around it underneath the skull:

 On the outside, there’s the dura mater (which means “hard mother” in Latin), a firm, rugged, waterproof layer. The dura is flush with the skull. I’ve heard it said that the brain has no pain sensory area, but the dura actually does—it’s about as sensitive as the skin on your face—and pressure on or contusions in the dura often account for people’s bad headaches.

 Then below that there’s the arachnoid mater (“spider mother”), which is a layer of skin and then an open space with these stretchy-looking fibers. I always thought my brain was just floating aimlessly in my head in some kind of fluid, but actually, the only real space gap between the outside of the brain and the inner wall of the skull is this arachnoid business. Those fibers stabilize the brain in position so it can’t move too much, and they act as a shock absorber when your head bumps into something. This area is filled with spinal fluid, which keeps the brain mostly buoyant, since its density is similar to that of water.

 Finally you have the pia mater (“soft mother”), a fine, delicate layer of skin that’s fused with the outside of the brain. You know how when you see a brain, it’s always covered with icky blood vessels? Those aren’t actually on the brain’s surface, they’re embedded in the pia. (For the non-squeamish, here’s a video of a professor peeling the pia off of a human brain.)

 Here’s the full overview, using the head of what looks like probably a pig:

 From the left you have the skin (the pink), then two scalp layers, then the skull, then the dura, arachnoid, and on the far right, just the brain covered by the pia.

 Once we’ve stripped everything down, we’re left with this silly boy:5

 This ridiculous-looking thing is the most complex known object in the universe—three pounds of what neuroengineer Tim Hanson calls “ one of the most information-dense, structured, and self-structuring matter known.” 6 All while operating on only 20 watts of power (an equivalently powerful computer runs on 24,000,000 watts).

 It’s also what MIT professor Polina Anikeeva calls “soft pudding you could scoop with a spoon.” Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described it to me more scientifically, as “somewhere between pudding and jello.” He explained that if you placed a brain on a table, gravity would make it lose its shape and flatten out a bit, kind of like a jellyfish. We often don’t think of the brain as so smooshy, because it’s normally suspended in water.

 But this is what we all are. You look in the mirror and see your body and your face and you think that’s you—but that’s really just the machine you’re riding in. What you actually are is a zany-looking ball of jello. I hope that’s okay.

 And given how weird that is, you can’t really blame Aristotle, or the ancient Egyptians, or many others, for assuming that the brain was somewhat-meaningless “cranial stuffing” (Aristotle believed the heart was the center of intelligence).7

 Eventually, humans figured out the deal. But only kind of.

 Professor Krishna Shenoy likens our understanding of the brain to humanity’s grasp on the world map in the early 1500s.

 Another professor, Jeff Lichtman, is even harsher. He starts off his courses by asking his students the question, “If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?” He says students give answers like three-quarters of a mile, half a mile, a quarter of a mile, etc.—but that he believes the real answer is “about three inches.”8

 A third professor, neuroscientist Moran Cerf, shared with me an old neuroscience saying that points out why trying to master the brain is a bit of a catch-22: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

 Maybe with the help of the great knowledge tower our species is building, we can get there at some point. For now, let’s go through what we do currently know about the jellyfish in our heads—starting with the big picture.

 The brain, zoomed out

 Let’s look at the major sections of the brain using a hemisphere cross section. So this is what the brain looks like in your head:

 Now let’s take the brain out of the head and remove the left hemisphere, which gives us a good view of the inside.9

 Neurologist Paul MacLean made a simple diagram that illustrates the basic idea we talked about earlier of the reptile brain coming first in evolution, then being built upon by mammals, and finally being built upon again to give us our brain trifecta.

 Here’s how this essentially maps out on our real brain:

 Let’s take a look at each section:

 The Reptilian Brain: The Brain Stem (and Cerebellum)

 This is the most ancient part of our brain:10

 That’s the section of our brain cross section above that the frog boss resides over. In fact, a frog’s entire brain is similar to this lower part of our brain. Here’s a real frog brain:11

 When you understand the function of these parts, the fact that they’re ancient makes sense—everything these parts do, frogs and lizards can do. These are the major sections (click any of these spinning images to see a high-res version):

 The medulla oblongata

 The medulla oblongata really just wants you to not die. It does the thankless tasks of controlling involuntary things like your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, along with making you vomit when it thinks you’ve been poisoned.

 The pons

 The pons’s thing is that it does a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It deals with swallowing, bladder control, facial expressions, chewing, saliva, tears, and posture—really just whatever it’s in the mood for.

 The midbrain

 The midbrain is dealing with an even bigger identity crisis than the pons. You know a brain part is going through some shit when almost all its functions are already another brain part’s thing. In the case of the midbrain, it deals with vision, hearing, motor control, alertness, temperature control, and a bunch of other things that other people in the brain already do. The rest of the brain doesn’t seem very into the midbrain either, given that they created a ridiculously uneven “forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain” divide that intentionally isolates the midbrain all by itself while everyone else hangs out.12

 One thing I’ll grant the pons and midbrain is that it’s the two of them that control your voluntary eye movement, which is a pretty legit job. So if right now you move your eyes around, that’s you doing something specifically with your pons and midbrain.7

 The cerebellum

 The odd-looking thing that looks like your brain’s scrotum is your cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”), which makes sure you stay a balanced, coordinated, and normal-moving person. Here’s that rad professor again showing you what a real cerebellum looks like.8

 The Paleo-Mammalian Brain: The Limbic System

 Above the brain stem is the limbic system—the part of the brain that makes humans so insane.13

 The limbic system is a survival system. A decent rule of thumb is that whenever you’re doing something that your dog might also do—eating, drinking, having sex, fighting, hiding or running away from something scary—your limbic system is probably behind the wheel. Whether it feels like it or not, when you’re doing any of those things, you’re in primitive survival mode.

 The limbic system is also where your emotions live, and in the end, emotions are also all about survival—they’re the more advanced mechanisms of survival, necessary for animals living in a complex social structure.

 In other posts, when I refer to your Instant Gratification Monkey, your Social Survival Mammoth, and all your other animals—I’m usually referring to your limbic system. Anytime there’s an internal battle going on in your head, it’s likely that the limbic system’s role is urging you to do the thing you’ll later regret doing.

 I’m pretty sure that gaining control over your limbic system is both the definition of maturity and the core human struggle. It’s not that we would be better off without our limbic systems—limbic systems are half of what makes us distinctly human, and most of the fun of life is related to emotions and/or fulfilling your animal needs—it’s just that your limbic system doesn’t get that you live in a civilization, and if you let it run your life too much, it’ll quickly ruin your life.

 Anyway, let’s take a closer look at it. There are a lot of little parts of the limbic system, but we’ll keep it to the biggest celebrities:

 The amygdala

 The amygdala is kind of an emotional wreck of a brain structure. It deals with anxiety, sadness, and our responses to fear. There are two amygdalae, and oddly, the left one has been shown to be more balanced, sometimes producing happy feelings in addition to the usual angsty ones, while the right one is always in a bad mood.

 The hippocampus

 Your hippocampus (Greek for “seahorse” because it looks like one) is like a scratch board for memory. When rats start to memorize directions in a maze, the memory gets encoded in their hippocampus—quite literally. Different parts of the rat’s two hippocampi will fire during different parts of the maze, since each section of the maze is stored in its own section of the hippocampus. But if after learning one maze, the rat is given other tasks and is brought back to the original maze a year later, it will have a hard time remembering it, because the hippocampus scratch board has been mostly wiped of the memory so as to free itself up for new memories.

 The condition in the movie Memento is a real thing—anterograde amnesia—and it’s caused by damage to the hippocampus. Alzheimer’s also starts in the hippocampus before working its way through many parts of the brain, which is why, of the slew of devastating effects of the disease, diminished memory happens first.

 The thalamus

 In its central position in the brain, the thalamus also serves as a sensory middleman that receives information from your sensory organs and sends them to your cortex for processing. When you’re sleeping, the thalamus goes to sleep with you, which means the sensory middleman is off duty. That’s why in a deep sleep, some sound or light or touch often will not wake you up. If you want to wake someone up who’s in a deep sleep, you have to be aggressive enough to wake their thalamus up.

 The exception is your sense of smell, which is the one sense that bypasses the thalamus. That’s why smelling salts are used to wake up a passed-out person. While we’re here, cool fact: smell is the function of the olfactory bulb and is the most ancient of the senses. Unlike the other senses, smell is located deep in the limbic system, where it works closely with the hippocampus and amygdala—which is why smell is so closely tied to memory and emotion.

 The Neo-Mammalian Brain: The Cortex

 Finally, we arrive at the cortex. The cerebral cortex. The neocortex. The cerebrum. The pallium.

 The most important part of the whole brain can’t figure out what its name is. Here’s what’s happening:

 The What the Hell is it Actually Called Blue Box

 The cerebrum is the whole big top/outside part of the brain but it also technically includes some of the internal parts too.

 Cortex means “bark” in Latin and is the word used for the outer layer of many organs, not just the brain. The outside of the cerebellum is the cerebellar cortex. And the outside of the cerebrum is the cerebral cortex. Only mammals have cerebral cortices. The equivalent part of the brain in reptiles is called the pallium.

 The neocortex is often used interchangeably with “cerebral cortex,” but it’s technically the outer layers of the cerebral cortex that are especially developed in more advanced mammals. The other parts are called the allocortex.

 In the rest of this post, we’ll be mostly referring to the neocortex but we’ll just call it the cortex, since that’s the least annoying way to do it for everyone.

 The cortex is in charge of basically everything—processing what you see, hear, and feel, along with language, movement, thinking, planning, and personality.

 It’s divided into four lobes:14

 It’s pretty unsatisfying to describe what they each do, because they each do so many things and there’s a lot of overlap, but to oversimplify:

 The frontal lobe (click the words to see a gif) handles your personality, along with a lot of what we think of as “thinking”—reasoning, planning, and executive function. In particular, a lot of your thinking takes place in the front part of the frontal lobe, called the prefrontal cortex—the adult in your head. The prefrontal cortex is the other character in those internal battles that go on in your life. The rational decision-maker trying to get you to do your work. The authentic voice trying to get you to stop worrying so much what others think and just be yourself. The higher being who wishes you’d stop sweating the small stuff.

 As if that’s not enough to worry about, the frontal lobe is also in charge of your body’s movement. The top strip of the frontal lobe is your primary motor cortex.15

 Then there’s the parietal lobe which, among other things, controls your sense of touch, particularly in the primary somatosensory cortex, the strip right next to the primary motor cortex.16

 The motor and somatosensory cortices are fun because they’re well-mapped. Neuroscientists know exactly which part of each strip connects to each part of your body. Which leads us to the creepiest diagram of this post: the homunculus.

 The homunculus, created by pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, visually displays how the motor and somatosensory cortices are mapped. The larger the body part in the diagram, the more of the cortex is dedicated to its movement or sense of touch. A couple interesting things about this:

 First, it’s amazing that more of your brain is dedicated to the movement and feeling of your face and hands than to the rest of your body combined. This makes sense though—you need to make incredibly nuanced facial expressions and your hands need to be unbelievably dexterous, while the rest of your body—your shoulder, your knee, your back—can move and feel things much more crudely. This is why people can play the piano with their fingers but not with their toes.

 Second, it’s interesting how the two cortices are basically dedicated to the same body parts, in the same proportions. I never really thought about the fact that the same parts of your body you need to have a lot of movement control over tend to also be the most sensitive to touch.

 Finally, I came across this shit and I’ve been living with it ever since—so now you have to too. A 3-dimensional homunculus man.17

 Moving on—

 The temporal lobe is where a lot of your memory lives, and being right next to your ears, it’s also the home of your auditory cortex.

 Last, at the back of your head is the occipital lobe, which houses your visual cortex and is almost entirely dedicated to vision.

 Now for a long time, I thought these major lobes were chunks of the brain—like, segments of the whole 3D structure. But actually, the cortex is just the outer two millimeters of the brain—the thickness of a nickel—and the meat of the space underneath is mostly just wiring.

 The Why Brains Are So Wrinkly Blue Box

 As we’ve discussed, the evolution of our brain happened by building outwards, adding newer, fancier features on top of the existing model. But building outwards has its limits, because the need for humans to emerge into the world through someone’s vagina puts a cap on how big our heads could be.9

 So evolution got innovative. Because the cortex is so thin, it scales by increasing its surface area. That means that by creating lots of folds (including both sides folding down into the gap between the two hemispheres), you can more than triple the area of the brain’s surface without increasing the volume too much. When the brain first develops in the womb, the cortex is smooth—the folds form mostly in the last two months of pregnancy:18

 Cool explainer of how the folds form here.

 If you could take the cortex off the brain, you’d end up with a 2mm-thick sheet with an area of 2,000-2,400cm2—about the size of a 48cm x 48cm (19in x 19in) square.10 A dinner napkin.

 This napkin is where most of the action in your brain happens—it’s why you can think, move, feel, see, hear, remember, and speak and understand language. Best napkin ever.

 And remember before when I said that you were a jello ball? Well the you you think of when you think of yourself—it’s really mainly your cortex. Which means you’re actually a napkin.

 The magic of the folds in increasing the napkin’s size is clear when we put another brain on top of our stripped-off cortex:

 So while it’s not perfect, modern science has a decent understanding of the big picture when it comes to the brain. We also have a decent understanding of the little picture. Let’s check it out:

 The brain, zoomed in

 Even though we figured out that the brain was the seat of our intelligence a long time ago, it wasn’t until pretty recently that science understood what the brain was made of. Scientists knew that the body was made of cells, but in the late 19th century, Italian physician Camillo Golgi figured out how to use a staining method to see what brain cells actually looked like. The result was surprising:

 That wasn’t what a cell was supposed to look like. Without quite realizing it yet,11 Golgi had discovered the neuron.

 Scientists realized that the neuron was the core unit in the vast communication network that makes up the brains and nervous systems of nearly all animals.

 But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists worked out how neurons communicate with each other.

 An axon, the long strand of a neuron that carries information, is normally microscopic in diameter—too small for scientists to test on until recently. But in the 1930s, English zoologist J. Z. Young discovered that the squid, randomly, could change everything for our understanding, because squids have an unusually huge axon in their bodies that could be experimented on. A couple decades later, using the squid’s giant axon, scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley definitively figured out how neurons send information: the action potential. Here’s how it works.

 So there are a lot of different kinds of neurons—19

 —but for simplicity, we’ll discuss the cliché textbook neuron—a pyramidal cell, like one you might find in your motor cortex. To make a neuron diagram, we can start with a guy:

 And then if we just give him a few extra legs, some hair, take his arms off, and stretch him out—we have a neuron.

 And let’s add in a few more neurons.

 Rather than launch into the full, detailed explanation for how action potentials work—which involves a lot of unnecessary and uninteresting technical information you already dealt with in 9th-grade biology—I’ll link to this great Khan Academy explainer article for those who want the full story. We’ll go through the very basic ideas that are relevant for our purposes.

 So our guy’s body stem—the neuron’s axon—has a negative “resting potential,” which means that when it’s at rest, its electrical charge is slightly negative. At all times, a bunch of people’s feet keep touching12 our guy’s hair—the neuron’s dendrites—whether he likes it or not. Their feet drop chemicals called neurotransmitters13 onto his hair—which pass through his head (the cell body, or soma) and, depending on the chemical, raise or lower the charge in his body a little bit. It’s a little unpleasant for our neuron guy, but not a huge deal—and nothing else happens.

 But if enough chemicals touch his hair to raise his charge over a certain point—the neuron’s “threshold potential”—then it triggers an action potential, and our guy is electrocuted.

 This is a binary situation—either nothing happens to our guy, or he’s fully electrocuted. He can’t be kind of electrocuted, or extra electrocuted—he’s either not electrocuted at all, or he’s fully electrocuted to the exact same degree every time.

 When this happens, a pulse of electricity (in the form of a brief reversal of his body’s normal charge from negative to positive and then rapidly back down to his normal negative) zips down his body (the axon) and into his feet—the neuron’s axon terminals—which themselves touch a bunch of other people’s hair (the points of contact are called synapses). When the action potential reaches his feet, it causes them to release chemicals onto the people’s hair they’re touching, which may or may not cause those people to be electrocuted, just like he was.

 This is usually how info moves through the nervous system—chemical information sent in the tiny gap between neurons triggers electrical information to pass through the neuron—but sometimes, in situations when the body needs to move a signal extra quickly, neuron-to-neuron connections can themselves be electric.

 Action potentials move at between 1 and 100 meters/second. Part of the reason for this large range is that another type of cell in the nervous system—a Schwann cell—acts like a super nurturing grandmother and constantly wraps some types of axons in layers of fat blankets called myelin sheath. Like this (takes a second to start):20

 On top of its protection and insulation benefits, the myelin sheath is a major factor in the pace of communication—action potentials travel much faster through axons when they’re covered in myelin sheath:1421

 One nice example of the speed difference created by myelin: You know how when you stub your toe, your body gives you that one second of reflection time to think about what you just did and what you’re about to feel, before the pain actually kicks in? What’s happening is you feel both the sensation of your toe hitting against something and the sharp part of the pain right away, because sharp pain information is sent to the brain via types of axons that are myelinated. It takes a second or two for the dull pain to kick in because dull pain is sent via unmyelinated “C fibers”—at only around one meter/second.

 Neural Networks

 Neurons are similar to computer transistors in one way—they also transmit information in the binary language of 1’s (action potential firing) and 0’s (no action potential firing). But unlike computer transistors, the brain’s neurons are constantly changing.

 You know how sometimes you learn a new skill and you get pretty good at it, and then the next day you try again and you suck again? That’s because what made you get good at the skill the day before was adjustments to the amount or concentration of the chemicals in the signaling between neurons. Repetition caused chemicals to adjust, which helped you improve, but the next day the chemicals were back to normal so the improvement went away.

 But then if you keep practicing, you eventually get good at something in a lasting way. What’s happened is you’ve told the brain, “this isn’t just something I need in a one-off way,” and the brain’s neural network has responded by making structural changes to itself that last. Neurons have shifted shape and location and strengthened or weakened various connections in a way that has built a hard-wired set of pathways that know how to do that skill.

 Neurons’ ability to alter themselves chemically, structurally, and even functionally, allow your brain’s neural network to optimize itself to the external world—a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Babies’ brains are the most neuroplastic of all. When a baby is born, its brain has no idea if it needs to accommodate the life of a medieval warrior who will need to become incredibly adept at sword-fighting, a 17th-century musician who will need to develop fine-tuned muscle memory for playing the harpsichord, or a modern-day intellectual who will need to store and organize a tremendous amount of information and master a complex social fabric—but the baby’s brain is ready to shape itself to handle whatever life has in store for it.

 Babies are the neuroplasticity superstars, but neuroplasticity remains throughout our whole lives, which is why humans can grow and change and learn new things. And it’s why we can form new habits and break old ones—your habits are reflective of the existing circuitry in your brain. If you want to change your habits, you need to exert a lot of willpower to override your brain’s neural pathways, but if you can keep it going long enough, your brain will eventually get the hint and alter those pathways, and the new behavior will stop requiring willpower. Your brain will have physically built the changes into a new habit.

 Altogether, there are around 100 billion neurons in the brain that make up this unthinkably vast network—similar to the number of stars in the Milky Way and over 10 times the number of people in the world. Around 15 – 20 billion of those neurons are in the cortex, and the rest are in the animal parts of your brain (surprisingly, the random cerebellum has more than three times as many neurons as the cortex).

 Let’s zoom back out and look at another cross section of the brain—this time cut not from front to back to show a single hemisphere, but from side to side:22

 Brain material can be divided into what’s called gray matter and white matter. Gray matter actually looks darker in color and is made up of the cell bodies (somas) of the brain’s neurons and their thicket of dendrites and axons—along with a lot of other stuff. White matter is made up primarily of wiring—axons carrying information from somas to other somas or to destinations in the body. White matter is white because those axons are usually wrapped in myelin sheath, which is fatty white tissue.

 There are two main regions of gray matter in the brain—the internal cluster of limbic system and brain stem parts we discussed above, and the nickel-thick layer of cortex around the outside. The big chunk of white matter in between is made up mostly of the axons of cortical neurons. The cortex is like a great command center, and it beams many of its orders out through the mass of axons making up the white matter beneath it.

 The coolest illustration of this concept that I’ve come across15 is a beautiful set of artistic representations done by Dr. Greg A. Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards. Check out the distinct difference between the structure of the outer layer of gray matter cortex and the white matter underneath it (click to view in high res):

 Those cortical axons might be taking information to another part of the cortex, to the lower part of the brain, or through the spinal cord—the nervous system’s superhighway—and into the rest of the body.16

 Let’s look at the whole nervous system:23

 The nervous system is divided into two parts: the central nervous system—your brain and spinal cord—and the peripheral nervous system—made up of the neurons that radiate outwards from the spinal cord into the rest of the body.

 Most types of neurons are interneurons—neurons that communicate with other neurons. When you think, it’s a bunch of interneurons talking to each other. Interneurons are mostly contained to the brain.

 The two other kinds of neurons are sensory neurons and motor neurons—those are the neurons that head down into your spinal cord and make up the peripheral nervous system. These neurons can be up to a meter long.17 Here’s a typical structure of each type:24

 Remember our two strips?25

 These strips are where your peripheral nervous system originates. The axons of sensory neurons head down from the somatosensory cortex, through the brain’s white matter, and into the spinal cord (which is just a massive bundle of axons). From the spinal cord, they head out to all parts of your body. Each part of your skin is lined with nerves that originate in the somatosensory cortex. A nerve, by the way, is a few bundles of axons wrapped together in a little cord. Here’s a nerve up close:26

 The nerve is the whole thing circled in purple, and those four big circles inside are bundles of many axons (here’s a helpful cartoony drawing).

 So if a fly lands on your arm, here’s what happens:

 The fly touches your skin and stimulates a bunch of sensory nerves. The axon terminals in the nerves have a little fit and start action potential-ing, sending the signal up to the brain to tell on the fly. The signals head into the spinal cord and up to the somas in the somatosensory cortex.18 The somatosensory cortex then taps the motor cortex on the shoulder and tells it that there’s a fly on your arm and that it needs to deal with it (lazy). The particular somas in your motor cortex that connect to the muscles in your arm then start action potential-ing, sending the signals back into the spinal cord and then out to the muscles of the arm. The axon terminals at the end of those neurons stimulate your arm muscles, which constrict to shake your arm to get the fly off (by now the fly has already thrown up on your arm), and the fly (whose nervous system now goes through its own whole thing) flies off.

 Then your amygdala looks over and realizes there was a bug on you, and it tells your motor cortex to jump embarrassingly, and if it’s a spider instead of a fly, it also tells your vocal cords to yell out involuntarily and ruin your reputation.

 So it seems so far like we do kind of actually understand the brain, right? But then why did that professor ask that question—If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?—and say the answer was three inches?

 Well here’s the thing.

 You know how we totally get how an individual computer sends an email and we totally understand the broad concepts of the internet, like how many people are on it and what the biggest sites are and what the major trends are—but all the stuff in the middle—the inner workings of the internet—are pretty confusing?

 And you know how economists can tell you all about how an individual consumer functions and they can also tell you about the major concepts of macroeconomics and the overarching forces at play—but no one can really tell you all the ins and outs of how the economy works or predict what will happen with the economy next month or next year?

 The brain is kind of like those things. We get the little picture—we know all about how a neuron fires. And we get the big picture—we know how many neurons are in the brain and what the major lobes and structures control and how much energy the whole system uses. But the stuff in between—all that middle stuff about how each part of the brain actually does its thing?

 Yeah we don’t get that.

 What really makes it clear how confounded we are is hearing a neuroscientist talk about the parts of the brain we understand best.

 Like the visual cortex. We understand the visual cortex pretty well because it’s easy to map.

 Research scientist Paul Merolla described it to me:

 The visual cortex has very nice anatomical function and structure. When you look at it, you literally see a map of the world. So when something in your visual field is in a certain region of space, you’ll see a little patch in the cortex that represents that region of space, and it’ll light up. And as that thing moves over, there’s a topographic mapping where the neighboring cells will represent that. It’s almost like having Cartesian coordinates of the real world that will map to polar coordinates in the visual cortex. And you can literally trace from your retina, through your thalamus, to your visual cortex, and you’ll see an actual mapping from this point in space to this point in the visual cortex.

 So far so good. But then he went on:

 So that mapping is really useful if you want to interact with certain parts of the visual cortex, but there’s many regions of vision, and as you get deeper into the visual cortex, it becomes a little bit more nebulous, and this topographic representation starts to break down. … There’s all these levels of things going on in the brain, and visual perception is a great example of that. We look at the world, and there’s just this physical 3D world out there—like you look at a cup, and you just see a cup—but what your eyes are seeing is really just a bunch of pixels. And when you look in the visual cortex, you see that there are roughly 20-40 different maps. V1 is the first area, where it’s tracking little edges and colors and things like that. And there’s other areas looking at more complicated objects, and there’s all these different visual representations on the surface of your brain, that you can see. And somehow all of that information is being bound together in this information stream that’s being coded in a way that makes you believe you’re just seeing a simple object.

 And the motor cortex, another one of the best-understood areas of the brain, might be even more difficult to understand on a granular level than the visual cortex. Because even though we know which general areas of the motor cortex map to which areas of the body, the individual neurons in these motor cortex areas aren’t topographically set up, and the specific way they work together to create movement in the body is anything but clear. Here’s Paul again:

 The neural chatter in everyone’s arm movement part of the brain is a little bit different—it’s not like the neurons speak English and say “move”—it’s a pattern of electrical activity, and in everyone it’s a little bit different. … And you want to be able to seamlessly understand that it means “Move the arm this way” or “move the arm toward the target” or “move the arm to the left, move it up, grasp, grasp with a certain kind of force, reach with a certain speed,” and so on. We don’t think about these things when we move—it just happens seamlessly. So each brain has a unique code with which it talks to the muscles in the arm and hand.

 The neuroplasticity that makes our brains so useful to us also makes them incredibly difficult to understand—because the way each of our brains works is based on how that brain has shaped itself, based on its particular environment and life experience.

 And again, those are the areas of the brain we understand the best. “When it comes to more sophisticated computation, like language, memory, mathematics,” one expert told me, “we really don’t understand how the brain works.” He lamented that, for example, the concept of one’s mother is coded in a different way, and in different parts of the brain, for every person. And in the frontal lobe—you know, that part of the brain where you really live—”there’s no topography at all.”

 But somehow, none of this is why building effective brain-computer interfaces is so hard, or so daunting. What makes BMIs so hard is that the engineering challenges are monumental. It’s physically working with the brain that makes BMIs among the hardest engineering endeavors in the world.

 So with our brain background tree trunk built, we’re ready to head up to our first branch.

 Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces

 Let’s zip back in time for a second to 50,000 BC and kidnap someone and bring him back here to 2017.

 This is Bok. Bok, we’re really thankful that you and your people invented language.

 As a way to thank you, we want to show you all the amazing things we were able to build because of your invention.

 Alright, first let’s take Bok on a plane, and into a submarine, and to the top of the Burj Khalifa. Now we’ll show him a telescope and a TV and an iPhone. And now we’ll let him play around on the internet for a while.

 Okay that was fun. How’d it go, Bok?

 Yeah we figured that you’d be pretty surprised. To wrap up, let’s show him how we communicate with each other.

 Bok would be shocked to learn that despite all the magical powers humans have gained as a result of having learned to speak to each other, when it comes to actually speaking to each other, we’re no more magical than the people of his day. When two people are together and talking, they’re using 50,000-year-old technology.

 Bok might also be surprised that in a world run by fancy machines, the people who made all the machines are walking around with the same biological bodies that Bok and his friends walk around with. How can that be?

 This is why brain-machine interfaces—a subset of the broader field of neural engineering, which itself is a subset of biotechnology—are such a tantalizing new industry. We’ve conquered the world many times over with our technology, but when it comes to our brains—our most central tool—the tech world has for the most part been too daunted to dive in.

 That’s why we still communicate using technology Bok invented, it’s why I’m typing this sentence at about a 20th of the speed that I’m thinking it, and it’s why brain-related ailments still leave so many lives badly impaired or lost altogether.

 But 50,000 years after the brain’s great “aha!” moment, that may finally be about to change. The brain’s next great frontier may be itself.

 ___________

 There are many kinds of potential brain-machine interface (sometimes called a brain-computer interface) that will serve many different functions. But everyone working on BMIs is grappling with either one or both of these two questions:

 1) How do I get the right information out of the brain?

 2) How do I send the right information into the brain?

 The first is about capturing the brain’s output—it’s about recording what neurons are saying.

 The second is about inputting information into the brain’s natural flow or altering that natural flow in some other way—it’s about stimulating neurons.

 These two things are happening naturally in your brain all the time. Right now, your eyes are making a specific set of horizontal movements that allow you to read this sentence. That’s the brain’s neurons outputting information to a machine (your eyes) and the machine receiving the command and responding. And as your eyes move in just the right way, the photons from the screen are entering your retinas and stimulating neurons in the occipital lobe of your cortex in a way that allows the image of the words to enter your mind’s eye. That image then stimulates neurons in another part of your brain that allows you to process the information embedded in the image and absorb the sentence’s meaning.

 Inputting and outputting information is what the brain’s neurons do. All the BMI industry wants to do is get in on the action.

 At first, this seems like maybe not that difficult a task? The brain is just a jello ball, right? And the cortex—the part of the brain in which we want to do most of our recording and stimulating—is just a napkin, located conveniently right on the outside of the brain where it can be easily accessed. Inside the cortex are around 20 billion firing neurons—20 billion oozy little transistors that if we can just learn to work with, will give us an entirely new level of control over our life, our health, and the world. Can’t we figure that out? Neurons are small, but we know how to split an atom. A neuron’s diameter is about 100,000 times as large as an atom’s—if an atom were a marble, a neuron would be a kilometer across—so we should probably be able to handle the smallness. Right?

 So what’s the issue here?

 Well on one hand, there’s something to that line of thinking, in that because of those facts, this is an industry where immense progress can happen. We can do this.

 But only when you understand what actually goes on in the brain do you realize why this is probably the hardest human endeavor in the world.

 So before we talk about BMIs themselves, we need to take a closer look at what the people trying to make BMIs are dealing with here. I find that the best way to illustrate things is to scale the brain up by exactly 1,000X and look at what’s going on.

 Remember our cortex-is-a-napkin demonstration earlier?

 Well if we scale that up by 1,000X, the cortex napkin—which was about 48cm / 19in on each side—now has a side the length of six Manhattan street blocks (or two avenue blocks). It would take you about 25 minutes to walk around the perimeter. And the brain as a whole would now fit snugly inside a two block by two block square—just about the size of Madison Square Garden (this works in length and width, but the brain would be about double the height of MSG).

 So let’s lay it out in the actual city. I’m sure the few hundred thousand people who live there will understand.

 I chose 1,000X as our multiplier for a couple reasons. One is that we can all instantly convert the sizes in our heads. Every millimeter of the actual brain is now a meter. And in the much smaller world of neurons, every micron is now an easy-to-conceptualize millimeter. Secondly, it conveniently brings the cortex up to human size—its 2mm thickness is now two meters—the height of a tall (6’6”) man.

 So we could walk up to 29th street, to the edge of our giant cortex napkin, and easily look at what was going on inside those two meters of thickness. For our demonstration, let’s pull out a cubic meter of our giant cortex to examine, which will show us what goes on in a typical cubic millimeter of real cortex.

 What we’d see in that cubic meter would be a mess. Let’s empty it out and put it back together.

 First, let’s put the somas19 in—the little bodies of all the neurons that live in that cube.

 Somas range in size, but the neuroscientists I spoke with said that the somas of neurons in the cortex are often around 10 or 15µm in diameter (µm = micrometer, or micron: 1/1,000th of a millimeter). That means that if you laid out 7 or 10 of them in a line, that line would be about the diameter of a human hair (which is about 100µm). On our scale, that makes a soma 1 – 1.5cm in diameter. A marble.

 The volume of the whole cortex is in the ballpark of 500,000 cubic millimeters, and in that space are about 20 billion somas. That means an average cubic millimeter of cortex contains about 40,000 neurons. So there are 40,000 marbles in our cubic meter box. If we divide our box into about 40,000 cubic spaces, each with a side of 3cm (or about a cubic inch), it means each of our soma marbles is at the center of its own little 3cm cube, with other somas about 3cm away from it in all directions.

 With me so far? Can you visualize our meter cube with those 40,000 floating marbles in it?

 Here’s a microscope image of the somas in an actual cortex, using techniques that block out the other stuff around them:27

 Okay not too crazy so far. But the soma is only a tiny piece of each neuron. Radiating out from each of our marble-sized somas are twisty, branchy dendrites that in our scaled-up brain can stretch out for three or four meters in many different directions, and from the other end an axon that can be over 100 meters long (when heading out laterally to another part of the cortex) or as long as a kilometer (when heading down into the spinal cord and body). Each of them only about a millimeter thick, these cords turn the cortex into a dense tangle of electrical spaghetti.

 And there’s a lot going on in that mash of spaghetti. Each neuron has synaptic connections to as many as 1,000—sometimes as high as 10,000—other neurons. With around 20 billion neurons in the cortex, that means there are over 20 trillion individual neural connections in the cortex (and as high as a quadrillion connections in the entire brain). In our cubic meter alone, there will be over 20 million synapses.

 To further complicate things, not only are there many spaghetti strands coming out of each of the 40,000 marbles in our cube, but there are thousands of other spaghetti strings passing through our cube from other parts of the cortex. That means that if we were trying to record signals or stimulate neurons in this particular cubic area, we’d have a lot of difficulty, because in the mess of spaghetti, it would be very hard to figure out which spaghetti strings belonged to our soma marbles (and god forbid there are Purkinje cells in the mix).

 And of course, there’s the whole neuroplasticity thing. The voltages of each neuron would be constantly changing, as many as hundreds of times per second. And the tens of millions of synapse connections in our cube would be regularly changing sizes, disappearing, and reappearing.

 If only that were the end of it.

 It turns out there are other cells in the brain called glial cells—cells that come in many different varieties and perform many different functions, like mopping up chemicals released into synapses, wrapping axons in myelin, and serving as the brain’s immune system. Here are some common types of glial cell:28

 And how many glial cells are in the cortex? About the same number as there are neurons.20 So add about 40,000 of these wacky things into our cube.

 Finally, there are the blood vessels. In every cubic millimeter of cortex, there’s a total of a meter of tiny blood vessels. On our scale, that means that in our cubic meter, there’s a kilometer of blood vessels. Here’s what the blood vessels in a space about that size look like:29

 The Connectome Blue Box

 There’s an amazing project going on right now in the neuroscience world called the Human Connectome Project (pronounced “connec-tome”) in which scientists are trying to create a complete detailed map of the entire human brain. Nothing close to this scale of brain mapping has ever been done.21

 The project entails slicing a human brain into outrageously thin slices—around 30-nanometer-thick slices. That’s 1/33,000th of a millimeter (here’s a machine slicing up a mouse brain).

 Anyway, in addition to producing some gorgeous images of the “ribbon” formations axons with similar functions often form inside white matter, like—

 —the connectome project has helped people visualize just how packed the brain is with all this stuff. Here’s a breakdown of all the different things going on in one tiny snippet of mouse brain (and this doesn’t even include the blood vessels):30

 (In the image, E is the complete brain snippet, and F–N show the separate components that make up E.)

 So our meter box is a jam-packed, oozy, electrified mound of dense complexity—now let’s recall that in reality, everything in our box actually fits in a cubic millimeter.

 And the brain-machine interface engineers need to figure out what the microscopic somas buried in that millimeter are saying, and other times, to stimulate just the right somas to get them to do what the engineers want. Good luck with that.

 We’d have a super hard time doing that on our 1,000X brain. Our 1,000X brain that also happens to be a nice flat napkin. That’s not how it normally works—usually, the napkin is up on top of our Madison Square Garden brain and full of deep folds (on our scale, between five and 30 meters deep). In fact, less than a third of the cortex napkin is up on the surface of the brain—most is buried inside the folds.

 Also, engineers are not operating on a bunch of brains in a lab. The brain is covered with all those Russian doll layers, including the skull—which at 1,000X would be around seven meters thick. And since most people don’t really want you opening up their skull for very long—and ideally not at all—you have to try to work with those tiny marbles as non-invasively as possible.

 And this is all assuming you’re dealing with the cortex—but a lot of cool BMI ideas deal with the structures down below, which if you’re standing on top of our MSG brain, are buried 50 or 100 meters under the surface.

 The 1,000X game also hammers home the sheer scope of the brain. Think about how much was going on in our cube—and now remember that that’s only one 500,000th of the cortex. If we broke our whole giant cortex into similar meter cubes and lined them up, they’d stretch 500km / 310mi—all the way to Boston and beyond. And if you made the trek—which would take over 100 hours of brisk walking—at any point you could pause and look at the cube you happened to be passing by and it would have all of this complexity inside of it. All of this is currently in your brain.

 Part 3A: How Happy Are You That This Isn’t Your Problem

 Totes.

 Back to Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces

 So how do scientists and engineers begin to manage this situation?

 Well they do the best they can with the tools they currently have—tools used to record or stimulate neurons (we’ll focus on the recording side for the time being). Let’s take a look at the options:

 BMI Tools

 With the current work that’s being done, three broad criteria seem to stand out when evaluating a type of recording tool’s pros and cons:

 1) Scale – how many neurons can be simultaneously recorded

 2) Resolution – how detailed is the information the tool receives—there are two types of resolution, spatial (how closely your recordings come to telling you how individual neurons are firing) and temporal (how well you can determine when the activity you record happened)

 3) Invasiveness – is surgery needed, and if so, how extensively

 The long-term goal is to have all three of your cakes and eat them all. But for now, it’s always a question of “which one (or two) of these criteria are you willing to completely fail?” Going from one tool to another isn’t an overall upgrade or downgrade—it’s a tradeoff.

 Let’s examine the types of tools currently being used:

 fMRI

 Scale: high (it shows you information across the whole brain)

 Resolution: medium-low spatial, very low temporal

 Invasiveness: non-invasive

 fMRI isn’t typically used for BMIs, but it is a classic recording tool—it gives you information about what’s going on inside the brain.

 fMRI uses MRI—magnetic resonance imaging—technology. MRIs, invented in the 1970s, were an evolution of the x-ray-based CAT scan. Instead of using x-rays, MRIs use magnetic fields (along with radio waves and other signals) to generate images of the body and brain. Like this:31

 And this full set of cross sections, allowing you to see through an entire head.

 Pretty amazing technology.

 fMRI (“functional” MRI) uses similar technology to track changes in blood flow. Why? Because when areas of the brain become more active, they use more energy, so they need more oxygen—so blood flow increases to the area to deliver that oxygen. Blood flow indirectly indicates where activity is happening. Here’s what an fMRI scan might show:32

 Of course, there’s always blood throughout the brain—what this image shows is where blood flow has increased (red/orange/yellow) and where it has decreased (blue). And because fMRI can scan through the whole brain, results are 3-dimensional:

 fMRI has many medical uses, like informing doctors whether or not certain parts of the brain are functioning properly after a stroke, and fMRI has taught neuroscientists a ton about which regions of the brain are involved with which functions. Scans also have the benefit of providing info about what’s going on in the whole brain at any given time, and it’s safe and totally non-invasive.

 The big drawback is resolution. fMRI scans have a literal resolution, like a computer screen has with pixels, except the pixels are three-dimensional, cubic volume pixels—or “voxels.”

 fMRI voxels have gotten smaller as the technology has improved, bringing the spatial resolution up. Today’s fMRI voxels can be as small as a cubic millimeter. The brain has a volume of about 1,200,000mm3, so a high-resolution fMRI scan divides the brain into about one million little cubes. The problem is that on neuron scale, that’s still pretty huge (the same size as our scaled-up cubic meter above)—each voxel contains tens of thousands of neurons. So what the fMRI is showing you, at best, is the average blood flow drawn in by each group of 40,000 or so neurons.

 The even bigger problem is temporal resolution. fMRI tracks blood flow, which is both imprecise and comes with a delay of about a second—an eternity in the world of neurons.

 EEG

 Scale: high

 Resolution: very low spatial, medium-high temporal

 Invasiveness: non-invasive

 Dating back almost a century, EEG (electroencephalography) puts an array of electrodes on your head. You know, this whole thing:33

 EEG is definitely technology that will look hilariously primitive to a 2050 person, but for now, it’s one of the only tools that can be used with BMIs that’s totally non-invasive. EEGs record electrical activity in different regions of the brain, displaying the findings like this:34

 EEG graphs can uncover information about medical issues like epilepsy, track sleep patterns, or be used to determine something like the status of a dose of anesthesia.

 And unlike fMRI, EEG has pretty good temporal resolution, getting electrical signals from the brain right as they happen—though the skull blurs the temporal accuracy considerably (bone is a bad conductor).

 The major drawback is spatial resolution. EEG has none. Each electrode only records a broad average—a vector sum of the charges from millions or billions of neurons (and a blurred one because of the skull).

 Imagine that the brain is a baseball stadium, its neurons are the members of the crowd, and the information we want is, instead of electrical activity, vocal cord activity. In that case, EEG would be like a group of microphones placed outside the stadium, against the stadium’s outer walls. You’d be able to hear when the crowd was cheering and maybe predict the type of thing they were cheering about. You’d be able to hear telltale signs that it was between innings and maybe whether or not it was a close game. You could probably detect when something abnormal happened. But that’s about it.

 ECoG

 Scale: high

 Resolution: low spatial, high temporal

 Invasiveness: kind of invasive

 ECoG (electrocorticography) is a similar idea to EEG, also using surface electrodes—except they put them under the skull, on the surface of the brain.35

 Ick. But effective—at least much more effective than EEG. Without the interference of the skull blurring things, ECoG picks up both higher spatial (about 1cm) and temporal resolution (5 milliseconds). ECoG electrodes can either be placed above or below the dura:36

 Bringing back our stadium analogy, ECoG microphones are inside the stadium and a bit closer to the crowd. So the sound is much crisper than what EEG mics get from outside the stadium, and ECoG mics can better distinguish the sounds of individual sections of the crowd. But the improvement comes at a cost—it requires invasive surgery. In the scheme of invasive surgeries, though, it’s not so bad. As one neurosurgeon described to me, “You can slide stuff underneath the dura relatively non-invasively. You still have to make a hole in the head, but it’s relatively non-invasive.”

 Local Field Potential

 Scale: low

 Resolution: medium-low spatial, high temporal

 Invasiveness: very invasive

 Okay here’s where we shift from surface electrode discs to microelectrodes—tiny needles surgeons stick into the brain.

 Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described to me how his father (a neurologist) used to make microelectrodes:

 When my father was making electrodes, he’d make them by hand. He’d take a very fine wire—like a gold or platinum or iridium wire, that was 10-30 microns in diameter, and he’d insert that wire in a glass capillary tube that was maybe a millimeter in diameter. Then they’d take that piece of glass over a flame and rotate it until the glass became soft. They’d stretch out the capillary tube until it’s incredibly thin, and then take it out of the flame and break it. Now the capillary tube is flush with and pinching the wire. The glass is an insulator and the wire is a conductor. So what you end up with is a glass-insulated stiff electrode that is maybe a few 10s of microns at the tip.

 Today, while some electrodes are still made by hand, newer techniques use silicon wafers and manufacturing technology borrowed from the integrated circuits industry.

 The way local field potentials (LFP) work is simple—you take one of these super thin needles with an electrode tip and stick it one or two millimeters into the cortex. There it picks up the average of the electrical charges from all of the neurons within a certain radius of the electrode.

 LFP gives you the not-that-bad spatial resolution of the fMRI combined with the instant temporal resolution of an ECoG. Kind of the best of all the worlds described above when it comes to resolution.

 Unfortunately, it does badly on both other criteria.

 Unlike fMRI, EEG, and ECoG, microelectrode LFP does not have scale—it only tells you what the little sphere surrounding it is doing. And it’s far more invasive, actually entering the brain.

 In the baseball stadium, LFP is a single microphone hanging over a single section of seats, picking up a crisp feed of the sounds in that area, and maybe picking out an individual voice for a second here and there—but otherwise only getting the general vibe.

 A more recent development is the multielectrode array, which is the same idea as the LFP except it’s about 100 LFPs all at once, in a single area of the cortex. A multielectrode array looks like this:37

 A tiny 4mm x 4mm square with 100 tiny silicon electrodes on it. Here’s another image where you can see just how sharp the electrodes are—just a few microns across at the very tip:38

 Single-Unit Recording

 Scale: tiny

 Resolution: super high

 Invasiveness: very invasive

 To record a broader LFP, the electrode tip is a bit rounded to give the electrode more surface area, and they turn the resistance down with the intent of allowing very faint signals from a wide range of locations to be picked up. The end result is the electrode picks up a chorus of activity from the local field.

 Single-unit recording also uses a needle electrode, but they make the tip super sharp and crank up the resistance. This wipes out most of the noise and leaves the electrode picking up almost nothing—until it finds itself so close to a neuron (maybe 50µm away) that the signal from that neuron is strong enough to make it past the electrode’s high resistance wall. With distinct signals from one neuron and no background noise, this electrode can now voyeur in on the private life of a single neuron. Lowest possible scale, highest possible resolution.

 By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire here (what you’re actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio).

 Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the patch clamp, whereby it’ll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette,22 and it’ll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a “patch” of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements:39

 A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we’ve discussed, because it’s physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but stimulate the neuron,23 injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together).

 Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called sharp electrode recording. If the tip is sharp enough, this won’t destroy the cell—the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique—a punctured neuron won’t survive long.

 In our stadium, a single unit recording is a one-directional microphone clipped to a single crowd member’s collar. A patch clamp or sharp recording is a mic in someone’s throat, registering the exact movement of their vocal cords. This is a great way to learn about that person’s experience at the game, but it also gives you no context, and you can’t really tell if the sounds and reactions of that person are representative of what’s going on in the game.

 And that’s about what we’ve got, at least in common usage. These tools are simultaneously unbelievably advanced and what will seem like Stone Age technology to future humans, who won’t believe you had to choose either high-res or a wide field and that you actually had to open someone’s skull to get high-quality brain readouts or write-ins.

 But given their limitations, these tools have taught us worlds about the brain and led to the creation of some amazing early BMIs. Here’s what’s already out there—

 The BMIs we already have

 In 1969, a researcher named Eberhard Fetz connected a single neuron in a monkey’s brain to a dial in front of the monkey’s face. The dial would move when the neuron was fired. When the monkey would think in a way that fired the neuron and the dial would move, he’d get a banana-flavored pellet. Over time, the monkey started getting better at the game because he wanted more delicious pellets. The monkey had learned to make the neuron fire and inadvertently became the subject of the first real brain-machine interface.

 Progress was slow over the next few decades, but by the mid-90s, things had started to move, and it’s been quietly accelerating ever since.

 Given that both our understanding of the brain and the electrode hardware we’ve built are pretty primitive, our efforts have typically focused on building straightforward interfaces to be used with the areas of the brain we understand the best, like the motor cortex and the visual cortex.

 And given that human experimentation is only really possible for people who are trying to use BMIs to alleviate an impairment—and because that’s currently where the market demand is—our efforts have focused so far almost entirely on restoring lost function to people with disabilities.

 The major BMI industries of the future that will give all humans magical superpowers and transform the world are in their fetal stage right now—and we should look at what’s being worked on as a set of clues about what the mind-boggling worlds of 2040 and 2060 and 2100 might be like.

 Like, check this out:

 That’s a computer built by Alan Turing in 1950 called the Pilot ACE. Truly cutting edge in its time.

 Now check this out:

 As you read through the examples below, I want you to think about this analogy—

 Pilot ACE is to iPhone 7

 as

 Each BMI example below is to _____

 —and try to imagine what the blank looks like. And we’ll come back to the blank later in the post.

 Anyway, from everything I’ve read about and discussed with people in the field, there seem to be three major categories of brain-machine interface being heavily worked on right now:

 Early BMI type #1: Using the motor cortex as a remote control

 In case you forgot this from 9,000 words ago, the motor cortex is this guy:

 All areas of the brain confuse us, but the motor cortex confuses us less than almost all the other areas. And most importantly, it’s well-mapped, meaning specific parts of it control specific parts of the body (remember the upsetting homunculus?).

 Also importantly, it’s one of the major areas of the brain in charge of our output. When a human does something, the motor cortex is almost always the one pulling the strings (at least for the physical part of the doing). So the human brain doesn’t really have to learn to use the motor cortex as a remote control, because the brain already uses the motor cortex as its remote control.

 Lift your hand up. Now put it down. See? Your hand is like a little toy drone, and your brain just picked up the motor cortex remote control and used it to make the drone fly up and then back down.

 The goal of motor cortex-based BMIs is to tap into the motor cortex, and then when the remote control fires a command, to hear that command and then send it to some kind of machine that can respond to it the way, say, your hand would. A bundle of nerves is the middleman between your motor cortex and your hand. BMIs are the middleman between your motor cortex and a computer. Simple.

 One barebones type of interface allows a human—often a person paralyzed from the neck down or someone who has had a limb amputated—to move a cursor on a screen with only their thoughts.

 This begins with a 100-pin multielectrode array being implanted in the person’s motor cortex. The motor cortex in a paralyzed person usually works just fine—it’s just that the spinal cord, which had served as the middleman between the cortex and the body, stopped doing its job. So with the electrode array implanted, researchers have the person try to move their arm in different directions. Even though they can’t do that, the motor cortex still fires normally, as if they can.

 When someone moves their arm, their motor cortex bursts into a flurry of activity—but each neuron is usually only interested in one type of movement. So one neuron might fire whenever the person moves their arm to the right—but it’s bored by other directions and is less active in those cases. That neuron alone, then, could tell a computer when the person wants to move their arm to the right and when they don’t. But that’s all. But with an electrode array, 100 single-unit electrodes each listen to a different neuron.24 So when they do testing, they’ll ask the person to try to move their arm to the right, and maybe 38 of the 100 electrodes detect their neuron firing. When the person tries to go left with their arm, maybe 41 others fire. After going through a bunch of different movements and directions and speeds, a computer takes the data from the electrodes and synthesizes it into a general understanding of which firing patterns correspond to which movement intentions on an X-Y axis.

 Then when they link up that data to a computer screen, the person can use their mind, via “trying” to move the cursor, to really control the cursor. And this actually works. Through the work of motor-cortex-BMI pioneer company BrainGate, here’s a guy playing a video game using only his mind.

 And if 100 neurons can tell you where they want to move a cursor, why couldn’t they tell you when they want to pick up a mug of coffee and take a sip? That’s what this quadriplegic woman did:

 Another quadriplegic woman flew an F-35 fighter jet in a simulation, and a monkey recently used his mind to ride around in a wheelchair.

 And why stop with arms? Brazilian BMI pioneer Miguel Nicolelis and his team built an entire exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to make the opening kick of the World Cup.25

 The Proprioception Blue Box

 Moving these kinds of “neuroprosthetics” is all about the recording of neurons, but for these devices to be truly effective, this needs to not be a one-way street, but a loop that includes recording and stimulation pathways. We don’t really think about this, but a huge part of your ability to pick up an object is all of the incoming sensory information your hand’s skin and muscles send back in (called “proprioception”). In one video I saw, a woman with numbed fingers tried to light a match, and it was almost impossible for her to do it, despite having no other disabilities. And the beginning of this video shows the physical struggles of a man with a perfectly functional motor cortex but impaired proprioception. So for something like a bionic arm to really feel like an arm, and to really be useful, it needs to be able to send sensory information back in.

 Stimulating neurons is even harder than recording them. As researcher Flip Sabes explained to me:

 If I record a pattern of activity, it doesn’t mean I can readily recreate that pattern of activity by just playing it back. You can compare it to the planets in the Solar System. You can watch the planets move around and record their movements. But then if you jumble them all up and later want to recreate the original motion of one of the planets, you can’t just take that one planet and put it back into its orbit, because it’ll be influenced by all the other planets. Likewise, neurons aren’t just working in isolation—so there’s a fundamental irreversibility there. On top of that, with all of the axons and dendrites, it’s hard to just stimulate the neurons you want to—because when you try, you’ll hit a whole jumble of them.

 Flip’s lab tries to deal with these challenges by getting the brain to help out. It turns out that if you reward a monkey with a succulent sip of orange juice when a single neuron fires, eventually the monkey will learn to make the neuron fire on demand. The neuron could then act as another kind of remote control. This means that normal motor cortex commands are only one possibility as a control mechanism. Likewise, until BMI technology gets good enough to perfect stimulation, you can use the brain’s neuroplasticity as a shortcut. If it’s too hard to make someone’s bionic fingertip touch something and send back information that feels just like the kind of sensation their own fingertip used to give them, the arm could instead send some other signal into the brain. At first, this would seem odd to the patient—but eventually the brain can learn to treat that signal as a new sense of touch. This concept is called “sensory substitution” and makes the brain a collaborator in BMI efforts.

 In these developments are the seeds of other future breakthrough technologies—like brain-to-brain communication.

 Nicolelis created an experiment where the motor cortex of one rat in Brazil was wired, via the internet, to the motor cortex of another rat in the US. The rat in Brazil was presented with two transparent boxes, each with a lever attached to it, and inside one of the boxes would be a treat. To attempt to get the treat, the rat would press the lever of the box that held the treat. Meanwhile, the rat in the US was in a similar cage with two similar boxes, except unlike the rat in Brazil, the boxes weren’t transparent and offered him no information about which of his two levers would yield a treat and which wouldn’t. The only info the US rat had were the signals his brain received from the Brazil rat’s motor cortex. The Brazil rat had the key knowledge—but the way the experiment worked, the rats only received treats when the US rat pressed the correct lever. If he pulled the wrong one, neither would. The amazing thing is that over time, the rats got better at this and began to work together, almost like a single nervous system—even though neither had any idea the other rat existed. The US rat’s success rate at choosing the correct lever with no information would have been 50%. With the signals coming from the Brazil rat’s brain, the success rate jumped to 64%. (Here’s a video of the rats doing their thing.)

 This has even worked, crudely, in people. Two people, in separate buildings, worked together to play a video game. One could see the game, the other had the controller. Using simple EEG headsets, the player who could see the game would, without moving his hand, think about moving his hand to press the “shoot” button on a controller. Because their brains’ devices were communicating with each other, the player with the controller would then feel a twitch in his finger and press the shoot button.

 Early BMI type #2: Artificial ears and eyes

 There are a couple reasons giving sound to the deaf and sight to the blind is among the more manageable BMI categories.

 The first is that like the motor cortex, the sensory cortices are parts of the brain we tend to understand pretty well, partly because they too tend to be well-mapped.

 The second is that in many early applications, we don’t really need to deal with the brain—we can just deal with the place where ears and eyes connect to the brain, since that’s often where the impairment is based.

 And while the motor cortex stuff was mostly about recording neurons to get information out of the brain, artificial senses go the other way—stimulation of neurons to send information in.

 On the ears side of things, recent decades have seen the development of the groundbreaking cochlear implant.

 The How Hearing Works Blue Box

 When you think you’re “hearing” “sound,” here’s what’s actually happening:

 What we think of as sound is actually patterns of vibrations in the air molecules around your head. When a guitar string or someone’s vocal cords or the wind or anything else makes a sound, it’s because it’s vibrating, which pushes nearby air molecules into a similar vibration and that pattern expands outward in a sphere, kind of like the surface of water expands outward in a circular ripple when something touches it.26

 Your ear is a machine that converts those air vibrations into electrical impulses. Whenever air (or water, or any other medium whose molecules can vibrate) enters your ear, your ear translates the precise way it’s vibrating into an electrical code that it sends into the nerve endings that touch it. This causes those nerves to fire a pattern of action potentials that send the code into your auditory cortex for processing. Your brain receives the information, and we call the experience of receiving that particular type of information “hearing.”

 Most people who are deaf or hard of hearing don’t have a nerve problem or an auditory cortex problem—they usually have an ear problem. Their brain is as ready as anyone else’s to turn electrical impulses into hearing—it’s just that their auditory cortex isn’t receiving any electrical impulses in the first place, because the machine that converts air vibrations into those impulses isn’t doing its job.

 The ear has a lot of parts, but it’s the cochlea in particular that makes the key conversion. When vibrations enter the fluid in the cochlea, it causes thousands of tiny hairs lining the cochlea to vibrate, and the cells those hairs are attached to transform the mechanical energy of the vibrations into electrical signals that then excite the auditory nerve. Here’s what it all looks like:40

 The cochlea also sorts the incoming sound by frequency. Here’s a cool chart that shows why lower sounds are processed at the end of the cochlea and high sounds are processed at the beginning (and also why there’s a minimum and maximum frequency on what the ear can hear):41

 A cochlear implant is a little computer that has a microphone coming out of one end (which sits on the ear) and a wire coming out of the other that connects to an array of electrodes that line the cochlea.

 So sound comes into the microphone (the little hook on top of the ear), and goes into the brown thing, which processes the sound to filter out the less useful frequencies. Then the brown thing transmits the information through the skin, through electrical induction, to the computer’s other component, which converts the info into electric impulses and sends them into the cochlea. The electrodes filter the impulses by frequency just like the cochlea and stimulate the auditory nerve just like the hairs on the cochlea do. This is what it looks like from the outside:

 In other words, an artificial ear, performing the same sound-to-impulses-to-auditory-nerve function the ear does.

 Check out what sound sounds like to someone with the implant.

 Not great. Why? Because to send sound into the brain with the richness the ear hears with, you’d need 3,500 electrodes. Most cochlear implants have about 16.27 Crude.

 But we’re in the Pilot ACE era—so of course it’s crude.

 Still, today’s cochlear implant allows deaf people to hear speech and have conversations, which is a groundbreaking development.28

 Many parents of deaf babies are now having a cochlear implant put in when the baby’s about one year old. Like this baby, whose reaction to hearing for the first time is cute.

 There’s a similar revolution underway in the world of blindness, in the form of the retinal implant.

 Blindness is often the result of a retinal disease. When this is the case, a retinal implant can perform a similar function for sight as a cochlear implant does for hearing (though less directly). It performs the normal duties of the eye and hands things off to nerves in the form of electrical impulses, just like the eye does.

 A more complicated interface than the cochlear implant, the first retinal implant was approved by the FDA in 2011—the Argus II implant, made by Second Sight. The retinal implant looks like this:42

 And it works like this:

 The retinal implant has 60 sensors. The retina has around a million neurons. Crude. But seeing vague edges and shapes and patterns of light and dark sure beats seeing nothing at all. What’s encouraging is that you don’t need a million sensors to gain a reasonable amount of sight—simulations suggest that 600-1,000 electrodes would be enough for reading and facial recognition.

 Early BMI type #3: Deep brain stimulation

 Dating back to the late 1980s, deep brain stimulation is yet another crude tool that is also still pretty life-changing for a lot of people.

 It’s also a type of category of BMI that doesn’t involve communication with the outside world—it’s about using brain-machine interfaces to treat or enhance yourself by altering something internally.

 What happens here is one or two electrode wires, usually with four separate electrode sites, are inserted into the brain, often ending up somewhere in the limbic system. Then a little pacemaker computer is implanted in the upper chest and wired to the electrodes. Like this unpleasant man:43

 The electrodes can then give a little zap when called for, which can do a variety of important things. Like:

 * Reduce the tremors of people with Parkinson’s Disease
 * Reduce the severity of seizures
 * Chill people with OCD out

 It’s also experimentally (not yet FDA approved) been able to mitigate certain kinds of chronic pain like migraines or phantom limb pain, treat anxiety or depression or PTSD, or even be combined with muscle stimulation elsewhere in the body to restore and retrain circuits that were broken down from stroke or a neurological disease.

 ___________

 This is the state of the early BMI industry, and it’s the moment when Elon Musk is stepping into it. For him, and for Neuralink, today’s BMI industry is Point A. We’ve spent the whole post so far in the past, building up to the present moment. Now it’s time to step into the future—to figure out what Point B is and how we’re going to get there.

 Part 4: Neuralink’s Challenge

 Having already written about two of Elon Musk’s companies—Tesla and SpaceX—I think I understand his formula. It looks like this:

 And his initial thinking about a new company always starts on the right and works its way left.

 He decides that some specific change in the world will increase the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. He knows that large-scale world change happens quickest when the whole world—the Human Colossus—is working on it. And he knows that the Human Colossus will work toward a goal if (and only if) there’s an economic forcing function in place—if it’s a good business decision to spend resources innovating toward that goal.

 Often, before a booming industry starts booming, it’s like a pile of logs—it has all the ingredients of a fire and it’s ready to go—but there’s no match. There’s some technological shortcoming that’s preventing the industry from taking off.

 So when Elon builds a company, its core initial strategy is usually to create the match that will ignite the industry and get the Human Colossus working on the cause. This, in turn, Elon believes, will lead to developments that will change the world in the way that increases the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. But you have to look at his companies from a zoomed-out perspective to see all of this. If you don’t, you’ll mistake what they do as their business for what they do—when in fact, what they do as their business is usually a mechanism to sustain the company while it innovates to try to make that critical match.

 Back when I was working on the Tesla and SpaceX posts, I asked Elon why he went into engineering and not science, and he explained that when it comes to progress, “engineering is the limiting factor.” In other words, the progress of science, business, and industry are all at the whim of the progress of engineering. If you look at history, this makes sense—behind each of the greatest revolutions in human progress is an engineering breakthrough. A match.

 So to understand an Elon Musk company, you need to think about the match he’s trying to create—along with three other variables:

 I know what’s in these boxes with the other companies:


 And when I started trying to figure out what Neuralink was all about, I knew those were the variables I needed to fill in. At the time, I had only had the chance to get a very vague idea of one of the variables—that the goal of the company was “to accelerate the advent of a whole-brain interface.” Or what I’ve come to think of as a wizard hat.

 As I understood it, a whole-brain interface was what a brain-machine interface would be in an ideal world—a super-advanced concept where essentially all the neurons in your brain are able to communicate seamlessly with the outside world. It was a concept loosely based on the science fiction idea of a “neural lace,” described in Iain Banks’ Culture series—a massless, volumeless, whole-brain interface that can be teleported into the brain.

 I had a lot of questions.

 Luckily, I was on my way to San Francisco, where I had plans to sit down with half of Neuralink’s founding team and be the dumbest person in the room.

 The I’m Not Being Self-Deprecating I Really Was Definitely the Dumbest Person in the Room Just Look at This Shit Blue Box

 The Neuralink team:

 Paul Merolla, who spent the last seven years as the lead chip designer at IBM on their SyNAPSE program, where he led the development of the TrueNorth chip—one of the largest CMOS devices ever designed by transistor count nbd. Paul told me his field was called neuromorphic, where the goal is to design transistor circuits based on principles of brain architecture.

 Vanessa Tolosa, Neuralink’s microfabrication expert and one of the world’s foremost researchers on biocompatible materials. Vanessa’s work involves designing biocompatible materials based on principles from the integrated circuits industry.

 Max Hodak, who worked on the development of some groundbreaking BMI technology at Miguel Nicolelis’s lab at Duke while also commuting across the country twice a week in college to run Transcriptic, the “robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences” he founded.

 DJ Seo, who while at UC Berkeley in his mid-20s designed a cutting-edge new BMI concept called neural dust—tiny ultrasound sensors that could provide a new way to record brain activity.

 Tim Hanson, whom a colleague described as “one of the best all-around engineers on the planet” and who self-taught himself enough about materials science and microfabrication methods to develop some of the core technology that’ll be used at Neuralink.

 Flip Sabes, a leading researcher whose lab at UCSF has pioneered new ground in BMIs by combining “cortical physiology, computational and theoretical modeling, and human psychophysics and physiology.”

 Tim Gardner, a leading researcher at BU, whose lab works on implanting BMIs in birds, in order to study “how complex songs are assembled from elementary neural units” and learn about “the relationships between patterns of neural activity on different time-scales.” Both Tim and Flip have left tenured positions to join the Neuralink team—pretty good testament to the promise they believe this company has.

 And then there’s Elon, both as their CEO/Founder and a fellow team member. Elon being CEO makes this different from other recent things he’s started and puts Neuralink on the top tier for him, where only SpaceX and Tesla have lived. When it comes to neuroscience, Elon has the least technical knowledge on the team—but he also started SpaceX without very much technical knowledge and quickly became a certifiable rocket science expert by reading and by asking questions of the experts on the team. That’ll probably happen again here. (And for good reason—he pointed out: “Without a strong technical understanding, I think it’s hard to make the right decisions.”)

 I asked Elon about how he brought this team together. He said that he met with literally over 1,000 people in order to assemble this group, and that part of the challenge was the large number of totally separate areas of expertise required when you’re working on technology that involves neuroscience, brain surgery, microscopic electronics, clinical trials, etc. Because it was such a cross-disciplinary area, he looked for cross-disciplinary experts. And you can see that in those bios—everyone brings their own unique crossover combination to a group that together has the rare ability to think as a single mega-expert. Elon also wanted to find people who were totally on board with the zoomed-out mission—who were more focused on industrial results than producing white papers. Not an easy group to assemble.

 But there they were, sitting around the table looking at me, as it hit me 40 seconds in that I should have done a lot more research before coming here.

 They took the hint and dumbed it down about four notches, and as the discussion went on, I started to wrap my head around things. Throughout the next few weeks, I met with each of the remaining Neuralink team members as well, each time playing the role of the dumbest person in the room. In these meetings, I focused on trying to form a comprehensive picture of the challenges at hand and what the road to a wizard hat might look like. I really wanted to understand these two boxes:

 The first one was easy. The business side of Neuralink is a brain-machine interface development company. They want to create cutting-edge BMIs—what one of them referred to as “micron-sized devices.” Doing this will support the growth of the company while also providing a perfect vehicle for putting their innovations into practice (the same way SpaceX uses their launches both to sustain the company and experiment with their newest engineering developments).

 As for what kind of interface they’re planning to work on first, here’s what Elon said:

 We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years.

 The second box was a lot hazier. It seems obvious to us today that using steam engine technology to harness the power of fire was the thing that had to happen to ignite the Industrial Revolution. But if you talked to someone in 1760 about it, they would have had a lot less clarity—on exactly which hurdles they were trying to get past, what kinds of innovations would allow them to leap over those hurdles, or how long any of this would take. And that’s where we are here—trying to figure out what the match looks like that will ignite the neuro revolution and how to create it.

 The starting place for a discussion about innovation is a discussion about hurdles—what are you even trying to innovate past? In Neuralink’s case, a whole lot of things. But given that, here too, engineering will likely prove to be the limiting factor, here are some seemingly large challenges that probably won’t end up being the major roadblock:

 Public skepticism

 Pew recently conducted a survey asking Americans about which future biotechnologies give them the shits the most. It turns out BMIs worry Americans even more than gene editing:44

 Flip Sabes, one of Neuralink’s ground floor members, doesn’t get it.

 To a scientist, to think about changing the fundamental nature of life—creating viruses, eugenics, etc.—it raises a specter that many biologists find quite worrisome, whereas the neuroscientists that I know, when they think about chips in the brain, it doesn’t seem that foreign, because we already have chips in the brain. We have deep brain stimulation to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, we have early trials of chips to restore vision, we have the cochlear implant—so to us it doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch to put devices into a brain to read information out and to read information back in.

 And after learning all about chips in the brain, I agree—and when Americans eventually learn about it, I think they’ll change their minds.

 History supports this prediction. People were super timid about Lasik eye surgery when it first became a thing—20 years ago, 20,000 people a year had the procedure done. Then everyone got used to it and now 2,000,000 people a year get laser eye surgery. Similar story with pacemakers. And defibrillators. And organ transplants—which people at first considered a freakish Frankenstein-esque concept. Brain implants will probably be the same story.

 Our non-understanding of the brain

 You know, the whole “if understanding the brain is a mile, we’re currently three inches in” thing. Flip weighed in on this topic too:

 If it were a prerequisite to understand the brain in order to interact with the brain in a substantive way, we’d have trouble. But it’s possible to decode all of those things in the brain without truly understanding the dynamics of the computation in the brain. Being able to read it out is an engineering problem. Being able to understand its origin and the organization of the neurons in fine detail in a way that would satisfy a neuroscientist to the core—that’s a separate problem. And we don’t need to solve all of those scientific problems in order to make progress.

 If we can just use engineering to get neurons to talk to computers, we’ll have done our job, and machine learning can do much of the rest. Which then, ironically, will teach us about the brain. As Flip points out:

 The flip side of saying, “We don’t need to understand the brain to make engineering progress,” is that making engineering progress will almost certainly advance our scientific knowledge—kind of like the way Alpha Go ended up teaching the world’s best players better strategies for the game. Then this scientific progress can lead to more engineering progress. The engineering and the science are gonna ratchet each other up here.

 Angry giants

 Tesla and SpaceX are both stepping on some very big toes (like the auto industry, the oil and gas industry, and the military-industrial complex). Big toes don’t like being stepped on, so they’ll usually do whatever they can to hinder the stepper’s progress. Luckily, Neuralink doesn’t really have this problem. There aren’t any massive industries that Neuralink is disrupting (at least not in the foreseeable future—an eventual neuro revolution would disrupt almost every industry).

 Neuralink’s hurdles are technology hurdles—and there are many. But two challenges stand out as the largest—challenges that, if conquered, may be impactful enough to trigger all the other hurdles to fall and totally change the trajectory of our future.

 Major Hurdle 1: Bandwidth

 There have never been more than a couple hundred electrodes in a human brain at once. When it comes to vision, that equals a super low-res image. When it comes to motor, that limits the possibilities to simple commands with little control. When it comes to your thoughts, a few hundred electrodes won’t be enough to communicate more than the simplest spelled-out message.

 We need higher bandwidth if this is gonna become a big thing. Way higher bandwidth.

 The Neuralink team threw out the number “one million simultaneously recorded neurons” when talking about an interface that could really change the world. I’ve also heard 100,000 as a number that would allow for the creation of a wide range of incredibly useful BMIs with a variety of applications.

 Early computers had a similar problem. Primitive transistors took up a lot of space and didn’t scale easily. Then in 1959 came the integrated circuit—the computer chip. Now there was a way to scale the number of transistors in a computer, and Moore’s Law—the concept that the number of transistors that can fit onto a computer chip doubles every 18 months—was born.

 Until the 90s, electrodes for BMIs were all made by hand. Then we started figuring out how to manufacture those little 100-electrode multielectrode arrays using conventional semiconductor technologies. Neurosurgeon Ben Rapoport believes that “the move from hand manufacturing to Utah Array electrodes was the first hint that BMIs were entering a realm where Moore’s Law could become relevant.”

 This is everything for the industry’s potential. Our maximum today is a couple hundred electrodes able to measure about 500 neurons at once—which is either super far from a million or really close, depending on the kind of growth pattern we’re in. If we add 500 more neurons to our maximum every 18 months, we’ll get to a million in the year 5017. If we double our total every 18 months, like we do with computer transistors, we’ll get to a million in the year 2034.

 Currently, we seem to be somewhere in between. Ian Stevenson and Konrad Kording published a paper that looked at the maximum number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded at various points throughout the last 50 years (in any animal), and put the results on this graph:45

 Sometimes called Stevenson’s Law, this research suggests that the number of neurons we can simultaneously record seems to consistently double every 7.4 years. If that rate continues, it’ll take us till the end of this century to reach a million, and until 2225 to record every neuron in the brain and get our totally complete wizard hat.

 Whatever the equivalent of the integrated circuit is for BMIs isn’t here yet, because 7.4 years is too big a number to start a revolution. The breakthrough here isn’t the device that can record a million neurons—it’s the paradigm shift that makes the future of that graph look more like Moore’s Law and less like Stevenson’s Law. Once that happens, a million neurons will follow.

 Major Hurdle 2: Implantation

 BMIs won’t sweep the world as long as you need to go in for skull-opening surgery to get involved.

 This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team.

 On top of being both a major barrier to entry and a major safety issue, invasive brain surgery is expensive and in limited supply. Elon talked about an eventual BMI implantation process that could be automated: “The machine to accomplish this would need to be something like Lasik, an automated process—because otherwise you just get constrained by the limited number of neural surgeons, and the costs are very high. You’d need a Lasik-like machine ultimately to be able to do this at scale.”

 Making BMIs high-bandwidth alone would be a huge deal, as would developing a way to non-invasively implant devices. But doing both would start a revolution.

 Other hurdles

 Today’s BMI patients have a wire coming out of their head. In the future, that certainly won’t fly. Neuralink plans to work on devices that will be wireless. But that brings a lot of new challenges with it. You’ll now need your device to be able to send and receive a lot of data wirelessly. Which means the implant also has to take care of things like signal amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and data compression on its own. Oh and it needs to be powered inductively.

 Another big one—biocompatibility. Delicate electronics tend to not do well inside a jello ball. And the human body tends to not like having foreign objects in it. But the brain interfaces of the future are intended to last forever without any problems. This means that the device will likely need to be hermetically sealed and robust enough to survive decades of the oozing and shifting of the neurons around it. And the brain—which treats today’s devices like invaders and eventually covers them in scar tissue—will need to somehow be tricked into thinking the device is just a normal brain part doing its thing.29

 Then there’s the space issue. Where exactly are you gonna put your device that can interface with a million neurons in a skull that’s already dealing with making space for 100 billion neurons? A million electrodes using today’s multielectrode arrays would be the size of a baseball. So further miniaturization is another dramatic innovation to add to the list.

 There’s also the fact that today’s electrodes are mostly optimized for simple electrical recording or simple electrical stimulation. If we really want an effective brain interface, we’ll need something other than single-function, stiff electrodes—something with the mechanical complexity of neural circuits, that can both record and stimulate, and that can interact with neurons chemically and mechanically as well as electrically.

 And just say all of this comes together perfectly—a high-bandwidth, long-lasting, biocompatible, bidirectional communicative, non-invasively-implanted device. Now we can speak back and forth with a million neurons at once! Except this little thing where we actually don’t know how to talk to neurons. It’s complicated enough to decode the static-like firings of 100 neurons, but all we’re really doing is learning what a set of specific firings corresponds to and matching them up to simple commands. That won’t work with millions of signals. It’s like how Google Translate essentially uses two dictionaries to swap words from one dictionary to another—which is very different than understanding language. We’ll need a pretty big leap in machine learning before a computer will be able to actually know a language, and we’ll need just as big a leap for machines to understand the language of the brain—because humans certainly won’t be learning to decipher the code of millions of simultaneously chattering neurons.

 How easy does colonizing Mars seem right now.

 But I bet the telephone and the car and the moon landing would have seemed like insurmountable technological challenges to people a few decades earlier. Just like I bet this—

 —would have seemed utterly inconceivable to people at the time of this:

 And yet, there it is in your pocket. If there’s one thing we should learn from the past, it’s that there will always be ubiquitous technology of the future that’s inconceivable to people of the past. We don’t know which technologies that seem positively impossible to us will turn out to be ubiquitous later in our lives—but there will be some. People always underestimate the Human Colossus.

 If everyone you know in 40 years has electronics in their skull, it’ll be because a paradigm shift took place that caused a fundamental shift in this industry. That shift is what the Neuralink team will try to figure out. Other teams are working on it too, and some cool ideas are being developed:

 Current BMI innovations

 A team at the University of Illinois is developing an interface made of silk:46

 Silk can be rolled up into a thin bundle and inserted into the brain relatively non-invasively. There, it would theoretically spread out around the brain and melt into the contours like shrink wrap. On the silk would be flexible silicon transistor arrays.

 In his TEDx Talk, Hong Yeo demonstrated an electrode array printed on his skin, like a temporary tattoo, and researchers say this kind of technique could potentially be used on the brain:47

 Another group is working on a kind of nano-scale, electrode-lined neural mesh so tiny it can be injected into the brain with a syringe:48

 For scale—that red tube on the right is the tip of a syringe. Nature Magazine has a nice graphic illustrating the concept:

 Other non-invasive techniques involve going in through veins and arteries. Elon mentioned this: “The least invasive way would be something that comes in like a heart stent like through a femoral artery and ultimately unfolds in the vascular system to interface with the neurons. Neurons use a lot of energy, so there’s basically a road network to every neuron.”

 DARPA, the technology innovation arm of the US military,30 through their recently funded BRAIN program, is working on tiny, “closed-loop” neural implants that could replace medication.49

 A second DARPA project aims to fit a million electrodes into a device the size of two nickels stacked.

 Another idea being worked on is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which a magnetic coil outside the head can create electrical pulses inside the brain.50

 The pulses can stimulate targeted neuron areas, providing a type of deep brain stimulation that’s totally non-invasive.

 One of Neuralink’s ground floor members, DJ Seo, led an effort to design an even cooler interface called “neural dust.” Neural dust refers to tiny, 100µm silicon sensors (about the same as the width of a hair) that would be sprinkled through the cortex. Right nearby, above the pia, would be a 3mm-sized device that could communicate with the dust sensors via ultrasound.

 This is another example of the innovation benefits that come from an interdisciplinary team. DJ explained to me that “there are technologies that are not really thought about in this domain, but we can bring in some principles of their work.” He says that neural dust is inspired both by microchip technology and RFID (the thing that allows hotel key cards to communicate with the door lock without making physical contact) principles. And you can easily see the multi-field influence in how it works:51

 Others are working on even more out-there ideas, like optogenetics (where you inject a virus that attaches to a brain cell, causing it to thereafter be stimulated by light) or even using carbon nanotubes—a million of which could be bundled together and sent to the brain via the bloodstream.

 These people are all working on this arrow:

 It’s a relatively small group right now, but when the breakthrough spark happens, that’ll quickly change. Developments will begin to happen rapidly. Brain interface bandwidth will get better and better as the procedures to implant them become simpler and cheaper. Public interest will pick up. And when public interest picks up, the Human Colossus notices an opportunity—and then the rate of development skyrockets. Just like the breakthroughs in computer hardware caused the software industry to explode, major industries will pop up working on cutting-edge machines and intelligent apps to be used in conjunction with brain interfaces, and you’ll tell some little kid in 2052 all about how when you grew up, no one could do any of the things she can do with her brain, and she’ll be bored.

 I tried to get the Neuralink team to talk about 2052 with me. I wanted to know what life was going to be like once this all became a thing. I wanted to know what went in the [Pilot ACE : iPhone 7 :: Early BMIs : ____] blank. But it wasn’t easy—this was a team built specifically because of their focus on concrete results, not hype, and I was doing the equivalent of talking to people in the late 1700s who were feverishly trying to create a breakthrough steam engine and prodding them about when they thought there would be airplanes.

 But I’d keep pulling teeth until they’d finally talk about their thoughts on the far future to get my hand off their tooth. I also focused a large portion of my talks with Elon on the far future possibilities and had other helpful discussions with Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist friend of mine who works on BMIs and thinks a lot about the long-term outlook. Finally, one reluctant-to-talk-about-his-predictions Neuralink team member told me that of course, he and his colleagues were dreamers—otherwise they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing—and that many of them were inspired to get into this industry by science fiction. He recommended I talk to Ramez Naam, writer of the popular Nexus Trilogy, a series all about the future of BMIs, and also someone with a hard tech background that includes 19 software-related patents. So I had a chat with Ramez to round out the picture and ask him the 435 remaining questions I had about everything.

 And I came out of all of it utterly blown away. I wrote once about how I think if you went back to 1750—a time when there was no electricity or motorized vehicles or telecommunication—and retrieved, say, George Washington, and brought him to today and showed him our world, he’d be so shocked by everything that he’d die. You’d have killed George Washington and messed everything up. Which got me thinking about the concept of how many years one would need to go into the future such that the ensuing shock from the level of progress would kill you. I called it a Die Progress Unit, or DPU.

 Ever since the Human Colossus was born, our world has had a weird property to it—it gets more magical as time goes on. That’s why DPUs are a thing. And because advancement begets more rapid advancement, the trend is that as time passes, the DPUs get shorter. For George Washington, a DPU was a couple hundred years, which is outrageously short in the scheme of human history. But we now live in a time where things are moving so fast that we might experience one or even multiple DPUs in our lifetime. The amount that changed between 1750 and 2017 might happen again between now and another time when you’re still alive. This is a ridiculous time to be alive—it’s just hard for us to notice because we live life so zoomed in.

 Anyway, I think about DPUs a lot and I always wonder what it would feel like to go forward in a time machine and experience what George would experience coming here. What kind of future could blow my mind so hard that it would kill me? We can talk about things like AI and gene editing—and I have no doubt that progress in those areas could make me die of shock—but it’s always, “Who knows what it’ll be like!” Never a descriptive picture.

 I think I might finally have a descriptive picture of a piece of our shocking future. Let me paint it for you.

 Part 5: The Wizard Era

 The budding industry of brain-machine interfaces is the seed of a revolution that will change just about everything. But in many ways, the brain-interface future isn’t really a new thing that’s happening. If you take a step back, it looks more like the next big chapter in a trend that’s been going on for a long time. Language took forever to turn into writing, which then took forever to turn into printing, and that’s where things were when George Washington was around. Then came electricity and the pace picked up. Telephone. Radio. Television. Computers. And just like that, everyone’s homes became magical. Then phones became cordless. Then mobile. Computers went from being devices for work and games to windows into a digital world we all became a part of. Then phones and computers merged into an everything device that brought the magic out of our homes and put it into our hands. And on our wrists. We’re now in the early stages of a virtual and augmented reality revolution that will wrap the magic around our eyes and ears and bring our whole being into the digital world.

 You don’t need to be a futurist to see where this is going.

 Magic has worked its way from industrial facilities to our homes to our hands and soon it’ll be around our heads. And then it’ll take the next natural step. The magic is heading into our brains.

 It will happen by way of a “whole-brain interface,” or what I’ve been calling a wizard hat—a brain interface so complete, so smooth, so biocompatible, and so high-bandwidth that it feels as much a part of you as your cortex and limbic system. A whole-brain interface would give your brain the ability to communicate wirelessly with the cloud, with computers, and with the brains of anyone with a similar interface in their head. This flow of information between your brain and the outside world would be so effortless, it would feel similar to the thinking that goes on in your head today. And though we’ve used the term brain-machine interface so far, I kind of think of a BMI as a specific brain interface to be used for a specific purpose, and the term doesn’t quite capture the everything-of-everything concept of the whole-brain interface. So I’ll call that a wizard hat instead.

 Now, to fully absorb the implications of having a wizard hat installed in your head and what that would change about you, you’ll need to wrap your head around (no pun intended) two things:

 1) The intensely mind-bending idea

 2) The super ridiculously intensely mind-bending idea

 We’ll tackle #1 in this section and save #2 for the last section after you’ve had time to absorb #1.

 Elon calls the whole-brain interface and its many capabilities a “digital tertiary layer,” a term that has two levels of meaning that correspond to our two mind-bending ideas above.

 The first meaning gets at the idea of physical brain parts. We discussed three layers of brain parts—the brain stem (run by the frog), the limbic system (run by the monkey), and the cortex (run by the rational thinker). We were being thorough, but for the rest of this post, we’re going to leave the frog out of the discussion, since he’s entirely functional and lives mostly behind the scenes.

 When Elon refers to a “digital tertiary layer,” he’s considering our existing brain having two layers—our animal limbic system (which could be called our primary layer) and our advanced cortex (which could be called our secondary layer). The wizard hat interface, then, would be our tertiary layer—a new physical brain part to complement the other two.

 If thinking about this concept is giving you the willies, Elon has news for you:

 We already have a digital tertiary layer in a sense, in that you have your computer or your phone or your applications. You can ask a question via Google and get an answer instantly. You can access any book or any music. With a spreadsheet, you can do incredible calculations. If you had an Empire State building filled with people—even if they had calculators, let alone if they had to do it with a pencil and paper—one person with a laptop could outdo the Empire State Building filled with people with calculators. You can video chat with someone in freaking Timbuktu for free. This would’ve gotten you burnt for witchcraft in the old days. You can record as much video with sound as you want, take a zillion pictures, have them tagged with who they are and when it took place. You can broadcast communications through social media to millions of people simultaneously for free. These are incredible superpowers that the President of the United States didn’t have twenty years ago.

 The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.

 This is a hard point to really absorb, because we don’t feel like cyborgs. We feel like humans who use devices to do things. But think about your digital self—you when you’re interacting with someone on the internet or over FaceTime or when you’re in a YouTube video. Digital you is fully you—as much as in-person you is you—right? The only difference is that you’re not there in person—you’re using magic powers to send yourself to somewhere far away, at light speed, through wires and satellites and electromagnetic waves. The difference is the medium.

 Before language, there wasn’t a good way to get a thought from your brain into my brain. Then early humans invented the technology of language, transforming vocal cords and ears into the world’s first communication devices and air as the first communication medium. We use these devices every time we talk to each other in person. It goes:

 Then we built upon that with another leap, inventing a second layer of devices, with its own medium, allowing us to talk long distance:

 Or maybe:

 In that sense, your phone is as much “you” as your vocal cords or your ears or your eyes. All of these things are simply tools to move thoughts from brain to brain—so who cares if the tool is held in your hand, your throat, or your eye sockets? The digital age has made us a dual entity—a physical creature who interacts with its physical environment using its biological parts and a digital creature whose digital devices—whose digital parts—allow it to interact with the digital world.

 But because we don’t think of it like that, we’d consider someone with a phone in their head or throat a cyborg and someone else with a phone in their hand, pressed up against their head, not a cyborg. Elon’s point is that the thing that makes a cyborg a cyborg is their capabilities—not from which side of the skull those capabilities are generated.

 We’re already a cyborg, we already have superpowers, and we already spend a huge part of our lives in the digital world. And when you think of it like that, you realize how obvious it is to want to upgrade the medium that connects us to that world. This is the change Elon believes is actually happening when the magic goes into our brains:

 You’re already digitally superhuman. The thing that would change is the interface—having a high-bandwidth interface to your digital enhancements. The thing is that today, the interface all necks down to this tiny straw, which is, particularly in terms of output, it’s like poking things with your meat sticks, or using words—either speaking or tapping things with fingers. And in fact, output has gone backwards. It used to be, in your most frequent form, output would be ten-finger typing. Now, it’s like, two-thumb typing. That’s crazy slow communication. We should be able to improve that by many orders of magnitude with a direct neural interface.

 In other words, putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.

 A whole-brain interface is that upgrade. It changes us from creatures whose primary and secondary layers live inside their heads and whose tertiary layer lives in their pocket, in their hand, or on their desk—

 —to creatures whose three layers all live together.

 Your life is full of devices, including the one you’re currently using to read this. A wizard hat makes your brain into the device, allowing your thoughts to go straight from your head into the digital world.

 Which doesn’t only revolutionize human-computer communication.

 Right now humans communicate with each other like this:

 And that’s how it’s been ever since we could communicate. But in a wizard hat world, it would look more like this:

 Elon always emphasizes bandwidth when he talks about Neuralink’s wizard hat goals. Interface bandwidth allows incoming images to be HD, incoming sound to be hi-fi, and motor movement commands to be tightly controlled—but it’s also a huge factor in communication. If information were a milkshake, bandwidth would be the width of the straw. Today, the bandwidth-of-communication graph looks something like this:

 So computers can suck up the milkshake through a giant pipe, a human thinking would be using a large, pleasant-to-use straw, while language would be a frustratingly tiny coffee stirrer straw and typing (let alone texting) would be like trying to drink a milkshake through a syringe needle—you might be able to get a drop out once a minute.

 Moran Cerf has gathered data on the actual bandwidth of different parts of the nervous system and on this graph, he compares them to equivalent bandwidths in the computer world:

 You can see here on Moran’s graph that the disparity in bandwidth between the ways we communicate and our thinking (which is at 30 bits/second on this graph) is even starker than my graph above depicts.

 But making our brains the device cuts out those tiny straws, turning all of these:

 To this:

 Which preserves all the meaning with none of the fuss—and changes the graph to this:

 We’d still be using straws, but far bigger, more effective ones.

 But it’s not just about the speed of communication. As Elon points out, it’s about the nuance and accuracy of communication as well:

 There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is—your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you. … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person.

 This makes sense—nuance is like a high-resolution thought, which makes the file simply too big to transfer quickly through a coffee straw. The coffee straw gives you two bad options when it comes to nuance: take a lot of time saying a lot of words to really depict the nuanced thought or imagery you want to convey to me, or save time by using succinct language—but inevitably fail to transfer over the nuance. Compounding the effect is the fact that language itself is a low-resolution medium. A word is simply an approximation of a thought—buckets that a whole category of similar-but-distinct thoughts can all be shoved into. If I watch a horror movie and want to describe it to you in words, I’m stuck with a few simple low-res buckets—“scary” or “creepy” or “chilling” or “intense.” My actual impression of that movie is very specific and not exactly like any other movie I’ve seen—but the crude tools of language force my brain to “round to the nearest bucket” and choose the word that most closely resembles my actual impression, and that’s the information you’ll receive from me. You won’t receive the thought—you’ll receive the bucket—and now you’ll have to guess which of the many nuanced impressions that all approximate to that bucket is the most similar to my impression of the movie. You’ll decompress my description—“scary as shit”—into a high-res, nuanced thought that you associate with “scary as shit,” which will inevitably be based on your own experience watching other horror movies, and your own personality. The end result is that a lot has been lost in translation—which is exactly what you’d expect when you try to transfer a high-res file over a low-bandwidth medium, quickly, using low-res tools. That’s why Elon calls language data transfer “lossy.”

 We do the best we can with these limitations—and over time, we’ve supplemented language with slightly higher-resolution formats like video to better convey nuanced imagery, or music to better convey nuanced emotion. But compared to the richness and uniqueness of the ideas in our heads, and the large-bandwidth straw our internal thoughts flow through, all human-to-human communication is very lossy.

 Thinking about the phenomenon of communication as what it is—brains trying to share things with each other—you see the history of communication not as this:

 As much as this:

 Or it could be put this way:

 It really may be that the second major era of communication—the 100,000-year Era of Indirect Communication—is in its very last moments. If we zoom out on the timeline, it’s possible the entire last 150 years, during which we’ve suddenly been rapidly improving our communication media, will look to far-future humans like one concept: the transition from Era 2 to Era 3. We might be living on the line that divides timeline sections.

 And because indirect communication requires third-party body parts or digital parts, the end of Era 2 may be looked back upon as the era of physical devices. In an era where your brain is the device, there will be no need to carry anything around. You’ll have your body and, if you want, clothes—and that’s it.

 When Elon thinks about wizard hats, this is usually the stuff he’s thinking about—communication bandwidth and resolution. And we’ll explore why in Part 6 of this post.

 First, let’s dig into the mind-boggling concept of your brain becoming a device and talk about what a wizard hat world might be like.

 ___________

 One thing to keep in mind as we think about all of this is that none of it will take you by surprise. You won’t go from having nothing in your brain to a digital tertiary layer in your head, just like people didn’t go from the Apple IIGS to using Tinder overnight. The Wizard Era will come gradually, and by the time the shift actually begins to happen, we’ll all be very used to the technology, and it’ll seem normal.

 Supporting this point is the fact the staircase up to the Wizard Era has already started, and you haven’t even noticed. But there are thousands of people currently walking around with electrodes in their brain, like those with cochlear implants, retinal implants, and deep brain implants—all benefiting from early BMIs.

 The next few steps on the staircase will continue to focus on restoring lost function in different parts of the body—the first people to have their lives transformed by digital brain technology will be the disabled. As specialized BMIs serve more and more forms of disability, the concept of brain implants will work its way in from the fringes and become something we’re all used to—just like no one blinks an eye when you say your friend just got Lasik surgery or your grandmother just got a pacemaker installed.

 Elon talks about some types of people early BMIs could help:

 The first use of the technology will be to repair brain injuries as a result of stroke or cutting out a cancer lesion, where somebody’s fundamentally lost a certain cognitive element. It could help with people who are quadriplegics or paraplegics by providing a neural shunt from the motor cortex down to where the muscles are activated. It can help with people who, as they get older, have memory problems and can’t remember the names of their kids, through memory enhancement, which could allow them to function well to a much later time in life—the medically advantageous elements of this for dealing with mental disablement of one kind or another, which of course happens to all of us when we get old enough, are very significant.

 As someone who lost a grandfather to dementia five years before losing him to death, I’m excited to hear this.

 And as interface bandwidth improves, disabilities that hinder millions today will start to drop like flies. The concepts of complete blindness and deafness—whether centered in the sensory organs or in the brain31—are already on the way out. And with enough time, perfect vision or hearing will be restorable.

 Prosthetic limbs—and eventually sleek, full-body exoskeletons underneath your clothes—will work so well, providing both outgoing motor functions and an incoming sense of touch, that paralysis or amputations will only have a minor long-term effect on people’s lives.

 In Alzheimer’s patients, memories themselves are often not lost—only the bridge to those memories. Advanced BMIs could help restore that bridge or serve as a new one.

 While this is happening, BMIs will begin to emerge that people without disabilities want. The very early adopters will probably be pretty rich. But so were the early cell phone adopters.52

 That’s Gordon Gekko, and that 1983, two-pound cell phone cost almost $9,000 in today’s dollars. And now over half of living humans own a mobile phone—all of them far less shitty than Gordon Gekko’s.

 As mobile phones got cheaper, and better, they went from new and fancy and futuristic to ubiquitous. As we go down the same road with brain interfaces, things are going to get really cool.

 Based on what I learned from my conversations with Elon, Ramez, and a dozen neuroscientists, let’s look at what the world might look like in a few decades. The timeline is uncertain, including the order in which the below developments may become a reality. And, of course, some of the below predictions are sure to be way off the mark, just as there will be other developments in this field that won’t be mentioned here because people today literally can’t imagine them yet.

 But some version of a lot of this stuff probably will happen, at some point, and a lot of it could be in your lifetime.

 Looking at all the predictions I heard, they seemed to fall into two broad categories: communication capabilities and internal enhancements.

 The Wizard Era: Communication

 Motor communication

 “Communication” in this section can mean human-to-human or human-to-computer. Motor communication is all about human-to-computer—the whole “motor cortex as remote control” thing from earlier, but now the unbelievably rad version.

 Like many future categories of brain interface possibility, motor communication will start with restoration applications for the disabled, and as those development efforts continually advance the possibilities, the technology will begin to be used to create augmentation applications for the non-disabled as well. The same technologies that will allow a quadriplegic to use their thoughts as a remote control to move a bionic limb can let anyone use their thoughts as a remote control…to move anything. Well not anything—I’m not talking about telekinesis—anything built to be used with a brain remote. But in the Wizard Era, lots of things will be built that way.

 Your car (or whatever people use for transportation at that point) will pull up to your house and your mind will open the car door. You’ll walk up to the house and your mind will unlock and open the front door (all doors at that point will be built with sensors to receive motor cortex commands). You’ll think about wanting coffee and the coffee maker will get that going. As you head to the fridge the door will open and after getting what you need it’ll close as you walk away. When it’s time for bed, you’ll decide you want the heat turned down and the lights turned off, and those systems will feel you make that decision and adjust themselves.

 None of this stuff will take any effort or thought—we’ll all get very good at it and it’ll feel as automatic and subconscious as moving your eyes to read this sentence does to you now.

 People will play the piano with their thoughts. And do building construction. And steer vehicles. In fact, today, if you’re driving somewhere and something jumps out in the road in front of you, what neuroscientists know is that your brain sees it and begins to react well before your consciousness knows what’s going on or your arms move to steer out of the way. But when your brain is the one steering the car, you’ll have swerved out of the way before you even realize what happened.

 Thought communication

 This is what we discussed up above—but you have to resist the natural instinct to equate a thought conversation with a normal language conversation where you simply hear each other’s voices in your head. As we discussed, words are compressed approximations of uncompressed thoughts, so why would you ever bother with any of that, or deal with lossiness, if you didn’t have to? When you watch a movie, your head is buzzing with thoughts—but do you have a compressed spoken word dialogue going on in your head? Probably not—you’re just thinking. Thought conversations will be like that.

 Elon says:

 If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now.

 That’s the thing—it’s difficult to really understand what it would be like to think with someone. We’ve never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that’s all we can imagine.

 Even weirder is the concept of a group thinking together. This is what a group brainstorm could look like in the Wizard Era.

 And of course, they wouldn’t need to be in the same room. This group could have been in four different countries while this was happening—with no external devices in sight.

 Ramez has written about the effect group thinking might have on the world:

 That type of communication would have a huge impact on the pace of innovation, as scientists and engineers could work more fluidly together. And it’s just as likely to have a transformative effect on the public sphere, in the same way that email, blogs, and Twitter have successively changed public discourse.

 The idea of collaboration today is supposed to be two or more brains working together to come up with things none of them could have on their own. And a lot of the time, it works pretty well—but when you consider the “lost in transmission” phenomenon that happens with language, you realize how much more effective group thinking would be.

 I asked Elon a question that pops into everyone’s mind when they first hear about thought communication:

 “So, um, will everyone be able to know what I’m thinking?”

 He assured me they would not. “People won’t be able to read your thoughts—you would have to will it. If you don’t will it, it doesn’t happen. Just like if you don’t will your mouth to talk, it doesn’t talk.” Phew.

 You can also think with a computer. Not just to issue a command, but to actually brainstorm something with a computer. You and a computer could strategize something together. You could compose a piece of music together. Ramez talked about using a computer as an imagination collaborator: “You could imagine something, and the computer, which can better forward predict or analyze physical models, could fill in constraints—and that allows you to get feedback.”

 One concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts I talked to believed it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it served us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality. Think of how much easier it is for people today to express their individuality and customize life to themselves than it was 50 or 100 or 500 years ago. There’s no reason to believe that trend won’t continue with more progress.

 Multimedia communication

 Similar to thought communication, but imagine how much easier it would be to describe a dream you had or a piece of music stuck in your head or a memory you’re thinking about if you could just beam the thing into someone’s head, like showing them on your computer screen. Or as Elon said, “I could think of a bouquet of flowers and have a very clear picture in my head of what that is. It would take a lot of words for you to even have an approximation of what that bouquet of flowers looks like.”

 How much faster could a team of engineers or architects or designers plan out a new bridge or a new building or a new dress if they could beam the vision in their head onto a screen and others could adjust it with their minds, versus sketching things out—which not only takes far longer, but probably is inevitably lossy?

 How many symphonies could Mozart have written if he had been able to think the music in his head onto the page? How many Mozarts are out there right now who never learned how to play instruments well enough to get their talent out?

 I watched this delightful animated short movie the other day, and below the video the creator, Felix Colgrave, said the video took him two years. How much of that time was spent dreaming up the art versus painstakingly getting it from his head into the software? Maybe in a few decades, I’ll be able to watch animation streaming live out of Felix’s head.

 Emotional communication

 Emotions are the quintessential example of a concept that words are poorly-equipped to accurately describe. If ten people say, “I’m sad,” it actually means ten different things. In the Wizard Era, we’ll probably learn pretty quickly that the specific emotions people feel are as unique to people as their appearance or sense of humor.

 This could work as communication—when one person communicates just what they’re feeling, the other person would be able to access the feeling in their own emotional centers. Obvious implications for a future of heightened empathy. But emotional communication could also be used for things like entertainment, where a movie, say, could also project out to the audience—directly into their limbic systems—certain feelings it wants the audience to feel as they watch. This is already what the film score does—another hack—and now it could be done directly.

 Sensory communication

 This one is intense.

 Right now, the only two microphones that can act as inputs for the “speaker” in your head—your auditory cortex—are your two ears. The only two cameras that can be hooked up to the projector in your head—your visual cortex—are your two eyes. The only sensory surface that you can feel is your skin. The only thing that lets you experience taste is your tongue.

 But in the same way we can currently hook an implant, for example, into someone’s cochlea—which connects a different mic to their auditory cortex—down the road we’ll be able to let sensory input information stream into your wizard hat wirelessly, from anywhere, and channel right into your sensory cortices the same way your bodily sensory organs do today. In the future, sensory organs will be only one set of inputs into your senses—and compared to what our senses will have access to, not a very exciting one.

 Now what about output?

 Currently, the only speaker your ear inputs can play out of is your auditory cortex. Only you can see what your eye cameras capture and only you can feel what touches your skin—because only you have access to the particular cortices those inputs are wired to. With a wizard hat, it would be a breeze for your brain to beam those input signals out of your head.

 So you’ll have sensory input capabilities and sensory output capabilities—or both at the same time. This will open up all kinds of amazing possibilities.

 Say you’re on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem—just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he’s there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze and smells the trees and jumps when a bug lands on your arm. You two share the equivalent of a five-minute discussion about the scene—your favorite parts, which other places it reminds you of, etc. along with a shared story from his day—in a 30-second thought session. He says he has to get back to what he was working on, so he cuts off the sense connections except for vision, which he reduces to a little picture-in-picture window on the side of his visual field so he can check out more of the hike from time to time.

 A surgeon could control a machine scalpel with her motor cortex instead of holding one in her hand, and she could receive sensory input from that scalpel so that it would feel like an 11th finger to her. So it would be as if one of her fingers was a scalpel and she could do the surgery without holding any tools, giving her much finer control over her incisions. An inexperienced surgeon performing a tough operation could bring a couple of her mentors into the scene as she operates to watch her work through her eyes and think instructions or advice to her. And if something goes really wrong, one of them could “take the wheel” and connect their motor cortex to her outputs to take control of her hands.

 There would be no more need for screens of course—because you could just make a virtual screen appear in your visual cortex. Or jump into a VR movie with all your senses. Speaking of VR—Facebook, the maker of the Oculus Rift, is diving into this too. In an interview with Mark Zuckerberg about VR (for an upcoming post), the conversation at one point turned to BMIs. He said: “Touch gives you input and it’s a little bit of haptic feedback. Over the long term, it’s not clear that we won’t just like to have our hands in no controller, and maybe, instead of having buttons that we press, we would just think something.”

 The ability to record sensory input means you can also record your memories, or share them—since a memory in the first place is just a not-so-accurate playback of previous sensory input. Or you could play them back as live experiences. In other words, that Black Mirror episode will probably actually happen.

 An NBA player could send out a livestream invitation to his fans before a game, which would let them see and hear through his eyes and ears while he plays. Those who miss it could jump into the recording later.

 You could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later—or, if you’re not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience. (Needless to say, the porn industry will thrive in the digital brain world.)

 Right now, you can go on YouTube and watch a first-hand account of almost anything, for free. This would have blown George Washington’s mind—but in the Wizard Era, you’ll be able to actually experience almost anything for free. The days of fancy experiences being limited to rich people will be long over.

 Another idea, via the imagination of Moran Cerf: Maybe player brain injuries will drive the NFL to alter the rules so that the players’ biological bodies stay on the sidelines, while they play the game with an artificial body whose motor cortex they control and whose eyes and ears they see and hear through. I like this idea and think it would be closer to the current NFL than it seems at first. In one way, you’ll still need to be a great athlete to play, since most of what makes a great athlete great is their motor cortex, their muscle memory, and their decision-making. But the other component of being a great athlete—the physical body itself—would now be artificial. The NFL could make all of the artificial playing bodies identical—this would be a cool way to see whose skills were actually best—or they could insist that artificial body matches in every way the biological body of the athlete, to mimic as closely as possible how the game would go if players used their biological bodies like in the old days. Either way, if this rule change happened, you can imagine how crazy it would seem to people that players used to have their actual, fragile brains on the field .

 I could go on. The communication possibilities in a wizard hat world, especially when you combine them with each other, are endless—and damn fun to think about.

 The Wizard Era: Internal Control

 Communication—the flow of information into and out of your brain—is only one way your wizard hat will be able to serve you.

 A whole-brain interface can stimulate any part of your brain in any way—it has to have this capability for the input half of all the communication examples above. But that capability also gives you a whole new level of control over your brain. Here are some ways people of the future might take advantage of that:

 Win the battle in your head for both sides

 Often, the battle in our heads between our prefrontal cortex and limbic system comes down to the fact that both parties are trying to do what’s best for us—it’s just that our limbic system is wrong about what’s best for us because it thinks we live in a tribe 50,000 years ago.

 Your limbic system isn’t making you eat your ninth Starburst candy in a row because it’s a dick—it’s making you eat it because it thinks that A) any fruit that sweet and densely chewy must be super rich in calories and B) you might not find food again for the next four days so it’s a good idea to load up on a high-calorie food whenever the opportunity arises.

 Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex is just watching in horror like “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS.”

 But Moran believes that a good brain interface could fix this problem:53

 Consider eating a chocolate cake. While eating, we feed data to our cognitive apparatus. These data provide the enjoyment of the cake. The enjoyment isn’t in the cake, per se, but in our neural experience of it. Decoupling our sensory desire (the experience of cake) from the underlying survival purpose (nutrition) will soon be within our reach.

 This concept of “sensory decoupling” would make so much sense if we could pull it off. You could get the enjoyment of eating like shit without actually putting shit in your body. Instead, Moran says, what would go in your body would be “nutrition inputs customized for each person based on genomes, microbiomes or other factors. Physical diets released from the tyranny of desire.”54

 The same principle could apply to things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and other pleasures that get people into trouble, healthwise or otherwise.

 Ramez Naam talks about how a brain interface could also help us win the discipline battle when it comes to time:55

 We know that stimulating the right centers in the brain can induce sleep or alertness, hunger or satiation, ease or stimulation, as quick as the flip of a switch. Or, if you’re running code, on a schedule. (Siri: Put me to sleep until 7:30, high priority interruptions only. And let’s get hungry for lunch around noon. Turn down the sugar cravings, though.)

 Take control of mood disorders

 Ramez also emphasized that a great deal of scientific evidence suggests that moods and disorders are tied to what the chemicals in your brain are doing. Right now, we take drugs to alter those chemicals, and Ramez explains why direct neural stimulation is a far better option:56

 Pharmaceuticals enter the brain and then spread out randomly, hitting whatever receptor they work on all across your brain. Neural interfaces, by contrast, can stimulate just one area at a time, can be tuned in real-time, and can carry information out about what’s happening.

 Depression, anxiety, OCD, and other disorders may be easy to eradicate once we can take better control of what goes on in our brain.

 Mess with your senses

 Want to hear what a dog hears? That’s easy. The pitch range we can hear is limited by the dimensions of our cochlea—but pitches out of the ear’s range can be sent straight into our auditory nerve.32

 Or maybe you want a new sense. You love bird watching and want to be able to sense when there’s a bird nearby. So you buy an infrared camera that can detect bird locations by their heat signals and you link it to your brain interface, which stimulates neurons in a certain way to alert you to the presence of a bird and tell you its location. I can’t describe what you’d experience when it alerts you, so I’ll just say words like “feel” or “see,” because I can only imagine the five senses we have. But in the future, there will be more words for new, useful types of senses.

 You could also dim or shut off parts of a sense, like pain perhaps. Pain is the body’s way of telling us we need to address something, but in the future, we’ll elect to get that information in much less unpleasant formats.33

 Increase your knowledge

 There’s evidence from experiments with rats that it’s possible to boost how fast a brain can learn—sometimes by 2x or even 3x—just by priming certain neurons to prepare to make a long-term connection.

 Your brain would also have access to all the knowledge in the world, at all times. I talked to Ramez about how accessing information in the cloud might work. We parsed it out into four layers of capability, each requiring a more advanced brain interface than the last:

 Level 1: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info—like Googling something with my brain—and the answer, in text, appears in my mind’s eye. Basically what I do now except it all happens in my head.

 Level 2: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info, and then a second later I just know it. No reading was involved—it was more like the way I’d recall something from memory.

 Level 3: I just know the fact I want to know the second I want it. I don’t even know if it came from the cloud or if it was stored in my brain. I can essentially treat the whole cloud like my brain. I don’t know all the info—my brain could never fit it all—but any time I want to know something it downloads into my consciousness so seamlessly and quickly, it’s as if it were there all along.

 Level 4: Beyond just knowing facts, I can deeply understand anything I want to, in a complex way. We discussed the example of Moby Dick. Could I download Moby Dick from the cloud into my memory and then suddenly have it be the same as if I had read the whole book? Where I’d have thoughts and opinions and I could cite passages and have discussions about the themes?

 Ramez thinks all four of these are possible with enough time, but that the fourth in particular will take a very long time to happen, if ever.

 So there are about 50 delightful potential things about putting a wizard hat on your brain. Now for the undelightful part.

 The scary thing about wizard hats

 As is always the case with the advent of new technologies, when the Wizard Era rolls around, the dicks of the world will do their best to ruin everything.

 And this time, the stakes are extra high. Here are some things that could suck:

 Trolls can have an even fielder day. The troll-type personalities of the world have been having a field day ever since the internet came out. They literally can’t believe their luck. But with brain interfaces, they’ll have an even fielder day. Being more connected to each other means a lot of good things—like empathy going up as a result of more exposure to all kinds of people—but it also means a lot of bad things. Just like the internet. Bad guys will have more opportunity to spread hate or build hateful coalitions. The internet has been a godsend for ISIS, and a brain-connected world would be an even more helpful recruiting tool.

 Computers crash. And they have bugs. And normally that’s not the end of the world, because you can try restarting, and if it’s really being a piece of shit, you can just get a new computer. You can’t get a new head. There will have to be a way way higher number of precautions taken here.

 Computers can be hacked. Except this time they have access to your thoughts, sensory input, and memories. Bad times.

 Holy shit computers can be hacked. In the last item I was thinking about bad guys using hacking to steal information from my brain. But brain interfaces can also put information in. Meaning a clever hacker might be able to change your thoughts or your vote or your identity or make you want to do something terrible you normally wouldn’t ever consider. And you wouldn’t know it ever happened. You could feel strongly about voting for a candidate and a little part of you would wonder if someone manipulated your thoughts so you’d feel that way. The darkest possible scenario would be an ISIS-type organization actually influencing millions of people to join their cause by altering their thoughts. This is definitely the scariest paragraph in this post. Let’s get out of here.

 Why the Wizard Era will be a good thing anyway even though there are a lot of dicks

 Physics advancements allow bad guys to make nuclear bombs. Biological advancements allow bad guys to make bioweapons. The invention of cars and planes led to crashes that kill over a million people a year. The internet enabled the spread of fake news, made us vulnerable to cyberattack, made terrorist recruiting efforts easier, and allowed predators to flourish.

 And yet—

 Would people choose to reverse our understanding of science, go back to the days of riding horses across land and boats across the ocean, or get rid of the internet?

 Probably not.

 New technology also comes along with real dangers and it always does end up harming a lot of people. But it also always seems to help a lot more people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive.

 People also love to hate the concept of new technology—because they worry it’s unhealthy and makes us less human. But those same people, if given the option, usually wouldn’t consider going back to George Washington’s time, when half of children died before the age of 5, when traveling to other parts of the world was impossible for almost everyone, when a far greater number of humanitarian atrocities were being committed than there are today, when women and ethnic minorities had far fewer rights across the world than they do today, when far more people were illiterate and far more people were living under the poverty line than there are today. They wouldn’t go back 250 years—a time right before the biggest explosion of technology in human history happened. Sounds like people who are immensely grateful for technology. And yet their opinion holds—our technology is ruining our lives, people in the old days were much wiser, our world’s going to shit, etc. I don’t think they’ve thought about it hard enough.

 So when it comes to what will be a long list of dangers of the Wizard Era—they suck, and they’ll continue to suck as some of them play out into sickening atrocities and catastrophes. But a vastly larger group of good guys will wage war back, as they always do, and a giant “brain security” industry will be born. And I bet, if given the option, people in the Wizard Era wouldn’t for a second consider coming back to 2017.

 ___________

 The Timeline

 I always know when humanity doesn’t know what the hell is going on with something when all the experts are contradicting each other about it.34

 The timeline for our road to the Wizard Era is one of those times—in large part because no one knows to what extent we’ll be able to make Stevenson’s Law look more like Moore’s Law.

 My conversations yielded a wide range of opinions on the timeline. One neuroscientist predicted that I’d have a whole-brain interface in my lifetime. Mark Zuckerberg said: “I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.” One prediction on the longer end came from Ramez Naam, who thought the time of people beginning to install BMIs for reasons other than disability might not come for 50 years and that mass adoption would take even longer.

 “I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope that Elon bends the curve on this.”

 When I asked Elon about his timeline, he said:

 I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities.

 During another discussion, I had asked him about why he went into this branch of biotech and not into genetics. He responded:

 Genetics is just too slow, that’s the problem. For a human to become an adult takes twenty years. We just don’t have that amount of time.

 A lot of people working on this challenge have a lot of different motivations for doing so, but rarely did I talk to people who felt motivated by urgency.

 Elon’s urgency to get us into the Wizard Era is the final piece of the Neuralink puzzle. Our last box to fill in:

 With Elon’s companies, there’s always some “result of the goal” that’s his real reason for starting the company—the piece that ties the company’s goal into humanity’s better future. In the case of Neuralink, it’s a piece that takes a lot of tree climbing to understand. But with the view from all the way up here, we’ve got everything we need for our final stretch of the road.

 Part 6: The Great Merger

 Imagine an alien explorer is visiting a new star and finds three planets circling it, all with life on them. The first happens to be identical to the way Earth was in 10 million BC. The second happens to be identical to Earth in 50,000 BC. And the third happens to be identical to Earth in 2017 AD.

 The alien is no expert on primitive biological life but circles around all three planets, peering down at each with his telescope. On the first, he sees lots of water and trees and mountains and some little signs of animal life. He makes out a herd of elephants on an African plain, a group of dolphins skipping along the ocean’s surface, and a few other scattered critters living out their Tuesday.

 He moves on to the second planet and looks around. More critters, not too much different. He notices one new thing—occasional little points of flickering light dotting the land.

 Bored, he moves on to the third planet. Whoa. He sees planes crawling around above the land, vast patches of gray land with towering buildings on them, ships of all kinds sprinkled across the seas, long railways stretching across continents, and he has to jerk his spaceship out of the way when a satellite soars by him.

 When he heads home, he reports on what he found: “Two planets with primitive life and one planet with intelligent life.”

 You can understand why that would be his conclusion—but he’d be wrong.

 In fact, it’s the first planet that’s the odd one out. Both the second and third planets have intelligent life on them—equally intelligent life. So equal that you could kidnap a newborn baby from Planet 2 and swap it with a newborn on Planet 3 and both would grow up as normal people on the other’s planet, fitting in seamlessly. Same people.

 And yet, how could that be?

 The Human Colossus. That’s how.

 Ever wonder why you’re so often unimpressed by humans and yet so blown away by the accomplishments of humanity?

 It’s because humans are still, deep down, those people on Planet 2.

 Plop a baby human into a group of chimps and ask them to raise him, Tarzan style, and the human as an adult will know how to run around the forest, climb trees, find food, and masturbate. That’s who each of us actually is.

 Humanity, on the other hand, is a superintelligent, tremendously-knowledgeable, millennia-old Colossus, with 7.5 billion neurons. And that’s who built Planet 3.

 The invention of language allowed each human brain to dump its knowledge onto a pile before its death, and the pile became a tower and grew taller and taller until one day, it became the brain of a great Colossus that built us a civilization. The Human Colossus has been inventing things ever since, getting continually better at it with time. Driven only by the desire to create value, the Colossus is now moving at an unprecedented pace—which is why we live in an unprecedented and completely anomalous time in history.

 You know how I said we might be living literally on the line between two vast eras of communication?

 Well the truth is, we seem to be on a lot of historic timeline boundaries. After 1,000 centuries of human life and 3.8 billion years of Earthly life, it seems like this century will be the one where Earth life makes the leap from the Single-Planetary Era to the Multi-Planetary Era. This century may be the one when an Earthly species finally manages to wrest the genetic code from the forces of evolution and learns to reprogram itself. People alive today could witness the moment when biotechnology finally frees the human lifespan from the will of nature and hands it over to the will of each individual.

 The Human Colossus has reached an entirely new level of power—the kind of power that can overthrow 3.8-billion-year eras—positioning us on the verge of multiple tipping points that will lead to unimaginable change. And if our alien friend finds a fourth planet one day that happens to be identical to Earth in 2100, you can be pretty damn sure it’ll look nothing to him like Planet 3.

 I hope you enjoyed Planet 3, because we’re leaving it. Planet 4 is where we’re headed, whether we like it or not.

 __________

 If I had to sum up the driving theme behind everything Elon Musk does, it would be pretty simple:

 He wants to prepare us for Planet 4.

 He lives in the big picture, and his only lens is the maximum zoom-out. That’s why he’s such an unusual visionary. It’s also why he’s so worried.

 It’s not that he thinks Planet 4 is definitely a bad place—it’s that he thinks it could be a bad place, and he recognizes that the generations alive today, whether they realize it or not, are the first in history to face real, hardcore existential risk.

 At the same time, the people alive today also are the first who can live with the actually realistic hope for a genuinely utopian future—one that defies even death and taxes. Planet 4 could be our promised land.

 When you zoom way out, you realize how unfathomably high the stakes actually are.

 And the outcome isn’t at the whim of chance—it’s at the whim of the Human Colossus. Planet 4 is only coming because the Colossus is building it. And whether that future is like heaven or hell depends on what the Colossus does—maybe over the next 150 years, maybe over only the next 50. Or 25.

 But the unfortunate thing is that the Human Colossus isn’t optimized to maximize the chances of a safe transition to the best possible Planet 4 for the most possible humans—it’s optimized to build Planet 4, in any way possible, as quickly as possible.

 Understanding all of this, Elon has dedicated his life to trying to influence the Human Colossus to bring its motivation more in line with the long-term interests of humans. He knows it’s not possible to rewire the Human Colossus—not unless existential risk were suddenly directly in front of each human’s face, which normally doesn’t happen until it’s already too late—so he treats the Colossus like a pet.

 If you want your dog to sit, you correlate sitting on command with getting a treat. For the Human Colossus, a treat is a ripe new industry simultaneously exploding in both supply and demand.

 Elon saw the Human Colossus dog peeing on the floor in the form of continually adding ancient, deeply-buried carbon into the carbon cycle—and rather than plead with the Colossus to stop peeing on the floor (which a lot of people waste their breath doing) or try to threaten the Colossus into behaving (which governments try to do, with limited success), he’s creating an electric car so rad that everyone will want one. The auto industry sees the shift in consumer preferences this is beginning to create, and in the nine years since Tesla released its first car, the number of major car companies with an electric car in their line went from zero to almost all of them. The Colossus seems to be taking the treat, and a change in behavior may follow.

 Elon saw the Human Colossus dog running into traffic in the form of humanity keeping all of its eggs on one planet, despite all of those tipping points on the horizon, so he built SpaceX to learn to land a rocket, which will cut the cost of space travel by about 99% and make dedicating resources to the space industry a much tastier morsel for the Colossus. His plan with Mars isn’t to try to convince humanity that it’s a good idea to build a civilization there in order to buy life insurance for the species—it’s to create an affordable regular cargo and human transit route to Mars, knowing that once that happens, there will be enough value-creation opportunity in Mars development that the Colossus will become determined to make it happen.

 But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think. To Elon, and many others, the development of superintelligent AI poses by far the greatest existential threat to humanity. It’s not that hard to see why. Intelligence gives us godlike powers over all other creatures on Earth—which has not been a fun time for the creatures. If any of their body parts are possible value creators, we have major industries processing and selling those body parts. We sometimes kill them for sport. But we’re probably the least fun all the times we’re just doing our thing, for our own reasons, with no hate in our hearts or desire to hurt anyone, and there are creatures, or ecosystems, that just happen to be in our way or in the line of fire of the side effects of what we’re doing. People like to get all mad at humanity about this, but really, we’re just doing what species do—being selfish, first and foremost.

 The issue for other creatures isn’t our selfishness—it’s the immense damage our selfishness can do because of the tremendous power we have over them. Power that comes from our intelligence advantage.

 So it’s pretty logical to be apprehensive about the prospect of intentionally creating something that will have (perhaps far) more intelligence than we do—especially since every human on the planet is an amateur at creating something like that, because no one has ever done it before.

 And things are progressing quickly. Elon talked about the rapid progress made by Google’s game-playing AI:

 I mean, you’ve got these two things where AlphaGo crushes these human players head-on-head, beats Lee Sedol 4 out of 5 games and now it will beat a human every game all the time, while playing the 50 best players, and beating them always, all the time. You know, that’s like one year later.

 And it’s on a harmless thing like AlphaGo right now. But the degrees of freedom at which the AI can win are increasing. So, Go has many more degrees of freedom than Chess, but if you take something like one of the real-time strategy competitive games like League of Legends or Dota 2, that has vastly more degrees of freedom than Go, so it can’t win at that yet. But it will be able to. And then there’s reality, which has the ultimate number of degrees of freedom.35

 And for reasons discussed above, that kind of thing worries him:

 What I came to realize in recent years—the last couple years—is that AI is obviously going to surpass human intelligence by a lot. … There’s some risk at that point that something bad happens, something that we can’t control, that humanity can’t control after that point—either a small group of people monopolize AI power, or the AI goes rogue, or something like that. It may not, but it could.

 But in typical Human Colossus form, “the collective will is not attuned to the danger of AI.”

 When I interviewed Elon in 2015, I asked him if he would ever join the effort to build superintelligent AI. He said, “My honest opinion is that we shouldn’t build it.” And when I later commented that building something smarter than yourself did seem like a basic Darwinian error (a phrase I stole from Nick Bostrom), Elon responded, “We’re gonna win the Darwin Award, collectively.”

 Now, two years later, here’s what he says:

 I was trying to really sound the alarm on the AI front for quite a while, but it was clearly having no impact (laughs) so I was like, “Oh fine, okay, then we’ll have to try to help develop it in a way that’s good.”

 He’s accepted reality—the Human Colossus is not going to quit until the Computer Colossus, one day, wakes up. This is happening.

 No matter what anyone tells you, no one knows what will happen when the Computer Colossus learns to think. In my long AI explainer, I explored the reasoning of both those who are convinced that superintelligent AI will be the solution to every problem we have, and those who see humanity as a bunch of kids playing with a bomb they don’t understand. I’m personally still torn about which camp I find more convincing, but it seems pretty rational to plan for the worst and do whatever we can to increase our odds. Many experts agree with that logic, but there’s little consensus on the best strategy for creating superintelligent AI safely—just a whole lot of ideas from people who acknowledge they don’t really know the answer. How could anyone know how to take precautions for a future world they have no way to understand?

 Elon also acknowledges he doesn’t know the answer—but he’s working on a plan he thinks will give us our best shot.

 Elon’s Plan

 Abraham Lincoln was pleased with himself when he came up with the line:

 —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 Fair—it’s a good line.

 The whole idea of “of the people, by the people, for the people” is the centerpiece of democracy.

 Unfortunately, “the people” are unpleasant. So democracy ends up being unpleasant. But unpleasant tends to be a dream compared to the alternatives. Elon talked about this:

 I think that the protection of the collective is important. I think it was Churchill who said, “Democracy’s the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others.” It’s fine if you have Plato’s incredible philosopher king as the king, sure. That would be fine. Now, most dictators do not turn out that way. They tend to be quite horrible.

 In other words, democracy is like escaping from a monster by hiding in a sewer.

 There are plenty of times in life when it’s a good strategy to take a risk in order to give yourself a chance for the best possible outcome, but when the stakes are at their absolute highest, the right move is usually to play it safe. Power is one of those times. That’s why, even though democracy essentially guarantees a certain level of mediocrity, Elon says, “I think you’re hard-pressed to find many people in the United States who, no matter what they think of any given president, would advocate for a dictatorship.”

 And since Elon sees AI as the ultimate power, he sees AI development as the ultimate “play it safe” situation. Which is why his strategy for minimizing existential AI risk seems to essentially be that AI power needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people.

 To try to implement that concept in the realm of AI, Elon has approached the situation from multiple angles.

 For the by the people and for the people parts, he and Sam Altman created OpenAI—a self-described “non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.”

 Normally, when humanity is working on something new, it starts with the work of a few innovative pioneers. When they succeed, an industry is born and the Human Colossus jumps on board to build upon what the pioneers started, en masse.

 But what if the thing those pioneers were working on was a magic wand that might give whoever owned it immense, unbreakable power over everyone else—including the power to prevent anyone else from making a magic wand? That would be kinda stressful, right?

 Well that’s how Elon views today’s early AI development efforts. And since he can’t stop people from trying to make a magic wand, his solution is to create an open, collaborative, transparent magic wand development lab. When a new breakthrough innovation is discovered in the lab, instead of making it a tightly-kept secret like the other magic wand companies, the lab publishes the innovation for anyone to see or borrow for their own magic-wand-making efforts.

 On one hand, this could have drawbacks. Bad guys are out there trying to make a magic wand too, and you really don’t want the first magic wand to end up in the hands of a bad guy. And now the bad guys’ development efforts can benefit from all of the innovations being published by the lab. This is a serious concern.

 But the lab also boosts the efforts of millions of other people trying to create magic wands. This generates a ton of competition for the secretive early pioneers, and it becomes less likely that any one inventor can create a magic wand long before others also do. More likely is that when the first magic wand is eventually created, there are thousands of others near completion as well—different wands, with different capabilities, made by different people, for different reasons. If we have to have magic wands on Earth, Elon thinks, let’s at least make sure they’re in the hands of a large number of people across the world—not one all-powerful sorcerer. Or as he puts it:

 Essentially, if everyone’s from planet Krypton, that’s great. But if only one of them is Superman and Superman also has the personality of Hitler, then we’ve got a problem.

 More broadly, a single pioneer’s magic wand would likely have been built to serve that inventor’s own needs and purposes. But by turning the future magic wand industry into a collective effort, a wide variety of needs and purposes will have a wand made for them, making it more likely that the capabilities of the world’s aggregate mass of magic wands will overarchingly represent the needs of the masses.

 You know, like democracy.

 It worked fine for Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers and Alan Turing to jump-start revolutions by jumping way out ahead of the pack. But when you’re dealing with the invention of something unthinkably powerful, you can’t sit back and let the pioneers kick things off—it’s leaving too much to chance.

 OpenAI is an effort to democratize the creation of AI, to get the entire Human Colossus working on it during its pioneer phase. Elon sums it up:

 AI is definitely going to vastly surpass human abilities. To the degree that it is linked to human will, particularly the sum of a large number of humans, it would be an outcome that is desired by a large number of humans, because it would be a function of their will.

 So now you’ve maybe got early human-level-or-higher AI superpower being made by the people, for the people—which brings down the likelihood that the world’s AI ends up in the hands of a single bad guy or a tightly-controlled monopoly.

 Now all we’ve got left is of the people.

 This one should be easy. Remember, the Human Colossus is creating superintelligent AI for the same reason it created cars, factory machines, and computers—to serve as an extension of itself to which it can outsource work. Cars do our walking, factory machines do our manufacturing, and computers take care of information storage, organization, and computation.

 Creating computers that can think will be our greatest invention yet—they’ll allow us to outsource our most important and high-impact work. Thinking is what built everything we have, so just imagine the power that will come from building ourselves a superintelligent thinking extension. And extensions of the people by definition belong to the people—they’re of the people.

 There’s just this one thing—

 High-caliber AI isn’t quite like those other inventions. The rest of our technology is great at the thing it’s built to do, but in the end, it’s a mindless machine with narrow intelligence. The AI we’re trying to build will be smart, like a person—like a ridiculously smart person. It’s a fundamentally different thing than we’ve ever made before—so why would we expect normal rules to apply?

 It’s always been an automatic thing that the technology we make inherently belongs to us—it’s such an obvious point that it almost seems silly to make it. But could it be that if we make something smarter than a person, it might not be so easy to control?

 Could it be that a creation that’s better at thinking than any human on Earth might not be fully content to serve as a human extension, even if that’s what it was built to do?

 We don’t know how issues will actually manifest—but it seems pretty safe to say that yes, these possibilities could be.

 And if what could be turns out to actually be, we may have a serious problem on our hands.

 Because, as the human history case study suggests, when there’s something on the planet way smarter than everyone else, it can be a really bad thing for everyone else. And if AI becomes the new thing on the planet that’s way smarter than everyone else, and it turns out not to clearly belong to us—it means that it’s its own thing. Which drops us into the category of “everyone else.”

 So people gaining monopolistic control of AI is its own problem—and one that OpenAI is hoping to solve. But it’s a problem that may pale in comparison to the prospect of AI being uncontrollable.

 This is what keeps Elon up at night. He sees it as only a matter of time before superintelligent AI rises up on this planet—and when that happens, he believes that it’s critical that we don’t end up as part of “everyone else.”

 That’s why, in a future world made up of AI and everyone else, he thinks we have only one good option:

 To be AI.

 ___________

 Remember before when I said that there were two things about wizard hats we had to wrap our heads around?

 1) The intensely mind-bending idea

 2) The super ridiculously intensely mind-bending idea

 This is where #2 comes in.

 These two ideas are the two things Elon means when he refers to the wizard hat as a digital tertiary layer in our brains. The first, as we discussed, is the concept that a whole-brain interface is kind of the same thing as putting our devices in our heads—effectively making your brain the device. Like this:

 Your devices give you cyborg superpowers and a window into the digital world. Your brain’s wizard hat electrode array is a new brain structure, joining your limbic system and cortex.

 But your limbic system, cortex, and wizard hat are just the hardware systems. When you experience your limbic system, it’s not the physical system you’re interacting with—it’s the information flow within it. It’s the activity of the physical system that bubbles up in your consciousness, making you feel angry, scared, horny, or hungry.

 Same thing for your cortex. The napkin wrapped around your brain stores and organizes information, but it’s the information itself that you experience when you think something, see something, hear something, or feel something. The visual cortex in itself does nothing for you—it’s the stream of photon information flowing through it that gives you the experience of having a visual cortex. When you dig in your memory to find something, you’re not searching for neurons, you’re searching for information stored in the neurons.

 The limbic system and cortex themselves are just gray matter. The flow of activity within the gray matter is what forms your familiar internal characters, the monkey brain and the rational human brain.

 So what does that mean about your digital tertiary layer?

 It means that while what’s actually in your brain is the physical device—the electrode array itself—the component of the tertiary layer that you’ll experience and get to know as a character is the information that flows through the array.

 And just like the feelings and urges of the limbic system and the thoughts and chattering voice of the cortex all feel to you like parts of you—like your inner essence—the activity that flows through your wizard hat will feel like a part of you and your essence.

 Elon’s vision for the Wizard Era is that among the wizard hat’s many uses, one of its core purposes will be to serve as the interface between your brain and a cloud-based customized AI system. That AI system, he believes, will become as present a character in your mind as your monkey and your human characters—and it will feel like you every bit as much as the others do. He says:

 I think that, conceivably, there’s a way for there to be a tertiary layer that feels like it’s part of you. It’s not some thing that you offload to, it’s you.

 This makes sense on paper. You do most of your “thinking” with your cortex, but then when you get hungry, you don’t say, “My limbic system is hungry,” you say, “I’m hungry.” Likewise, Elon thinks, when you’re trying to figure out the solution to a problem and your AI comes up with the answer, you won’t say, “My AI got it,” you’ll say, “Aha! I got it.” When your limbic system wants to procrastinate and your cortex wants to work, a situation I might be familiar with, it doesn’t feel like you’re arguing with some external being, it feels like a singular you is struggling to be disciplined. Likewise, when you think up a strategy at work and your AI disagrees, that’ll be a genuine disagreement and a debate will ensue—but it will feel like an internal debate, not a debate between you and someone else that just happens to take place in your thoughts. The debate will feel like thinking.

 It makes sense on paper.

 But when I first heard Elon talk about this concept, it didn’t really feel right. No matter how hard I tried to get it, I kept framing the idea as something familiar—like an AI system whose voice I could hear in my head, or even one that I could think together with. But in those instances, the AI still seemed like an external system I was communicating with. It didn’t seem like me.

 But then, one night while working on the post, I was rereading some of Elon’s quotes about this, and it suddenly clicked. The AI would be me. Fully. I got it.

 Then I lost it. The next day, I tried to explain the epiphany to a friend and I left us both confused. I was back in “Wait, but it kind of wouldn’t really be me, it would be communicating with me” land. Since then, I’ve dipped into and out of the idea, never quite able to hold it for long. The best thing I can compare it to is having a moment when it actually makes sense that time is relative and space-time is a single fabric. For a second, it seems intuitive that time moves slower when you’re moving really fast. And then I lose it. As I typed those sentences just now, it did not seem intuitive.

 The idea of being AI is especially tough because it combines two mind-numbing concepts—the brain interface and the abilities it would give you, and artificial general intelligence. Humans today are simply not equipped to understand either of those things, because as imaginative as we think we are, our imaginations only really have our life experience as their toolkit, and these concepts are both totally novel. It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen.

 That’s why when I hear Elon talk with conviction about this stuff, I’m somewhere in between deeply believing it myself and taking his word for it. I go back and forth. But given that he’s someone who probably found space-time intuitive when he was seven, and given that he’s someone who knows how to colonize Mars, I’m inclined to listen hard to what he says.

 And what he says is that this is all about bandwidth. It’s obvious why bandwidth matters when it comes to making a wizard hat useful. But Elon believes that when it comes to interfacing with AI, high bandwidth isn’t just preferred, but actually fundamental to the prospect of being AI, versus simply using AI. Here he is walking me through his thoughts:

 The challenge is the communication bandwidth is extremely slow, particularly output. When you’re outputting on a phone, you’re moving two thumbs very slowly. That’s crazy slow communication. … If the bandwidth is too low, then your integration with AI would be very weak. Given the limits of very low bandwidth, it’s kind of pointless. The AI is just going to go by itself, because it’s too slow to talk to. The faster the communication, the more you’ll be integrated—the slower the communication, the less. And the more separate we are—the more the AI is “other”—the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate, and vastly more intelligent than us, how do you ensure that they don’t have optimization functions that are contrary to the best interests of humanity? … If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and with a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system.

 Elon sees communication bandwidth as the key factor in determining our level of integration with AI, and he sees that level of integration as the key factor in how we’ll fare in the AI world of our future:

 We’re going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet—you know, like a house cat or something—or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI.

 Then, a second later:

 A house cat’s a good outcome, by the way.

 Without really understanding what kinds of AI will be around when we reach the age of superintelligent AI, the idea that human-AI integration will lend itself to the protection of the species makes intuitive sense. Our vulnerabilities in the AI era will come from bad people in control of AI or rogue AI not aligned with human values. In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world’s aggregate AI power—people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it—humans are less vulnerable. People will be a lot more powerful, which is scary, but like Elon said, if everyone is Superman, it’s harder for any one Superman to cause harm on a mass scale—there are lots of checks and balances. And we’re less likely to lose control of AI in general because the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals.

 But time is of the essence here—something Elon emphasized:

 The pace of progress in this direction matters a lot. We don’t want to develop digital superintelligence too far before being able to do a merged brain-computer interface.

 When I thought about all of this, one reservation I had was whether a whole-brain interface would be enough of a change to make integration likely. I brought this up with Elon, noting that there would still be a vast difference between our thinking speed and a computer’s thinking speed. He said:

 Yes, but increasing bandwidth by orders of magnitude would make it better. And it’s directionally correct. Does it solve all problems? No. But is it directionally correct? Yes. If you’re going to go in some direction, well, why would you go in any direction other than this?

 And that’s why Elon started Neuralink.

 He started Neuralink to accelerate our pace into the Wizard Era—into a world where he says that “everyone who wants to have this AI extension of themselves could have one, so there would be billions of individual human-AI symbiotes who, collectively, make decisions about the future.” A world where AI really could be of the people, by the people, for the people.

 ___________

 I’ll guess that right now, some part of you believes this insane world we’ve been living in for the past 38,000 words could really maybe be the future—and another part of you refuses to believe it. I’ve got a little of both of those going on too.

 But the insanity part of it shouldn’t be the reason it’s hard to believe. Remember—George Washington died when he saw 2017. And our future will be unfathomably shocking to us. The only difference is that things are moving even faster now than they were in George’s time.

 The concept of being blown away by the future speaks to the magic of our collective intelligence—but it also speaks to the naivety of our intuition. Our minds evolved in a time when progress moved at a snail’s pace, so that’s what our hardware is calibrated to. And if we don’t actively override our intuition—the part of us that reads about a future this outlandish and refuses to believe it’s possible—we’re living in denial.

 The reality is that we’re whizzing down a very intense road to a very intense place, and no one knows what it’ll be like when we get there. A lot of people find it scary to think about, but I think it’s exciting. Because of when we happened to be born, instead of just living in a normal world like normal people, we’re living inside of a thriller movie. Some people take this information and decide to be like Elon, doing whatever they can to help the movie have a happy ending—and thank god they do. Because I’d rather just be a gawking member of the audience, watching the movie from the edge of my seat and rooting for the good guys.

 Either way, I think it’s good to climb a tree from time to time to look out at the view and remind ourselves what a time this is to be alive. And there are a lot of trees around here. Meet you at another one sometime soon.

 ___________

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 The clean version of this post, appropriate for all ages, is free to read here.

 To print this post or read it offline, try the PDF.

 ___________

 More Wait But Why stuff:

 If you want to understand AI better, here’s my big AI explainer.

 And here’s the full Elon Musk post series:

 Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
 Part 2, on Tesla: How Tesla Will Change the World
 Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
 Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce

 If you’re sick of science and tech, check these out instead :

 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

 Religion for the Nonreligious

 The Tail End

 Thanks to the Neuralink team for answering my 1,200 questions and explaining things to me like I’m five. Extra thanks to Ben Rapoport, Flip Sabes, and Moran Cerf for being my question-asking go-tos in my many dark moments of despair.

 1. Ridiculous of wildebeest to not be spelled wildebeast.↩

 2. A guy recently hand-wrote the Bible and it took him 13 years. Imagine how expensive books would be if they took 13 years to make (and if there were no other way to get that information).↩

 3. There are currently 49 known Gutenberg Bibles still in existence—many viewable in museums in major cities.↩

 4. The math checks out on that stat. Gutenberg and his team produced 180 Bibles in two years, and a Gutenberg Bible is 1,286 pages long, which works out to 317 pages/day on average. A healthy 13-hour work day at 25 pages/hour would do the trick.↩

 5. For example, while ass-deep in Google Images looking for some brain-related diagram last week, I came across this immensely satisfying shit. Such a great punchline at the last step, when I was already thrilled by how many iterations of coil there were and then I realized that the big big coil is what makes up the tiny scramble that makes up a chromosome. Chromosomes are intense. Then, just now, when I went back to Google Images to find a higher-res version of the diagram to link to here, I looked at related diagrams for ten minutes. Time-sucking curiosity diversions are always an issue for me during science/tech-related posts, but this one was a particular rabbit hole hell (heaven) for me. I’ll put some of the best not-that-related nuggets I found into footnotes.↩

 6. The skull is only about 6.5mm thick in women and 7.1mm in men—like a quarter-inch. I thought it was thicker than that.↩

 7. Delightful/upsetting tidbit: your eyes are connected directly to the brain by nerves and muscle fibers. So if you opened someone’s head and took out their brain, what would come out is their brain, their spinal cord (attached to the bottom)—and their dangling eyes.↩

 8. One thing I learned from that video is that the two hard bumps on the lower part of the back of your head, just above your neck, are the indents in the skull where the two lobes of the cerebellum sit—so that’s right where your cerebellum is.↩

 9. To add to the difficulties, as humans evolved, they became bipedal (upright on two legs), which reduced the size of the female pelvis (otherwise women wouldn’t have been able to run). Evolution pulled a cool trick to reconcile the situation—babies started being born while they were still fetuses. This is why newborns look like Winston Churchill for the first month or so before they become cute—they’re really supposed to still be in the womb. It’s also why newborn babies are so incredibly helpless at first.↩

 10. That’s enough surface area, that even at only 2mm thick, the cortex has a volume of 400-500cm3, over a third of the total volume of the brain, and about the same volume as a softball.↩

 11. Another scientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, made the official discovery 15 years later.↩

 12. Not quite touching actually—there’s about a 20-40nm gap in between.↩

 13. The often-discussed dopamine and serotonin are both neurotransmitters.↩

 14. Multiple sclerosis is caused by a glitch in the body’s immune system that causes it to destroy the myelin sheaths of neurons, which as you can see from the GIF below, would seriously disrupt the body’s ability to communicate with itself. ALD, the disease in Lorenzo’s Oil, is also caused by myelin being destroyed.↩

 15. Via the world’s greatest procrastination site, Kottke.org↩

 16. Tidbit: A neurosurgeon explained to me how a knockout punch works. Gray and white matter have different densities. So when your head is punched hard, or you get a really bad concussion, what can happen if your head snaps back and forth really sharply is that the gray and white matter accelerate at different velocities, which can make the gray matter of your cortex slide a bit over the white matter, or the white matter slide a bit over the gray matter of the brain stem. In the latter case, for a brief moment, your cortex is separated from being able to communicate with your brainstem. And since your consciousness resides in the brain stem, it makes you go unconscious. When either type of sliding happens, it can tear a bunch of axons. In a minor axon tear where the myelin sheath is still intact, the axon can grow back and heal. But if it’s a sharp enough blow, the myelin sheaths can tear too and the axons will never grow back—permanent brain damage. Concussions are really, really bad. This is also why an uppercut to the bottom of the chin or a blow to the back of the head can cause loss of consciousness—because those blows make the head snap back and forth sharply—while a punch to the side of the head or to the forehead won’t cause loss of consciousness.↩

 17. If our stick guy neuron were one of those sensory neurons, drawn to scale, his torso-axon would have been about a kilometer long.↩

 18. Sometimes, like when you step on a nail or touch a hot stove, the sensory axons will communicate with relevant motor neurons directly in the spinal cord to create an immediate reflex to pull your foot or hand away. This is called a “reflex arc.”↩

 19. It really feels like the plural of soma should be soma.↩

 20. The science world used to believe there were as many as ten times the number of glial cells as neurons in the brain, but that number has come down with more recent research.↩

 21. Here’s a silly video of a scientist explaining what a connectome is five times, to five people of all different levels.↩

 22. Really tiny—1/100th the diameter of a human hair. Here’s a delightful video of one being made.↩

 23. I’m not the one making this sexual. The patch clamp is making it sexual.↩

 24. Researcher Andrew Schwartz compares the number of electrodes used to a political poll, and says “the more neurons you poll, the better the result.”↩

 25. Though some in the BMI industry found this less than impressive.↩

 26. Full Wait But Why explainer on sound here.↩

 27. Through using a few sound engineering tricks, cochlear implant developers have allowed 16 electrodes to actually function as if there were seven additional electrodes in between each pair, bringing the total effect to the equivalent 121 electrodes.↩

 28. This is a super interesting firsthand account of the experience of getting the implant.↩

 29. One neuroscientist talked about putting devices into gaps formerly occupied by blood vessels, making the brain think the device is a blood vessel.↩

 30. DARPA seems to be the source of a good amount of controversy. I haven’t dug into it myself, but for what it’s worth, every expert I talked to feels that DARPA is an important piece of the puzzle and is working almost entirely on projects intended to help wounded veterans.↩

 31. The retinal implants we talked about are for people whose eyes are damaged. But blindness can take place in the brain for many people. Early work is being done for this type of blindness, which involves working directly with a patient’s visual cortex.↩

 32. Tidbit: While dogs and cats can both hear pitches beyond the human ear’s high end (hence the concept of dog whistles), apparently neither animal can hear things as low as humans—including the lowest seven keys on the piano. I only read this—people with dogs and cats and pianos should test this out.↩

 33. Your pain pathways could be rerouted to the cloud—to your medical AI—which would either make the repairs itself by stimulating the right patterns of neurons to command some kind of repair within your body, or order the necessary medicine to be delivered to you with instructions. If you injured something like your ankle and it was important for you to keep your weight off of it, your brain could remind you of that in a lot of ways—a sound alert, another type of feeling sensation, etc.—none of which would hurt.↩

 34. Classic example: the Fermi Paradox↩

 35. He added, “Or what appears to be reality” to the end of that quote. But let’s leave that can of worms for another time.↩

 1. Wikimedia Commons.↩

 2. Wikipedia. Yup, this is the second time I’m referencing Wikipedia. I feel like the whole “It’s incredibly unprofessional and irresponsible to reference Wikipedia” thing is kind of outdated? At least for things like historical printed-words-per-hour data? I’m pretty sure you agree that it’s fine. Good.↩

 3. Image source↩

 4. Image source↩

 5. Image source↩

 6. When a quote isn’t cited, it means that it came from my own discussion with the person.↩

 7. Stanley Finger: Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function↩

 8. Quote from this video.↩

 9. Image source↩

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 * 
Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.
 And here’s a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages. 
_______________________
Last month, I got a phone call.
 
Okay maybe that’s not exactly how it happened, and maybe those weren’t his exact words. But after learning about the new company Elon Musk was starting, I’ve come to realize that that’s exactly what he’s trying to do.
When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in and way, way out. In, on the technical challenges facing the engineers, out on the existential challenges facing our species. In on a snapshot of the world right now, out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like.
Not only is Elon’s new venture—Neuralink—the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do—Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will be . 
The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.
But before I can bring you in the time machine to show you what I found, we need to get in our zoom machine—because as I learned the hard way, Elon’s wizard hat plans cannot be properly understood until your head’s in the right place.
So wipe your brain clean of what it thinks it knows about itself and its future, put on soft clothes, and let’s jump into the vortex.
___________
Contents
  Part 1: The Human Colossus  
  Part 2: The Brain  
  Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces  
  Part 4: Neuralink’s Challenge  
  Part 5: The Wizard Era  
    Part 6: The Great Merger  
 
 Part 1: The Human Colossus 
600 million years ago, no one really did anything, ever.
     
The problem is that no one had any nerves. Without nerves, you can’t move, or think, or process information of any kind. So you just had to kind of exist and wait there until you died.
But then came the jellyfish.
   
The jellyfish was the first animal to figure out that nerves were an obvious thing to make sure you had, and it had the world’s first nervous system—a nerve net.
   
         
The jellyfish’s nerve net allowed it to collect important information from the world around it—like where there were objects, predators, or food—and pass that information along, through a big game of telephone, to all parts of its body. Being able to receive and process information meant that the jellyfish could actually react to changes in its environment in order to increase the odds of life going well, rather than just floating aimlessly and hoping for the best.
A little later, a new animal came around who had an even cooler idea.
   
The flatworm figured out that you could get a lot more done if there was someone in the nervous system who was in charge of everything—a nervous system boss. The boss lived in the flatworm’s head and had a rule that all nerves in the body had to report any new information directly to him. So instead of arranging themselves in a net shape, the flatworm’s nervous system all revolved around a central highway of messenger nerves that would pass messages back and forth between the boss and everyone else:
     
The flatworm’s boss-highway system was the world’s first central nervous system, and the boss in the flatworm’s head was the world’s first brain.
The idea of a nervous system boss quickly caught on with others, and soon, there were thousands of species on Earth with brains.
As time passed and Earth’s animals started inventing intricate new body systems, the bosses got busier.
   
   
   
A little while later came the arrival of mammals. For the Millennials of the Animal Kingdom, life was complicated. Yes, their hearts needed to beat and their lungs needed to breathe, but mammals were about a lot more than survival functions—they were in touch with complex feelings like love, anger, and fear.
For the reptilian brain, which had only had to deal with reptiles and other simpler creatures so far, mammals were just…a lot. So a second boss developed in mammals to pair up with the reptilian brain and take care of all of these new needs—the world’s first limbic system.
   
   
Over the next 100 million years, the lives of mammals grew more and more complex, and one day, the two bosses noticed a new resident in the cockpit with them.
     
What appeared to be a random infant was actually the early version of the neocortex, and though he didn’t say much at first, as evolution gave rise to primates and then great apes and then early hominids, this new boss grew from a baby into a child and eventually into a teenager with his own idea of how things should be run.
       
The new boss’s ideas turned out to be really helpful, and he became the hominid’s go-to boss for things like tool-making, hunting strategy, and cooperation with other hominids.
Over the next few million years, the new boss grew older and wiser, and his ideas kept getting better. He figured out how to not be naked. He figured out how to control fire. He learned how to make a spear.
   
But his coolest trick was thinking. He turned each human’s head into a little world of its own, making humans the first animal that could think complex thoughts, reason through decisions, and make long-term plans.
And then, maybe about 100,000 years ago, he came up with a breakthrough.
                                               
The human brain had advanced to the point where it could understand that even though the sound “rock” was not itself a rock, it could be used as a symbol of a rock—it was a sound that referred to a rock. The early human had invented language.
Soon there were words for all kinds of things, and by 50,000 BC, humans were speaking in full, complex language with each other.
The neocortex had turned humans into magicians. Not only had he made the human head a wondrous internal ocean of complex thoughts, his latest breakthrough had found a way to translate those thoughts into a symbolic set of sounds and send them vibrating through the air into the heads of other humans, who could then decode the sounds and absorb the embedded idea into their own internal thought oceans. The human neocortex had been thinking about things for a long time—and he finally had someone to talk about it all with.
A neocortex party ensued. Neocortexes—fine—neocortices shared everything with each other—stories from their past, funny jokes they had thought of, opinions they had formed, plans for the future.
But most useful was sharing what they had learned. If one human learned through trial and error that a certain type of berry led to 48 hours of your life being run by diarrhea, they could use language to share the hard-earned lesson with the rest of their tribe, like photocopying the lesson and handing it to everyone else. Tribe members would then use language to pass along that lesson to their children, and their children would pass it to their own children. Rather than the same mistake being made again and again by many different people, one person’s “stay away from that berry” wisdom could travel through space and time to protect everyone else from having their bad experience.
The same thing would happen when one human figured out a new clever trick. One unusually-intelligent hunter particularly attuned to both star constellations and the annual migration patterns of wildebeest1 herds could share a system he devised that used the night sky to determine exactly how many days remained until the herd would return. Even though very few hunters would have been able to come up with that system on their own, through word-of-mouth, all future hunters in the tribe would now benefit from the ingenuity of one ancestor, with that one hunter’s crowning discovery serving as every future hunter’s starting point of knowledge.
And let’s say this knowledge advancement makes the hunting season more efficient, which gives tribe members more time to work on their weapons—which allows one extra-clever hunter a few generations later to discover a method for making lighter, denser spears that can be thrown more accurately. And just like that, every present and future hunter in the tribe hunts with a more effective spear.
Language allows the best epiphanies of the very smartest people, through the generations, to accumulate into a little collective tower of tribal knowledge—a “greatest hits” of their ancestors’ best “aha!” moments. Every new generation has this knowledge tower installed in their heads as their starting point in life, leading them to new, even better discoveries that build on what their ancestors learned, as the tribe’s knowledge continues to grow bigger and wiser. Language is the difference between this:
   
And this:
   
The major trajectory upgrade happens for two reasons. Each generation can learn a lot more new things when they can talk to each other, compare notes, and combine their individual learnings (that’s why the blue bars are so much higher in the second graph). And each generation can successfully pass a higher percentage of their learnings on to the next generation, so knowledge sticks better through time.
Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration. Hundreds of generations later, what started as a pro tip about a certain berry to avoid has become an intricate system of planting long rows of the stomach-friendly berry bushes and harvesting them annually. The initial stroke of genius about wildebeest migrations has turned into a system of goat domestication. The spear innovation, through hundreds of incremental tweaks over tens of thousands of years, has become the bow and arrow.
Language gives a group of humans a collective intelligence far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself. We think of the bow and arrow as a primitive technology, but raise Einstein in the woods with no existing knowledge and tell him to come up with the best hunting device he can, and he won’t be nearly intelligent or skilled or knowledgeable enough to invent the bow and arrow. Only a collective human effort can pull that off.
Being able to speak to each other also allowed humans to form complex social structures which, along with advanced technologies like farming and animal domestication, led tribes over time to begin to settle into permanent locations and merge into organized super-tribes. When this happened, each tribe’s tower of accumulated knowledge could be shared with the larger super-tribe, forming a super-tower. Mass cooperation raised the quality of life for everyone, and by 10,000 BC, the first cities had formed.
According to Wikipedia, there’s something called Metcalfe’s law, which states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” And they include this little chart of old telephones:1
    
But the same idea applies to people. Two people can have one conversation. Three people have four unique conversation groups (three different two-person conversations and a fourth conversation between all three as a group). Five people have 26. Twenty people have 1,048,555.
So not only did the members of a city benefit from a huge knowledge tower as a foundation, but Metcalfe’s law means that the number of conversation possibilities now skyrocketed to an unprecedented amount of variety. More conversations meant more ideas bumping up against each other, which led to many more discoveries clicking together, and the pace of innovation soared.
Humans soon mastered agriculture, which freed many people up to think about all kinds of other ideas, and it wasn’t long before they stumbled upon a new, giant breakthrough: writing.
Historians think humans first started writing things down about 5 – 6,000 years ago. Up until that point, the collective knowledge tower was stored only in a network of people’s memories and accessed only through livestream word-of-mouth communication. This system worked in small tribes, but with a vastly larger body of knowledge shared among a vastly larger group of people, memories alone would have had a hard time supporting it all, and most of it would have ended up lost.
If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical object, like a stone, where it could live forever. When people began writing on thin sheets of parchment or paper, huge fields of knowledge that would take weeks to be conveyed by word of mouth could be compressed into a book or a scroll you could hold in your hand. The human collective knowledge tower now lived in physical form, neatly organized on the shelves of city libraries and universities.
These shelves became humanity’s grand instruction manual on everything. They guided humanity toward new inventions and discoveries, and those would in turn become new books on the shelves, as the grand instruction manual built upon itself. The manual taught us the intricacies of trade and currency, of shipbuilding and architecture, of medicine and astronomy. Each generation began life with a higher floor of knowledge and technology than the last, and progress continued to accelerate.
But painstakingly handwritten books were treated like treasures,2 and likely only accessible to the extreme elite (in the mid 15th century, there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe). And then came another breakthrough: the printing press.
In the 15th century, the beardy Johannes Gutenberg came up with a way to create multiple identical copies of the same book, much more quickly and cheaply than ever before. (Or, more accurately, when Gutenberg was born, humanity had already figured out the first 95% of how to invent the printing press, and Gutenberg, with that knowledge as his starting point, invented the last 5%.) (Oh, also, Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press, the Chinese did a bunch of centuries earlier. Pretty reliable rule is that everything you think was invented somewhere other than China was probably actually invented in China.) Here’s how it worked:
 It Turns Out Gutenberg Isn’t Actually Impressive Blue Box 
To prepare to write this blue box, I found this video explaining how Gutenberg’s press worked and was surprised to find myself unimpressed. I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. While he had the letters all set up for that page, he’d make a bunch of copies. Then he’d spend forever manually rearranging the stamps (this is the “movable type” part) into the next page, and then do a bunch of copies of that. His first project was 180 copies of the Bible,3 which took him and his employees two years.
 That‘s Gutenberg’s thing? A bunch of stamps? I feel like I could have come up with that pretty easily. Not really clear why it took humanity 5,000 years to go from figuring out how to write to creating a bunch of manual stamps. I guess it’s not that I’m unimpressed with Gutenberg—I’m neutral on Gutenberg, he’s fine—it’s that I’m unimpressed with everyone else.
Anyway, despite how disappointing Gutenberg’s press turned out to be, it was a huge leap forward for humanity’s ability to spread information. Over the coming centuries, printing technology rapidly improved, bringing the number of pages a machine could print in an hour from about 25 in Gutenberg’s time4 up 100-fold to 2,400 by the early 19th century.2
 Mass-produced books allowed information to spread like wildfire, and with books being made increasingly affordable, no longer was education an elite privilege—millions now had access to books, and literacy rates shot upwards. One person’s thoughts could now reach millions of people. The era of mass communication had begun.
The avalanche of books allowed knowledge to transcend borders, as the world’s regional knowledge towers finally merged into one species-wide knowledge tower that stretched into the stratosphere.
The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.
   
With the entire body of collective human knowledge in its brain, the Human Colossus began inventing things no human could have dreamed of inventing on their own—things that would have seemed like absurd science fiction to people only a few generations before.
It turned our ox-drawn carts into speedy locomotives and our horse-and-buggies into shiny metal cars. It turned our lanterns into lightbulbs and written letters into telephone calls and factory workers into industrial machines. It sent us soaring through the skies and out into space. It redefined the meaning of “mass communication” by giving us radio and TV, opening up a world where a thought in someone’s head could be beamed instantly into the brains of a billion people.
If an individual human’s core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus’s core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff even faster.
And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious invention yet.
The Colossus had figured out a long time ago that the best way to create value was to invent value-creating machines. Machines were better than humans at doing many kinds of work, which generated a flood of new resources that could be put towards value creation. Perhaps even more importantly, machine labor freed up huge portions of human time and energy—i.e. huge portions of the Colossus itself—to focus on innovation. It had already outsourced the work of our arms to factory machines and the work of our legs to driving machines, and it had done so through the power of its brain—now what if, somehow, it could outsource the work of the brain itself to a machine?
The first digital computers sprung up in the 1940s.
One kind of brain labor computers could do was the work of information storage—they were remembering machines. But we already knew how to outsource our memories using books, just like we had been outsourcing our leg labor to horses long before cars provided a far better solution. Computers were simply a memory-outsourcing upgrade.
Information-processing was a different story—a type of brain labor we had never figured out how to outsource. The Human Colossus had always had to do all of its own computing. Computers changed that.
Factory machines allowed us to outsource a physical process—we put a material in, the machines physically processed it and spit out the results. Computers could do the same thing for information processing. A software program was like a factory machine for information processes.
These new information-storage/organizing/processing machines proved to be useful. Computers began to play a central role in the day-to-day operation of companies and governments. By the late 1980s, it was common for individual people to own their own personal brain assistant.
Then came another leap.
In the early 90s, we taught millions of isolated machine-brains how to communicate with one another. They formed a worldwide computer network, and a new giant was born—the Computer Colossus.
   
The Computer Colossus and the great network it formed were like popeye spinach for the Human Colossus.
If individual human brains are the nerves and muscle fibers of the Human Colossus, the internet gave the giant its first legit nervous system. Each of its nodes was now interconnected to all of its other nodes, and information could travel through the system with light speed. This made the Human Colossus a faster, more fluid thinker.
The internet gave billions of humans instant, free, easily-searchable access to the entire human knowledge tower (which by now stretched past the moon). This made the Human Colossus a smarter, faster learner.
And if individual computers had served as brain extensions for individual people, companies, or governments, the Computer Colossus was a brain extension for the entire Human Colossus itself.
   
With its first real nervous system, an upgraded brain, and a powerful new tool, the Human Colossus took inventing to a whole new level—and noticing how useful its new computer friend was, it focused a large portion of its efforts on advancing computer technology.
It figured out how to make computers faster and cheaper. It made internet faster and wireless. It made computing chips smaller and smaller until there was a powerful computer in everyone’s pocket.
Each innovation was like a new truckload of spinach for the Human Colossus.
But today, the Human Colossus has its eyes set on an even bigger idea than more spinach. Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism. But there’s one kind of brain labor computers still can’t quite do. Thinking. 
Computers can compute and organize and run complex software—software that can even learn on its own. But they can’t think in the way humans can. The Human Colossus knows that everything it’s built has originated with its ability to reason creatively and independently—and it knows that the ultimate brain extension tool would be one that can really, actually, legitimately think. It has no idea what it will be like when the Computer Colossus can think for itself—when it one day opens its eyes and becomes a real colossus—but with its core goal to create value and push technology to its limits, the Human Colossus is determined to find out.
___________
We’ll come back here in a bit. First, we have some learning to do.
As we’ve discussed before, knowledge works like a tree. If you try to learn a branch or a leaf of a topic before you have a solid tree trunk foundation of understanding in your head, it won’t work. The branches and leaves will have nothing to stick to, so they’ll fall right out of your head.
We’ve established that Elon Musk wants to build a wizard hat for the brain, and understanding why he wants to do that is the key to understanding Neuralink—and to understanding what our future might actually be like.
But none of that will make much sense until we really get into the truly mind-blowing concept of what a wizard hat is, what it might be like to wear one, and how we get there from where we are today.
The foundation for that discussion is an understanding of what brain-machine interfaces are, how they work, and where the technology is today.
Finally, BMIs themselves are just a larger branch—not the tree’s trunk. In order to really understand BMIs and how they work, we need to understand the brain. Getting how the brain works is our tree trunk.
   
  So we’ll start with the brain, which will prepare us to learn about BMIs, which will teach us about what it’ll take to build a wizard hat, and that’ll set things up for an insane discussion about the future—which will get our heads right where they need to be to wrap themselves around why Elon thinks a wizard hat is such a critical piece of our future. And by the time we reach the end, this whole thing should click into place.
 Part 2: The Brain 
   
This post was a nice reminder of why I like working with a brain that looks nice and cute like this:
   
Because the real brain is extremely uncute and upsetting-looking. People are gross.
But I’ve been living in a shimmery, oozy, blood-vessel-lined Google Images hell for the past month, and now you have to deal with it too. So just settle in.
We’ll start outside the head. One thing I will give to biology is that it’s sometimes very satisfying,5 and the brain has some satisfying things going on. The first of which is that there’s a real Russian doll situation going on with your head.
You have your hair, and under that is your scalp, and then you think your skull comes next—but it’s actually like 19 things and then your skull:3
    
Then below your skull,6 another whole bunch of things are going on before you get to the brain4:
   
Your brain has three membranes around it underneath the skull:
On the outside, there’s the dura mater (which means “hard mother” in Latin), a firm, rugged, waterproof layer. The dura is flush with the skull. I’ve heard it said that the brain has no pain sensory area, but the dura actually does—it’s about as sensitive as the skin on your face—and pressure on or contusions in the dura often account for people’s bad headaches.
Then below that there’s the arachnoid mater (“spider mother”), which is a layer of skin and then an open space with these stretchy-looking fibers. I always thought my brain was just floating aimlessly in my head in some kind of fluid, but actually, the only real space gap between the outside of the brain and the inner wall of the skull is this arachnoid business. Those fibers stabilize the brain in position so it can’t move too much, and they act as a shock absorber when your head bumps into something. This area is filled with spinal fluid, which keeps the brain mostly buoyant, since its density is similar to that of water.
Finally you have the pia mater (“soft mother”), a fine, delicate layer of skin that’s fused with the outside of the brain. You know how when you see a brain, it’s always covered with icky blood vessels? Those aren’t actually on the brain’s surface, they’re embedded in the pia. (For the non-squeamish, here’s a video of a professor peeling the pia off of a human brain.)
Here’s the full overview, using the head of what looks like probably a pig:
   
From the left you have the skin (the pink), then two scalp layers, then the skull, then the dura, arachnoid, and on the far right, just the brain covered by the pia.
Once we’ve stripped everything down, we’re left with this silly boy:5
    
This ridiculous-looking thing is the most complex known object in the universe—three pounds of what neuroengineer Tim Hanson calls “one of the most information-dense, structured, and self-structuring matter known.”6 All while operating on only 20 watts of power (an equivalently powerful computer runs on 24,000,000 watts).
It’s also what MIT professor Polina Anikeeva calls “soft pudding you could scoop with a spoon.” Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described it to me more scientifically, as “somewhere between pudding and jello.” He explained that if you placed a brain on a table, gravity would make it lose its shape and flatten out a bit, kind of like a jellyfish. We often don’t think of the brain as so smooshy, because it’s normally suspended in water.
But this is what we all are. You look in the mirror and see your body and your face and you think that’s you—but that’s really just the machine you’re riding in. What you actually are is a zany-looking ball of jello. I hope that’s okay.
And given how weird that is, you can’t really blame Aristotle, or the ancient Egyptians, or many others, for assuming that the brain was somewhat-meaningless “cranial stuffing” (Aristotle believed the heart was the center of intelligence).7
 Eventually, humans figured out the deal. But only kind of.
Professor Krishna Shenoy likens our understanding of the brain to humanity’s grasp on the world map in the early 1500s.
Another professor, Jeff Lichtman, is even harsher. He starts off his courses by asking his students the question, “If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?” He says students give answers like three-quarters of a mile, half a mile, a quarter of a mile, etc.—but that he believes the real answer is “about three inches.”8
    
A third professor, neuroscientist Moran Cerf, shared with me an old neuroscience saying that points out why trying to master the brain is a bit of a catch-22: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
Maybe with the help of the great knowledge tower our species is building, we can get there at some point. For now, let’s go through what we do currently know about the jellyfish in our heads—starting with the big picture.
 The brain, zoomed out 
Let’s look at the major sections of the brain using a hemisphere cross section. So this is what the brain looks like in your head:
   
Now let’s take the brain out of the head and remove the left hemisphere, which gives us a good view of the inside.9
    
Neurologist Paul MacLean made a simple diagram that illustrates the basic idea we talked about earlier of the reptile brain coming first in evolution, then being built upon by mammals, and finally being built upon again to give us our brain trifecta.
   
Here’s how this essentially maps out on our real brain:
   
Let’s take a look at each section:
 The Reptilian Brain: The Brain Stem (and Cerebellum) 
This is the most ancient part of our brain:10
    
That’s the section of our brain cross section above that the frog boss resides over. In fact, a frog’s entire brain is similar to this lower part of our brain. Here’s a real frog brain:11
    
When you understand the function of these parts, the fact that they’re ancient makes sense—everything these parts do, frogs and lizards can do. These are the major sections (click any of these spinning images to see a high-res version):
 The medulla oblongata   
The medulla oblongata really just wants you to not die. It does the thankless tasks of controlling involuntary things like your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, along with making you vomit when it thinks you’ve been poisoned.
 The pons   
The pons’s thing is that it does a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It deals with swallowing, bladder control, facial expressions, chewing, saliva, tears, and posture—really just whatever it’s in the mood for.
 The midbrain   
The midbrain is dealing with an even bigger identity crisis than the pons. You know a brain part is going through some shit when almost all its functions are already another brain part’s thing. In the case of the midbrain, it deals with vision, hearing, motor control, alertness, temperature control, and a bunch of other things that other people in the brain already do. The rest of the brain doesn’t seem very into the midbrain either, given that they created a ridiculously uneven “forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain” divide that intentionally isolates the midbrain all by itself while everyone else hangs out.12
    
One thing I’ll grant the pons and midbrain is that it’s the two of them that control your voluntary eye movement, which is a pretty legit job. So if right now you move your eyes around, that’s you doing something specifically with your pons and midbrain.7
  The cerebellum   
The odd-looking thing that looks like your brain’s scrotum is your cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”), which makes sure you stay a balanced, coordinated, and normal-moving person. Here’s that rad professor again showing you what a real cerebellum looks like.8
  The Paleo-Mammalian Brain: The Limbic System 
Above the brain stem is the limbic system—the part of the brain that makes humans so insane.13
    
The limbic system is a survival system. A decent rule of thumb is that whenever you’re doing something that your dog might also do—eating, drinking, having sex, fighting, hiding or running away from something scary—your limbic system is probably behind the wheel. Whether it feels like it or not, when you’re doing any of those things, you’re in primitive survival mode.
The limbic system is also where your emotions live, and in the end, emotions are also all about survival—they’re the more advanced mechanisms of survival, necessary for animals living in a complex social structure.
In other posts, when I refer to your Instant Gratification Monkey, your Social Survival Mammoth, and all your other animals—I’m usually referring to your limbic system. Anytime there’s an internal battle going on in your head, it’s likely that the limbic system’s role is urging you to do the thing you’ll later regret doing.
I’m pretty sure that gaining control over your limbic system is both the definition of maturity and the core human struggle. It’s not that we would be better off without our limbic systems—limbic systems are half of what makes us distinctly human, and most of the fun of life is related to emotions and/or fulfilling your animal needs—it’s just that your limbic system doesn’t get that you live in a civilization, and if you let it run your life too much, it’ll quickly ruin your life.
Anyway, let’s take a closer look at it. There are a lot of little parts of the limbic system, but we’ll keep it to the biggest celebrities:
 The amygdala   
The amygdala is kind of an emotional wreck of a brain structure. It deals with anxiety, sadness, and our responses to fear. There are two amygdalae, and oddly, the left one has been shown to be more balanced, sometimes producing happy feelings in addition to the usual angsty ones, while the right one is always in a bad mood.
 The hippocampus   
Your hippocampus (Greek for “seahorse” because it looks like one) is like a scratch board for memory. When rats start to memorize directions in a maze, the memory gets encoded in their hippocampus—quite literally. Different parts of the rat’s two hippocampi will fire during different parts of the maze, since each section of the maze is stored in its own section of the hippocampus. But if after learning one maze, the rat is given other tasks and is brought back to the original maze a year later, it will have a hard time remembering it, because the hippocampus scratch board has been mostly wiped of the memory so as to free itself up for new memories.
The condition in the movie Memento is a real thing—anterograde amnesia—and it’s caused by damage to the hippocampus. Alzheimer’s also starts in the hippocampus before working its way through many parts of the brain, which is why, of the slew of devastating effects of the disease, diminished memory happens first.
 The t halamus   
In its central position in the brain, the thalamus also serves as a sensory middleman that receives information from your sensory organs and sends them to your cortex for processing. When you’re sleeping, the thalamus goes to sleep with you, which means the sensory middleman is off duty. That’s why in a deep sleep, some sound or light or touch often will not wake you up. If you want to wake someone up who’s in a deep sleep, you have to be aggressive enough to wake their thalamus up.
The exception is your sense of smell, which is the one sense that bypasses the thalamus. That’s why smelling salts are used to wake up a passed-out person. While we’re here, cool fact: smell is the function of the  olfactory bulb and is the most ancient of the senses. Unlike the other senses, smell is located deep in the limbic system, where it works closely with the hippocampus and amygdala—which is why smell is so closely tied to memory and emotion.
 The Neo-Mammalian Brain: The Cortex 
Finally, we arrive at the cortex. The cerebral cortex. The neocortex. The cerebrum. The pallium.
The most important part of the whole brain can’t figure out what its name is. Here’s what’s happening:
 The What the Hell is it Actually Called Blue Box 
The cerebrum is the whole big top/outside part of the brain but it also technically includes some of the internal parts too.
 Cortex means “bark” in Latin and is the word used for the outer layer of many organs, not just the brain. The outside of the cerebellum is the cerebellar cortex. And the outside of the cerebrum is the cerebral cortex. Only mammals have cerebral cortices. The equivalent part of the brain in reptiles is called the pallium.  
The neocortex is often used interchangeably with “cerebral cortex,” but it’s technically the outer layers of the cerebral cortex that are especially developed in more advanced mammals. The other parts are called the allocortex.
In the rest of this post, we’ll be mostly referring to the neocortex but we’ll just call it the cortex, since that’s the least annoying way to do it for everyone.
The cortex is in charge of basically everything—processing what you see, hear, and feel, along with language, movement, thinking, planning, and personality.
It’s divided into four lobes:14
    
It’s pretty unsatisfying to describe what they each do, because they each do so many things and there’s a lot of overlap, but to oversimplify:
The  frontal lobe  (click the words to see a gif) handles your personality, along with a lot of what we think of as “thinking”—reasoning, planning, and executive function. In particular, a lot of your thinking takes place in the front part of the frontal lobe, called the prefrontal cortex—the adult in your head. The prefrontal cortex is the other character in those internal battles that go on in your life. The rational decision-maker trying to get you to do your work. The authentic voice trying to get you to stop worrying so much what others think and just be yourself. The higher being who wishes you’d stop sweating the small stuff.
As if that’s not enough to worry about, the frontal lobe is also in charge of your body’s movement. The top strip of the frontal lobe is your primary motor cortex. 15
    
Then there’s the  parietal lobe  which, among other things, controls your sense of touch, particularly in the primary somatosensory cortex, the strip right next to the primary motor cortex.16
    
The motor and somatosensory cortices are fun because they’re well-mapped. Neuroscientists know exactly which part of each strip connects to each part of your body. Which leads us to the creepiest diagram of this post: the homunculus.
   
The homunculus, created by pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, visually displays how the motor and somatosensory cortices are mapped. The larger the body part in the diagram, the more of the cortex is dedicated to its movement or sense of touch. A couple interesting things about this:
First, it’s amazing that more of your brain is dedicated to the movement and feeling of your face and hands than to the rest of your body combined. This makes sense though—you need to make incredibly nuanced facial expressions and your hands need to be unbelievably dexterous, while the rest of your body—your shoulder, your knee, your back—can move and feel things much more crudely. This is why people can play the piano with their fingers but not with their toes.
Second, it’s interesting how the two cortices are basically dedicated to the same body parts, in the same proportions. I never really thought about the fact that the same parts of your body you need to have a lot of movement control over tend to also be the most sensitive to touch.
Finally, I came across this shit and I’ve been living with it ever since—so now you have to too. A 3-dimensional homunculus man.17
    
Moving on—
The  temporal lobe is where a lot of your memory lives, and being right next to your ears, it’s also the home of your auditory cortex .  
Last, at the back of your head is the  occipital lobe  , which houses your visual cortex and is almost entirely dedicated to vision.
Now for a long time, I thought these major lobes were chunks of the brain—like, segments of the whole 3D structure. But actually, the cortex is just the outer two  millimeters of the brain—the thickness of a nickel—and the meat of the space underneath is mostly just wiring.
 The Why Brains Are So Wrinkly Blue Box 
As we’ve discussed, the evolution of our brain happened by building outwards, adding newer, fancier features on top of the existing model. But building outwards has its limits, because the need for humans to emerge into the world through someone’s vagina puts a cap on how big our heads could be.9
 So evolution got innovative. Because the cortex is so thin, it scales by increasing its surface area. That means that by creating lots of folds (including both sides folding down into the gap between the two hemispheres), you can more than triple the area of the brain’s surface without increasing the volume too much. When the brain first develops in the womb, the cortex is smooth—the folds form mostly in the last two months of pregnancy:18
    
Cool explainer of how the folds form here.
If you could take the cortex off the brain, you’d end up with a 2mm-thick sheet with an area of 2,000-2,400cm2—about the size of a 48cm x 48cm (19in x 19in) square.10 A dinner napkin.   
This napkin is where most of the action in your brain happens—it’s why you can think, move, feel, see, hear, remember, and speak and understand language. Best napkin ever.
And remember before when I said that you were a jello ball? Well the you you think of when you think of yourself—it’s really mainly your cortex. Which means you’re actually a napkin.
The magic of the folds in increasing the napkin’s size is clear when we put another brain on top of our stripped-off cortex:
   
So while it’s not perfect, modern science has a decent understanding of the big picture when it comes to the brain. We also have a decent understanding of the little picture. Let’s check it out:
 The brain, zoomed in 
Even though we figured out that the brain was the seat of our intelligence a long time ago, it wasn’t until pretty recently that science understood what the brain was made of. Scientists knew that the body was made of cells, but in the late 19th century, Italian physician Camillo Golgi figured out how to use a staining method to see what brain cells actually looked like. The result was surprising:
   
That wasn’t what a cell was supposed to look like. Without quite realizing it yet,11 Golgi had discovered the neuron.
Scientists realized that the neuron was the core unit in the vast communication network that makes up the brains and nervous systems of nearly all animals.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists worked out how neurons communicate with each other.
An axon, the long strand of a neuron that carries information, is normally microscopic in diameter—too small for scientists to test on until recently. But in the 1930s, English zoologist J. Z. Young discovered that the squid, randomly, could change everything for our understanding, because squids have an unusually huge axon in their bodies that could be experimented on. A couple decades later, using the squid’s giant axon, scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley definitively figured out how neurons send information: the action potential. Here’s how it works.
So there are a lot of different kinds of neurons—19
    
—but for simplicity, we’ll discuss the cliché textbook neuron—a pyramidal cell, like one you might find in your motor cortex. To make a neuron diagram, we can start with a guy:
   
And then if we just give him a few extra legs, some hair, take his arms off, and stretch him out—we have a neuron.
   
And let’s add in a few more neurons.
   
Rather than launch into the full, detailed explanation for how action potentials work—which involves a lot of unnecessary and uninteresting technical information you already dealt with in 9th-grade biology—I’ll link to this great Khan Academy explainer article for those who want the full story. We’ll go through the very basic ideas that are relevant for our purposes.
So our guy’s body stem—the neuron’s axon—has a negative “resting potential,” which means that when it’s at rest, its electrical charge is slightly negative. At all times, a bunch of people’s feet keep touching12 our guy’s hair—the neuron’s dendrites—whether he likes it or not. Their feet drop chemicals called neurotransmitters 13 onto his hair—which pass through his head (the cell body, or soma) and, depending on the chemical, raise or lower the charge in his body a little bit. It’s a little unpleasant for our neuron guy, but not a huge deal—and nothing else happens.
   
But if enough chemicals touch his hair to raise his charge over a certain point—the neuron’s “threshold potential”—then it triggers an action potential, and our guy is electrocuted.
   
This is a binary situation—either nothing happens to our guy, or he’s fully electrocuted. He can’t be kind of electrocuted, or extra electrocuted—he’s either not electrocuted at all, or he’s fully electrocuted to the exact same degree every time.
When this happens, a pulse of electricity (in the form of a brief reversal of his body’s normal charge from negative to positive and then rapidly back down to his normal negative) zips down his body (the axon) and into his feet—the neuron’s axon terminals—which themselves touch a bunch of other people’s hair (the points of contact are called synapses). When the action potential reaches his feet, it causes them to release chemicals onto the people’s hair they’re touching, which may or may not cause those people to be electrocuted, just like he was.
   
This is usually how info moves through the nervous system—chemical information sent in the tiny gap between neurons triggers electrical information to pass through the neuron—but sometimes, in situations when the body needs to move a signal extra quickly, neuron-to-neuron connections can themselves be electric.
Action potentials move at between 1 and 100 meters/second. Part of the reason for this large range is that another type of cell in the nervous system—a Schwann cell—acts like a super nurturing grandmother and constantly wraps some types of axons in layers of fat blankets called myelin sheath. Like this (takes a second to start):20
    
On top of its protection and insulation benefits, the myelin sheath is a major factor in the pace of communication—action potentials travel much faster through axons when they’re covered in myelin sheath:14 21
    
One nice example of the speed difference created by myelin: You know how when you stub your toe, your body gives you that one second of reflection time to think about what you just did and what you’re about to feel, before the pain actually kicks in? What’s happening is you feel both the sensation of your toe hitting against something and the sharp part of the pain right away, because sharp pain information is sent to the brain via types of axons that are myelinated. It takes a second or two for the dull pain to kick in because dull pain is sent via unmyelinated “C fibers”—at only around one meter/second.
 Neural Networks 
Neurons are similar to computer transistors in one way—they also transmit information in the binary language of 1’s (action potential firing) and 0’s (no action potential firing). But unlike computer transistors, the brain’s neurons are constantly changing.
You know how sometimes you learn a new skill and you get pretty good at it, and then the next day you try again and you suck again? That’s because what made you get good at the skill the day before was adjustments to the amount or concentration of the chemicals in the signaling between neurons. Repetition caused chemicals to adjust, which helped you improve, but the next day the chemicals were back to normal so the improvement went away.
But then if you keep practicing, you eventually get good at something in a lasting way. What’s happened is you’ve told the brain, “this isn’t just something I need in a one-off way,” and the brain’s neural network has responded by making structural changes to itself that last. Neurons have shifted shape and location and strengthened or weakened various connections in a way that has built a hard-wired set of pathways that know how to do that skill.
Neurons’ ability to alter themselves chemically, structurally, and even functionally, allow your brain’s neural network to optimize itself to the external world—a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Babies’ brains are the most neuroplastic of all. When a baby is born, its brain has no idea if it needs to accommodate the life of a medieval warrior who will need to become incredibly adept at sword-fighting, a 17th-century musician who will need to develop fine-tuned muscle memory for playing the harpsichord, or a modern-day intellectual who will need to store and organize a tremendous amount of information and master a complex social fabric—but the baby’s brain is ready to shape itself to handle whatever life has in store for it.
Babies are the neuroplasticity superstars, but neuroplasticity remains throughout our whole lives, which is why humans can grow and change and learn new things. And it’s why we can form new habits and break old ones—your habits are reflective of the existing circuitry in your brain. If you want to change your habits, you need to exert a lot of willpower to override your brain’s neural pathways, but if you can keep it going long enough, your brain will eventually get the hint and alter those pathways, and the new behavior will stop requiring willpower. Your brain will have physically built the changes into a new habit.
Altogether, there are around 100 billion neurons in the brain that make up this unthinkably vast network—similar to the number of stars in the Milky Way and over 10 times the number of people in the world. Around 15 – 20 billion of those neurons are in the cortex, and the rest are in the animal parts of your brain (surprisingly, the random cerebellum has more than three times as many neurons as the cortex).
Let’s zoom back out and look at another cross section of the brain—this time cut not from front to back to show a single hemisphere, but from side to side:22
    
Brain material can be divided into what’s called gray matter and white matter. Gray matter actually looks darker in color and is made up of the cell bodies (somas) of the brain’s neurons and their thicket of dendrites and axons—along with a lot of other stuff. White matter is made up primarily of wiring—axons carrying information from somas to other somas or to destinations in the body. White matter is white because those axons are usually wrapped in myelin sheath, which is fatty white tissue.
There are two main regions of gray matter in the brain—the internal cluster of limbic system and brain stem parts we discussed above, and the nickel-thick layer of cortex around the outside. The big chunk of white matter in between is made up mostly of the axons of cortical neurons. The cortex is like a great command center, and it beams many of its orders out through the mass of axons making up the white matter beneath it.
The coolest illustration of this concept that I’ve come across15 is a beautiful set of artistic representations done by Dr. Greg A. Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards. Check out the distinct difference between the structure of the outer layer of gray matter cortex and the white matter underneath it (click to view in high res):
     
Those cortical axons might be taking information to another part of the cortex, to the lower part of the brain, or through the spinal cord—the nervous system’s superhighway—and into the rest of the body.16
 Let’s look at the whole nervous system:23
    
The nervous system is divided into two parts: the central nervous system—your brain and spinal cord—and the peripheral nervous system—made up of the neurons that radiate outwards from the spinal cord into the rest of the body.
Most types of neurons are interneurons—neurons that communicate with other neurons. When you think, it’s a bunch of interneurons talking to each other. Interneurons are mostly contained to the brain.
The two other kinds of neurons are sensory neurons and motor neurons—those are the neurons that head down into your spinal cord and make up the peripheral nervous system. These neurons can be up to a meter long.17 Here’s a typical structure of each type:24
    
Remember our two strips?25
    
These strips are where your peripheral nervous system originates. The axons of sensory neurons head down from the somatosensory cortex, through the brain’s white matter, and into the spinal cord (which is just a massive bundle of axons). From the spinal cord, they head out to all parts of your body. Each part of your skin is lined with nerves that originate in the somatosensory cortex. A nerve, by the way, is a few bundles of axons wrapped together in a little cord. Here’s a nerve up close:26
  
The nerve is the whole thing circled in purple, and those four big circles inside are bundles of many axons (here’s a helpful cartoony drawing).
So if a fly lands on your arm, here’s what happens:
The fly touches your skin and stimulates a bunch of sensory nerves. The axon terminals in the nerves have a little fit and start action potential-ing, sending the signal up to the brain to tell on the fly. The signals head into the spinal cord and up to the somas in the somatosensory cortex.18 The somatosensory cortex then taps the motor cortex on the shoulder and tells it that there’s a fly on your arm and that it needs to deal with it (lazy). The particular somas in your motor cortex that connect to the muscles in your arm then start action potential-ing, sending the signals back into the spinal cord and then out to the muscles of the arm. The axon terminals at the end of those neurons stimulate your arm muscles, which constrict to shake your arm to get the fly off (by now the fly has already thrown up on your arm), and the fly (whose nervous system now goes through its own whole thing) flies off.
Then your amygdala looks over and realizes there was a bug on you, and it tells your motor cortex to jump embarrassingly, and if it’s a spider instead of a fly, it also tells your vocal cords to yell out involuntarily and ruin your reputation.
So it seems so far like we do kind of actually understand the brain, right? But then why did that professor ask that question—If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?—and say the answer was three inches? 
Well here’s the thing.
You know how we totally get how an individual computer sends an email and we totally understand the broad concepts of the internet, like how many people are on it and what the biggest sites are and what the major trends are—but all the stuff in the middle—the inner workings of the internet—are pretty confusing?
And you know how economists can tell you all about how an individual consumer functions and they can also tell you about the major concepts of macroeconomics and the overarching forces at play—but no one can really tell you all the ins and outs of how the economy works or predict what will happen with the economy next month or next year?
The brain is kind of like those things. We get the little picture—we know all about how a neuron fires. And we get the big picture—we know how many neurons are in the brain and what the major lobes and structures control and how much energy the whole system uses. But the stuff in between—all that middle stuff about how each part of the brain actually does its thing?
Yeah we don’t get that.
What really makes it clear how confounded we are is hearing a neuroscientist talk about the parts of the brain we understand best.
Like the visual cortex. We understand the visual cortex pretty well because it’s easy to map.
Research scientist Paul Merolla described it to me:
 The visual cortex has very nice anatomical function and structure. When you look at it, you literally see a map of the world. So when something in your visual field is in a certain region of space, you’ll see a little patch in the cortex that represents that region of space, and it’ll light up. And as that thing moves over, there’s a topographic mapping where the neighboring cells will represent that. It’s almost like having Cartesian coordinates of the real world that will map to polar coordinates in the visual cortex. And you can literally trace from your retina, through your thalamus, to your visual cortex, and you’ll see an actual mapping from this point in space to this point in the visual cortex. 
So far so good. But then he went on:
 So that mapping is really useful if you want to interact with certain parts of the visual cortex, but there’s many regions of vision, and as you get deeper into the visual cortex, it becomes a little bit more nebulous, and this topographic representation starts to break down. … There’s all these levels of things going on in the brain, and visual perception is a great example of that. We look at the world, and there’s just this physical 3D world out there—like you look at a cup, and you just see a cup—but what your eyes are seeing is really just a bunch of pixels. And when you look in the visual cortex, you see that there are roughly 20-40 different maps. V1 is the first area, where it’s tracking little edges and colors and things like that. And there’s other areas looking at more complicated objects, and there’s all these different visual representations on the surface of your brain, that you can see. And somehow all of that information is being bound together in this information stream that’s being coded in a way that makes you believe you’re just seeing a simple object. 
And the motor cortex, another one of the best-understood areas of the brain, might be even more difficult to understand on a granular level than the visual cortex. Because even though we know which general areas of the motor cortex map to which areas of the body, the individual neurons in these motor cortex areas aren’t topographically set up, and the specific way they work together to create movement in the body is anything but clear. Here’s Paul again:
 The neural chatter in everyone’s arm movement part of the brain is a little bit different—it’s not like the neurons speak English and say “move”—it’s a pattern of electrical activity, and in everyone it’s a little bit different. … And you want to be able to seamlessly understand that it means “Move the arm this way” or “move the arm toward the target” or “move the arm to the left, move it up, grasp, grasp with a certain kind of force, reach with a certain speed,” and so on. We don’t think about these things when we move—it just happens seamlessly. So each brain has a unique code with which it talks to the muscles in the arm and hand. 
The neuroplasticity that makes our brains so useful to us also makes them incredibly difficult to understand—because the way each of our brains works is based on how that brain has shaped itself, based on its particular environment and life experience.
And again, those are the areas of the brain we understand the best. “When it comes to more sophisticated computation, like language, memory, mathematics,” one expert told me, “we really don’t understand how the brain works.” He lamented that, for example, the concept of one’s mother is coded in a different way, and in different parts of the brain, for every person. And in the frontal lobe—you know, that part of the brain where you really live—”there’s no topography at all.”  
But somehow, none of this is why building effective brain-computer interfaces is so hard, or so daunting. What makes BMIs so hard is that the engineering challenges are monumental. It’s physically working with the brain that makes BMIs among the hardest engineering endeavors in the world.
So with our brain background tree trunk built, we’re ready to head up to our first branch.
 Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces 
   
Let’s zip back in time for a second to 50,000 BC and kidnap someone and bring him back here to 2017.
   
This is Bok. Bok, we’re really thankful that you and your people invented language.
   
As a way to thank you, we want to show you all the amazing things we were able to build because of your invention.
   
Alright, first let’s take Bok on a plane, and into a submarine, and to the top of the Burj Khalifa. Now we’ll show him a telescope and a TV and an iPhone. And now we’ll let him play around on the internet for a while.
Okay that was fun. How’d it go, Bok?
   
Yeah we figured that you’d be pretty surprised. To wrap up, let’s show him how we communicate with each other.
             
Bok would be shocked to learn that despite all the magical powers humans have gained as a result of having learned to speak to each other, when it comes to actually speaking to each other, we’re no more magical than the people of his day. When two people are together and talking, they’re using 50,000-year-old technology.
Bok might also be surprised that in a world run by fancy machines, the people who made all the machines are walking around with the same biological bodies that Bok and his friends walk around with. How can that be?
   
This is why brain-machine interfaces—a subset of the broader field of neural engineering, which itself is a subset of biotechnology—are such a tantalizing new industry. We’ve conquered the world many times over with our technology, but when it comes to our brains—our most central tool—the tech world has for the most part been too daunted to dive in.
That’s why we still communicate using technology Bok invented, it’s why I’m typing this sentence at about a 20th of the speed that I’m thinking it, and it’s why brain-related ailments still leave so many lives badly impaired or lost altogether.
But 50,000 years after the brain’s great “aha!” moment, that may finally be about to change. The brain’s next great frontier may be itself.
___________
There are many kinds of potential brain-machine interface (sometimes called a brain-computer interface) that will serve many different functions. But everyone working on BMIs is grappling with either one or both of these two questions:
 1) How do I get the right information out of the brain? 
 2) How do I send the right information into the brain? 
The first is about capturing the brain’s output—it’s about recording what neurons are saying.
The second is about inputting information into the brain’s natural flow or altering that natural flow in some other way—it’s about stimulating neurons.
These two things are happening naturally in your brain all the time. Right now, your eyes are making a specific set of horizontal movements that allow you to read this sentence. That’s the brain’s neurons outputting information to a machine (your eyes) and the machine receiving the command and responding. And as your eyes move in just the right way, the photons from the screen are entering your retinas and stimulating neurons in the occipital lobe of your cortex in a way that allows the image of the words to enter your mind’s eye. That image then stimulates neurons in another part of your brain that allows you to process the information embedded in the image and absorb the sentence’s meaning.
Inputting and outputting information is what the brain’s neurons do. All the BMI industry wants to do is get in on the action.
At first, this seems like maybe not that difficult a task? The brain is just a jello ball, right? And the cortex—the part of the brain in which we want to do most of our recording and stimulating—is just a napkin, located conveniently right on the outside of the brain where it can be easily accessed. Inside the cortex are around 20 billion firing neurons—20 billion oozy little transistors that if we can just learn to work with, will give us an entirely new level of control over our life, our health, and the world. Can’t we figure that out? Neurons are small, but we know how to split an atom. A neuron’s diameter is about 100,000 times as large as an atom’s—if an atom were a marble, a neuron would be a kilometer across—so we should probably be able to handle the smallness. Right?
So what’s the issue here?
Well on one hand, there’s something to that line of thinking, in that because of those facts, this is an industry where immense progress can happen. We can do this.
But only when you understand what actually goes on in the brain do you realize why this is probably the hardest human endeavor in the world.
So before we talk about BMIs themselves, we need to take a closer look at what the people trying to make BMIs are dealing with here. I find that the best way to illustrate things is to scale the brain up by exactly 1,000X and look at what’s going on.
Remember our cortex-is-a-napkin demonstration earlier?
   
Well if we scale that up by 1,000X, the cortex napkin—which was about 48cm / 19in on each side—now has a side the length of six Manhattan street blocks (or two avenue blocks). It would take you about 25 minutes to walk around the perimeter. And the brain as a whole would now fit snugly inside a two block by two block square—just about the size of Madison Square Garden (this works in length and width, but the brain would be about double the height of MSG).
   
So let’s lay it out in the actual city. I’m sure the few hundred thousand people who live there will understand.
   
I chose 1,000X as our multiplier for a couple reasons. One is that we can all instantly convert the sizes in our heads. Every millimeter of the actual brain is now a meter. And in the much smaller world of neurons, every micron is now an easy-to-conceptualize millimeter. Secondly, it conveniently brings the cortex up to human size—its 2mm thickness is now two meters—the height of a tall (6’6”) man.
So we could walk up to 29th street, to the edge of our giant cortex napkin, and easily look at what was going on inside those two meters of thickness. For our demonstration, let’s pull out a cubic meter of our giant cortex to examine, which will show us what goes on in a typical cubic millimeter of real cortex.
   
What we’d see in that cubic meter would be a mess. Let’s empty it out and put it back together.
First, let’s put the somas19 in—the little bodies of all the neurons that live in that cube.
Somas range in size, but the neuroscientists I spoke with said that the somas of neurons in the cortex are often around 10 or 15µm in diameter (µm = micrometer, or micron: 1/1,000th of a millimeter). That means that if you laid out 7 or 10 of them in a line, that line would be about the diameter of a human hair (which is about 100µm). On our scale, that makes a soma 1 – 1.5cm in diameter. A marble.
The volume of the whole cortex is in the ballpark of 500,000 cubic millimeters, and in that space are about 20 billion somas. That means an average cubic millimeter of cortex contains about 40,000 neurons. So there are 40,000 marbles in our cubic meter box. If we divide our box into about 40,000 cubic spaces, each with a side of 3cm (or about a cubic inch), it means each of our soma marbles is at the center of its own little 3cm cube, with other somas about 3cm away from it in all directions.
With me so far? Can you visualize our meter cube with those 40,000 floating marbles in it?
Here’s a microscope image of the somas in an actual cortex, using techniques that block out the other stuff around them:27
    
Okay not too crazy so far. But the soma is only a tiny piece of each neuron. Radiating out from each of our marble-sized somas are twisty, branchy dendrites that in our scaled-up brain can stretch out for three or four meters in many different directions, and from the other end an axon that can be over 100 meters long (when heading out laterally to another part of the cortex) or as long as a kilometer (when heading down into the spinal cord and body). Each of them only about a millimeter thick, these cords turn the cortex into a dense tangle of electrical spaghetti.
And there’s a lot going on in that mash of spaghetti. Each neuron has synaptic connections to as many as 1,000—sometimes as high as 10,000—other neurons. With around 20 billion neurons in the cortex, that means there are over 20 trillion individual neural connections in the cortex (and as high as a quadrillion connections in the entire brain). In our cubic meter alone, there will be over 20 million synapses.
To further complicate things, not only are there many spaghetti strands coming out of each of the 40,000 marbles in our cube, but there are thousands of other spaghetti strings passing through our cube from other parts of the cortex. That means that if we were trying to record signals or stimulate neurons in this particular cubic area, we’d have a lot of difficulty, because in the mess of spaghetti, it would be very hard to figure out which spaghetti strings belonged to our soma marbles (and god forbid there are  Purkinje cells in the mix).
And of course, there’s the whole neuroplasticity thing. The voltages of each neuron would be constantly changing, as many as hundreds of times per second. And the tens of millions of synapse connections in our cube would be regularly changing sizes, disappearing, and reappearing.
If only that were the end of it.
It turns out there are other cells in the brain called glial cells—cells that come in many different varieties and perform many different functions, like mopping up chemicals released into synapses, wrapping axons in myelin, and serving as the brain’s immune system. Here are some common types of glial cell:28
      
And how many glial cells are in the cortex? About the same number as there are neurons. 20 So add about 40,000 of these wacky things into our cube.
Finally, there are the blood vessels. In every cubic millimeter of cortex, there’s a total of a meter of tiny blood vessels. On our scale, that means that in our cubic meter, there’s a kilometer of blood vessels. Here’s what the blood vessels in a space about that size look like:29
    
 The Connectome Blue Box 
There’s an amazing project going on right now in the neuroscience world called the Human Connectome Project (pronounced “connec-tome”) in which scientists are trying to create a complete detailed map of the entire human brain. Nothing close to this scale of brain mapping has ever been done.21
 The project entails slicing a human brain into outrageously thin slices—around 30-nanometer-thick slices. That’s 1/33,000th of a millimeter (here’s a machine slicing up a mouse brain).
Anyway, in addition to producing some gorgeous images of the “ribbon” formations axons with similar functions often form inside white matter, like—
   
—the connectome project has helped people visualize just how packed the brain is with all this stuff. Here’s a breakdown of all the different things going on in one tiny snippet of mouse brain (and this doesn’t even include the blood vessels):30
    
(In the image, E is the complete brain snippet, and F–N show the separate components that make up E.)
So our meter box is a jam-packed, oozy, electrified mound of dense complexity—now let’s recall that in reality, everything in our box actually fits in a cubic millimeter. 
And the brain-machine interface engineers need to figure out what the microscopic somas buried in that millimeter are saying, and other times, to stimulate just the right somas to get them to do what the engineers want. Good luck with that. 
 We’d have a super hard time doing that on our 1,000X brain. Our 1,000X brain that also happens to be a nice flat napkin. That’s not how it normally works—usually, the napkin is up on top of our Madison Square Garden brain and full of deep folds (on our scale, between five and 30 meters deep). In fact, less than a third of the cortex napkin is up on the surface of the brain—most is buried inside the folds.
Also, engineers are not operating on a bunch of brains in a lab. The brain is covered with all those Russian doll layers, including the skull—which at 1,000X would be around seven meters thick. And since most people don’t really want you opening up their skull for very long—and ideally not at all—you have to try to work with those tiny marbles as non-invasively as possible.
And this is all assuming you’re dealing with the cortex—but a lot of cool BMI ideas deal with the structures down below, which if you’re standing on top of our MSG brain, are buried 50 or 100 meters under the surface.
The 1,000X game also hammers home the sheer scope of the brain. Think about how much was going on in our cube—and now remember that that’s only one 500,000th of the cortex. If we broke our whole giant cortex into similar meter cubes and lined them up, they’d stretch 500km / 310mi—all the way to Boston and beyond. And if you made the trek—which would take over 100 hours of brisk walking—at any point you could pause and look at the cube you happened to be passing by and it would have all of this complexity inside of it. All of this is currently in your brain.
 Part 3A: How Happy Are You That This Isn’t Your Problem 
Totes.
 Back to Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces 
So how do scientists and engineers begin to manage this situation?
Well they do the best they can with the tools they currently have—tools used to record or stimulate neurons (we’ll focus on the recording side for the time being). Let’s take a look at the options:
 BMI Tools 
With the current work that’s being done, three broad criteria seem to stand out when evaluating a type of recording tool’s pros and cons:
 1) Scale – how many neurons can be simultaneously recorded
 2) Resolution – how detailed is the information the tool receives—there are two types of resolution, spatial (how closely your recordings come to telling you how individual neurons are firing) and temporal (how well you can determine when the activity you record happened)
 3) Invasiveness – is surgery needed, and if so, how extensively
The long-term goal is to have all three of your cakes and eat them all. But for now, it’s always a question of “which one (or two) of these criteria are you willing to completely fail?” Going from one tool to another isn’t an overall upgrade or downgrade—it’s a tradeoff.
Let’s examine the types of tools currently being used:
 fMRI 
 Scale: high (it shows you information across the whole brain)
 Resolution: medium-low spatial, very low temporal
 Invasiveness: non-invasive
fMRI isn’t typically used for BMIs, but it is a classic recording tool—it gives you information about what’s going on inside the brain.
fMRI uses MRI—magnetic resonance imaging—technology. MRIs, invented in the 1970s, were an evolution of the x-ray-based CAT scan. Instead of using x-rays, MRIs use magnetic fields (along with radio waves and other signals) to generate images of the body and brain. Like this:31
    
And this full set of cross sections, allowing you to see through an entire head.
Pretty amazing technology.
fMRI (“functional” MRI) uses similar technology to track changes in blood flow. Why? Because when areas of the brain become more active, they use more energy, so they need more oxygen—so blood flow increases to the area to deliver that oxygen. Blood flow indirectly indicates where activity is happening. Here’s what an fMRI scan might show:32
    
Of course, there’s always blood throughout the brain—what this image shows is where blood flow has increased (red/orange/yellow) and where it has decreased (blue). And because fMRI can scan through the whole brain, results are 3-dimensional:
   
fMRI has many medical uses, like informing doctors whether or not certain parts of the brain are functioning properly after a stroke, and fMRI has taught neuroscientists a ton about which regions of the brain are involved with which functions. Scans also have the benefit of providing info about what’s going on in the whole brain at any given time, and it’s safe and totally non-invasive.
The big drawback is resolution. fMRI scans have a literal resolution, like a computer screen has with pixels, except the pixels are three-dimensional, cubic volume pixels—or “voxels.”
fMRI voxels have gotten smaller as the technology has improved, bringing the spatial resolution up. Today’s fMRI voxels can be as small as a cubic millimeter. The brain has a volume of about 1,200,000mm3, so a high-resolution fMRI scan divides the brain into about one million little cubes. The problem is that on neuron scale, that’s still pretty huge (the same size as our scaled-up cubic meter above)—each voxel contains tens of thousands of neurons. So what the fMRI is showing you, at best, is the average blood flow drawn in by each group of 40,000 or so neurons.
The even bigger problem is temporal resolution. fMRI tracks blood flow, which is both imprecise and comes with a delay of about a second—an eternity in the world of neurons.
 EEG 
 Scale: high
 Resolution: very low spatial, medium-high temporal
 Invasiveness: non-invasive
Dating back almost a century, EEG (electroencephalography) puts an array of electrodes on your head. You know, this whole thing:33
    
EEG is definitely technology that will look hilariously primitive to a 2050 person, but for now, it’s one of the only tools that can be used with BMIs that’s totally non-invasive. EEGs record electrical activity in different regions of the brain, displaying the findings like this:34
    
EEG graphs can uncover information about medical issues like epilepsy, track sleep patterns, or be used to determine something like the status of a dose of anesthesia.
And unlike fMRI, EEG has pretty good temporal resolution, getting electrical signals from the brain right as they happen—though the skull blurs the temporal accuracy considerably (bone is a bad conductor).
The major drawback is spatial resolution. EEG has none. Each electrode only records a broad average—a vector sum of the charges from millions or billions of neurons (and a blurred one because of the skull).
Imagine that the brain is a baseball stadium, its neurons are the members of the crowd, and the information we want is, instead of electrical activity, vocal cord activity. In that case, EEG would be like a group of microphones placed outside the stadium, against the stadium’s outer walls. You’d be able to hear when the crowd was cheering and maybe predict the type of thing they were cheering about. You’d be able to hear telltale signs that it was between innings and maybe whether or not it was a close game. You could probably detect when something abnormal happened. But that’s about it.
 ECoG 
 Scale: high
 Resolution: low spatial, high temporal
 Invasiveness: kind of invasive
ECoG (electrocorticography) is a similar idea to EEG, also using surface electrodes—except they put them under the skull, on the surface of the brain.35
    
Ick. But effective—at least much more effective than EEG. Without the interference of the skull blurring things, ECoG picks up both higher spatial (about 1cm) and temporal resolution (5 milliseconds). ECoG electrodes can either be placed above or below the dura:36
    
Bringing back our stadium analogy, ECoG microphones are inside the stadium and a bit closer to the crowd. So the sound is much crisper than what EEG mics get from outside the stadium, and ECoG mics can better distinguish the sounds of individual sections of the crowd. But the improvement comes at a cost—it requires invasive surgery. In the scheme of invasive surgeries, though, it’s not so bad. As one neurosurgeon described to me, “You can slide stuff underneath the dura relatively non-invasively. You still have to make a hole in the head, but it’s relatively non-invasive.”
 Local Field Potential 
 Scale: low
 Resolution: medium-low spatial, high temporal
 Invasiveness: very invasive
Okay here’s where we shift from surface electrode discs to microelectrodes—tiny needles surgeons stick into the brain.
Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described to me how his father (a neurologist) used to make microelectrodes:
 When my father was making electrodes, he’d make them by hand. He’d take a very fine wire—like a gold or platinum or iridium wire, that was 10-30 microns in diameter, and he’d insert that wire in a glass capillary tube that was maybe a millimeter in diameter. Then they’d take that piece of glass over a flame and rotate it until the glass became soft. They’d stretch out the capillary tube until it’s incredibly thin, and then take it out of the flame and break it. Now the capillary tube is flush with and pinching the wire. The glass is an insulator and the wire is a conductor. So what you end up with is a glass-insulated stiff electrode that is maybe a few 10s of microns at the tip. 
Today, while some electrodes are still made by hand, newer techniques use silicon wafers and manufacturing technology borrowed from the integrated circuits industry.
The way local field potentials (LFP) work is simple—you take one of these super thin needles with an electrode tip and stick it one or two millimeters into the cortex. There it picks up the average of the electrical charges from all of the neurons within a certain radius of the electrode.
LFP gives you the not-that-bad spatial resolution of the fMRI combined with the instant temporal resolution of an ECoG. Kind of the best of all the worlds described above when it comes to resolution.
Unfortunately, it does badly on both other criteria.
Unlike fMRI, EEG, and ECoG, microelectrode LFP does not have scale—it only tells you what the little sphere surrounding it is doing. And it’s far more invasive, actually entering the brain.
In the baseball stadium, LFP is a single microphone hanging over a single section of seats, picking up a crisp feed of the sounds in that area, and maybe picking out an individual voice for a second here and there—but otherwise only getting the general vibe.
A more recent development is the multielectrode array, which is the same idea as the LFP except it’s about 100 LFPs all at once, in a single area of the cortex. A multielectrode array looks like this:37
    
A tiny 4mm x 4mm square with 100 tiny silicon electrodes on it. Here’s another image where you can see just how sharp the electrodes are—just a few microns across at the very tip:38
    
 Single-Unit Recording 
 Scale: tiny
 Resolution: super high
 Invasiveness: very invasive
To record a broader LFP, the electrode tip is a bit rounded to give the electrode more surface area, and they turn the resistance down with the intent of allowing very faint signals from a wide range of locations to be picked up. The end result is the electrode picks up a chorus of activity from the local field.
Single-unit recording also uses a needle electrode, but they make the tip super sharp and crank up the resistance. This wipes out most of the noise and leaves the electrode picking up almost nothing—until it finds itself so close to a neuron (maybe 50µm away) that the signal from that neuron is strong enough to make it past the electrode’s high resistance wall. With distinct signals from one neuron and no background noise, this electrode can now voyeur in on the private life of a single neuron. Lowest possible scale, highest possible resolution.
By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire here (what you’re actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio).
Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the patch clamp, whereby it’ll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette,22 and it’ll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a “patch” of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements:39
    
A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we’ve discussed, because it’s physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but stimulate the neuron,23 injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together).
Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called sharp electrode recording. If the tip is sharp enough, this won’t destroy the cell—the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique—a punctured neuron won’t survive long.
In our stadium, a single unit recording is a one-directional microphone clipped to a single crowd member’s collar. A patch clamp or sharp recording is a mic in someone’s throat, registering the exact movement of their vocal cords. This is a great way to learn about that person’s experience at the game, but it also gives you no context, and you can’t really tell if the sounds and reactions of that person are representative of what’s going on in the game.
And that’s about what we’ve got, at least in common usage. These tools are simultaneously unbelievably advanced and what will seem like Stone Age technology to future humans, who won’t believe you had to choose either high-res or a wide field and that you actually had to open someone’s skull to get high-quality brain readouts or write-ins.
But given their limitations, these tools have taught us worlds about the brain and led to the creation of some amazing early BMIs. Here’s what’s already out there—
 The BMIs we already have 
In 1969, a researcher named Eberhard Fetz connected a single neuron in a monkey’s brain to a dial in front of the monkey’s face. The dial would move when the neuron was fired. When the monkey would think in a way that fired the neuron and the dial would move, he’d get a banana-flavored pellet. Over time, the monkey started getting better at the game because he wanted more delicious pellets. The monkey had learned to make the neuron fire and inadvertently became the subject of the first real brain-machine interface.
Progress was slow over the next few decades, but by the mid-90s, things had started to move, and it’s been quietly accelerating ever since.
Given that both our understanding of the brain and the electrode hardware we’ve built are pretty primitive, our efforts have typically focused on building straightforward interfaces to be used with the areas of the brain we understand the best, like the motor cortex and the visual cortex.
And given that human experimentation is only really possible for people who are trying to use BMIs to alleviate an impairment—and because that’s currently where the market demand is—our efforts have focused so far almost entirely on restoring lost function to people with disabilities.
The major BMI industries of the future that will give all humans magical superpowers and transform the world are in their fetal stage right now—and we should look at what’s being worked on as a set of clues about what the mind-boggling worlds of 2040 and 2060 and 2100 might be like.
Like, check this out:
   
That’s a computer built by Alan Turing in 1950 called the Pilot ACE. Truly cutting edge in its time.
Now check this out:
   
As you read through the examples below, I want you to think about this analogy—
 Pilot ACE is to iPhone 7  
as 
 Each BMI example below is to _____ 
—and try to imagine what the blank looks like. And we’ll come back to the blank later in the post.
Anyway, from everything I’ve read about and discussed with people in the field, there seem to be three major categories of brain-machine interface being heavily worked on right now:
 Early BMI type #1: Using the motor cortex as a remote control 
In case you forgot this from 9,000 words ago, the motor cortex is this guy:
   
All areas of the brain confuse us, but the motor cortex confuses us less than almost all the other areas. And most importantly, it’s well-mapped, meaning specific parts of it control specific parts of the body (remember the upsetting homunculus?).
Also importantly, it’s one of the major areas of the brain in charge of our output. When a human does something, the motor cortex is almost always the one pulling the strings (at least for the physical part of the doing). So the human brain doesn’t really have to learn to use the motor cortex as a remote control, because the brain already uses the motor cortex as its remote control.
Lift your hand up. Now put it down. See? Your hand is like a little toy drone, and your brain just picked up the motor cortex remote control and used it to make the drone fly up and then back down.
The goal of motor cortex-based BMIs is to tap into the motor cortex, and then when the remote control fires a command, to hear that command and then send it to some kind of machine that can respond to it the way, say, your hand would. A bundle of nerves is the middleman between your motor cortex and your hand. BMIs are the middleman between your motor cortex and a computer. Simple.
One barebones type of interface allows a human—often a person paralyzed from the neck down or someone who has had a limb amputated—to move a cursor on a screen with only their thoughts.
This begins with a 100-pin multielectrode array being implanted in the person’s motor cortex. The motor cortex in a paralyzed person usually works just fine—it’s just that the spinal cord, which had served as the middleman between the cortex and the body, stopped doing its job. So with the electrode array implanted, researchers have the person try to move their arm in different directions. Even though they can’t do that, the motor cortex still fires normally, as if they can.
When someone moves their arm, their motor cortex bursts into a flurry of activity—but each neuron is usually only interested in one type of movement. So one neuron might fire whenever the person moves their arm to the right—but it’s bored by other directions and is less active in those cases. That neuron alone, then, could tell a computer when the person wants to move their arm to the right and when they don’t. But that’s all. But with an electrode array, 100 single-unit electrodes each listen to a different neuron.24 So when they do testing, they’ll ask the person to try to move their arm to the right, and maybe 38 of the 100 electrodes detect their neuron firing. When the person tries to go left with their arm, maybe 41 others fire. After going through a bunch of different movements and directions and speeds, a computer takes the data from the electrodes and synthesizes it into a general understanding of which firing patterns correspond to which movement intentions on an X-Y axis.
Then when they link up that data to a computer screen, the person can use their mind, via “trying” to move the cursor, to really control the cursor. And this actually works. Through the work of motor-cortex-BMI pioneer company BrainGate, here’s a guy playing a video game using only his mind.
 
And if 100 neurons can tell you where they want to move a cursor, why couldn’t they tell you when they want to pick up a mug of coffee and take a sip? That’s what this quadriplegic woman did:
 
Another quadriplegic woman flew an F-35 fighter jet in a simulation, and a monkey recently used his mind to ride around in a wheelchair.
And why stop with arms? Brazilian BMI pioneer Miguel Nicolelis and his team built an entire exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to make the opening kick of the World Cup.25
 
 The Proprioception Blue Box 
Moving these kinds of “neuroprosthetics” is all about the recording of neurons, but for these devices to be truly effective, this needs to not be a one-way street, but a loop that includes recording and stimulation pathways. We don’t really think about this, but a huge part of your ability to pick up an object is all of the incoming sensory information your hand’s skin and muscles send back in (called “proprioception”). In one video I saw, a woman with numbed fingers tried to light a match, and it was almost impossible for her to do it, despite having no other disabilities. And the beginning of this video shows the physical struggles of a man with a perfectly functional motor cortex but impaired proprioception. So for something like a bionic arm to really feel like an arm, and to really be useful, it needs to be able to send sensory information back in.
Stimulating neurons is even harder than recording them. As researcher Flip Sabes explained to me:
 If I record a pattern of activity, it doesn’t mean I can readily recreate that pattern of activity by just playing it back. You can compare it to the planets in the Solar System. You can watch the planets move around and record their movements. But then if you jumble them all up and later want to recreate the original motion of one of the planets, you can’t just take that one planet and put it back into its orbit, because it’ll be influenced by all the other planets. Likewise, neurons aren’t just working in isolation—so there’s a fundamental irreversibility there. On top of that, with all of the axons and dendrites, it’s hard to just stimulate the neurons you want to—because when you try, you’ll hit a whole jumble of them. 
Flip’s lab tries to deal with these challenges by getting the brain to help out. It turns out that if you reward a monkey with a succulent sip of orange juice when a single neuron fires, eventually the monkey will learn to make the neuron fire on demand. The neuron could then act as another kind of remote control. This means that normal motor cortex commands are only one possibility as a control mechanism. Likewise, until BMI technology gets good enough to perfect stimulation, you can use the brain’s neuroplasticity as a shortcut. If it’s too hard to make someone’s bionic fingertip touch something and send back information that feels just like the kind of sensation their own fingertip used to give them, the arm could instead send some other signal into the brain. At first, this would seem odd to the patient—but eventually the brain can learn to treat that signal as a new sense of touch. This concept is called “sensory substitution” and makes the brain a collaborator in BMI efforts.
In these developments are the seeds of other future breakthrough technologies—like brain-to-brain communication.
Nicolelis created an experiment where the motor cortex of one rat in Brazil was wired, via the internet, to the motor cortex of another rat in the US. The rat in Brazil was presented with two transparent boxes, each with a lever attached to it, and inside one of the boxes would be a treat. To attempt to get the treat, the rat would press the lever of the box that held the treat. Meanwhile, the rat in the US was in a similar cage with two similar boxes, except unlike the rat in Brazil, the boxes weren’t transparent and offered him no information about which of his two levers would yield a treat and which wouldn’t. The only info the US rat had were the signals his brain received from the Brazil rat’s motor cortex. The Brazil rat had the key knowledge—but the way the experiment worked, the rats only received treats when the US rat pressed the correct lever. If he pulled the wrong one, neither would. The amazing thing is that over time, the rats got better at this and began to work together, almost like a single nervous system—even though neither had any idea the other rat existed. The US rat’s success rate at choosing the correct lever with no information would have been 50%. With the signals coming from the Brazil rat’s brain, the success rate jumped to 64%. (Here’s a video of the rats doing their thing.)
This has even worked, crudely, in people. Two people, in separate buildings, worked together to play a video game. One could see the game, the other had the controller. Using simple EEG headsets, the player who could see the game would, without moving his hand, think about moving his hand to press the “shoot” button on a controller. Because their brains’ devices were communicating with each other, the player with the controller would then feel a twitch in his finger and press the shoot button.
 Early BMI type #2: Artificial ears and eyes 
There are a couple reasons giving sound to the deaf and sight to the blind is among the more manageable BMI categories.
The first is that like the motor cortex, the sensory cortices are parts of the brain we tend to understand pretty well, partly because they too tend to be well-mapped.
The second is that in many early applications, we don’t really need to deal with the brain—we can just deal with the place where ears and eyes connect to the brain, since that’s often where the impairment is based.
And while the motor cortex stuff was mostly about recording neurons to get information out of the brain, artificial senses go the other way—stimulation of neurons to send information in. 
On the ears side of things, recent decades have seen the development of the groundbreaking cochlear implant.   
 The How Hearing Works Blue Box 
When you think you’re “hearing” “sound,” here’s what’s actually happening:
What we think of as sound is actually patterns of vibrations in the air molecules around your head. When a guitar string or someone’s vocal cords or the wind or anything else makes a sound, it’s because it’s vibrating, which pushes nearby air molecules into a similar vibration and that pattern expands outward in a sphere, kind of like the surface of water expands outward in a circular ripple when something touches it.26
 Your ear is a machine that converts those air vibrations into electrical impulses. Whenever air (or water, or any other medium whose molecules can vibrate) enters your ear, your ear translates the precise way it’s vibrating into an electrical code that it sends into the nerve endings that touch it. This causes those nerves to fire a pattern of action potentials that send the code into your auditory cortex for processing. Your brain receives the information, and we call the experience of receiving that particular type of information “hearing.”
Most people who are deaf or hard of hearing don’t have a nerve problem or an auditory cortex problem—they usually have an ear problem. Their brain is as ready as anyone else’s to turn electrical impulses into hearing—it’s just that their auditory cortex isn’t receiving any electrical impulses in the first place, because the machine that converts air vibrations into those impulses isn’t doing its job.
The ear has a lot of parts, but it’s the cochlea in particular that makes the key conversion. When vibrations enter the fluid in the cochlea, it causes thousands of tiny hairs lining the cochlea to vibrate, and the cells those hairs are attached to transform the mechanical energy of the vibrations into electrical signals that then excite the auditory nerve. Here’s what it all looks like:40
    
The cochlea also sorts the incoming sound by frequency. Here’s a cool chart that shows why lower sounds are processed at the end of the cochlea and high sounds are processed at the beginning (and also why there’s a minimum and maximum frequency on what the ear can hear):41
    
A cochlear implant is a little computer that has a microphone coming out of one end (which sits on the ear) and a wire coming out of the other that connects to an array of electrodes that line the cochlea.   
So sound comes into the microphone (the little hook on top of the ear), and goes into the brown thing, which processes the sound to filter out the less useful frequencies. Then the brown thing transmits the information through the skin, through electrical induction, to the computer’s other component, which converts the info into electric impulses and sends them into the cochlea. The electrodes filter the impulses by frequency just like the cochlea and stimulate the auditory nerve just like the hairs on the cochlea do. This is what it looks like from the outside:
   
In other words, an artificial ear, performing the same sound-to-impulses-to-auditory-nerve function the ear does.
 Check out what sound sounds like to someone with the implant.
Not great. Why? Because to send sound into the brain with the richness the ear hears with, you’d need 3,500 electrodes. Most cochlear implants have about 16.27 Crude.
But we’re in the Pilot ACE era—so of course it’s crude.
Still, today’s cochlear implant allows deaf people to hear speech and have conversations, which is a groundbreaking development.28
 Many parents of deaf babies are now having a cochlear implant put in when the baby’s about one year old. Like this baby, whose reaction to hearing for the first time is cute.
 
There’s a similar revolution underway in the world of blindness, in the form of the retinal implant.
Blindness is often the result of a retinal disease. When this is the case, a retinal implant can perform a similar function for sight as a cochlear implant does for hearing (though less directly). It performs the normal duties of the eye and hands things off to nerves in the form of electrical impulses, just like the eye does.
A more complicated interface than the cochlear implant, the first retinal implant was approved by the FDA in 2011—the Argus II implant, made by Second Sight. The retinal implant looks like this:42
    
And it works like this:
 
The retinal implant has 60 sensors. The retina has around a million neurons. Crude. But seeing vague edges and shapes and patterns of light and dark sure beats seeing nothing at all. What’s encouraging is that you don’t need a million sensors to gain a reasonable amount of sight—simulations suggest that 600-1,000 electrodes would be enough for reading and facial recognition.
 Early BMI type #3: Deep brain stimulation 
Dating back to the late 1980s, deep brain stimulation is yet another crude tool that is also still pretty life-changing for a lot of people.
It’s also a type of category of BMI that doesn’t involve communication with the outside world—it’s about using brain-machine interfaces to treat or enhance yourself by altering something internally.
What happens here is one or two electrode wires, usually with four separate electrode sites, are inserted into the brain, often ending up somewhere in the limbic system. Then a little pacemaker computer is implanted in the upper chest and wired to the electrodes. Like this unpleasant man:43
    
The electrodes can then give a little zap when called for, which can do a variety of important things. Like:
Reduce the tremors of people with Parkinson’s Disease
Reduce the severity of seizures
Chill people with OCD out
It’s also experimentally (not yet FDA approved) been able to mitigate certain kinds of chronic pain like migraines or phantom limb pain, treat anxiety or depression or PTSD, or even be combined with muscle stimulation elsewhere in the body to restore and retrain circuits that were broken down from stroke or a neurological disease.
___________
  This is the state of the early BMI industry, and it’s the moment when Elon Musk is stepping into it. For him, and for Neuralink, today’s BMI industry is Point A. We’ve spent the whole post so far in the past, building up to the present moment. Now it’s time to step into the future—to figure out what Point B is and how we’re going to get there.
 Part 4: Neuralink’s Challenge 
   
Having already written about two of Elon Musk’s companies—Tesla and SpaceX—I think I understand his formula. It looks like this:
   
And his initial thinking about a new company always starts on the right and works its way left.
He decides that some specific change in the world will increase the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. He knows that large-scale world change happens quickest when the whole world—the Human Colossus—is working on it. And he knows that the Human Colossus will work toward a goal if (and only if) there’s an economic forcing function in place—if it’s a good business decision to spend resources innovating toward that goal.
Often, before a booming industry starts booming, it’s like a pile of logs—it has all the ingredients of a fire and it’s ready to go—but there’s no match. There’s some technological shortcoming that’s preventing the industry from taking off.
So when Elon builds a company, its core initial strategy is usually to create the match that will ignite the industry and get the Human Colossus working on the cause. This, in turn, Elon believes, will lead to developments that will change the world in the way that increases the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. But you have to look at his companies from a zoomed-out perspective to see all of this. If you don’t, you’ll mistake what they do as their business for what they do—when in fact, what they do as their business is usually a mechanism to sustain the company while it innovates to try to make that critical match.
Back when I was working on the Tesla and SpaceX posts, I asked Elon why he went into engineering and not science, and he explained that when it comes to progress, “engineering is the limiting factor.” In other words, the progress of science, business, and industry are all at the whim of the progress of engineering. If you look at history, this makes sense—behind each of the greatest revolutions in human progress is an engineering breakthrough. A match.
   
So to understand an Elon Musk company, you need to think about the match he’s trying to create—along with three other variables:
   
I know what’s in these boxes with the other companies:
    
   
And when I started trying to figure out what Neuralink was all about, I knew those were the variables I needed to fill in. At the time, I had only had the chance to get a very vague idea of one of the variables—that the goal of the company was “to accelerate the advent of a whole-brain interface.” Or what I’ve come to think of as a wizard hat.
   
As I understood it, a whole-brain interface was what a brain-machine interface would be in an ideal world—a super-advanced concept where essentially all the neurons in your brain are able to communicate seamlessly with the outside world. It was a concept loosely based on the science fiction idea of a “neural lace,” described in Iain Banks’ Culture series—a massless, volumeless, whole-brain interface that can be teleported into the brain.
I had a lot of questions.
Luckily, I was on my way to San Francisco, where I had plans to sit down with half of Neuralink’s founding team and be the dumbest person in the room.
   
 The I’m Not Being Self-Deprecating I Really Was Definitely the Dumbest Person in the Room Just Look at This Shit Blue Box 
The Neuralink team:
  Paul Merolla , who spent the last seven years as the lead chip designer at IBM on their SyNAPSE program, where he led the development of the TrueNorth chip—one of the largest CMOS devices ever designed by transistor count nbd. Paul told me his field was called neuromorphic, where the goal is to design transistor circuits based on principles of brain architecture.
  Vanessa Tolosa , Neuralink’s microfabrication expert and one of the world’s foremost researchers on biocompatible materials. Vanessa’s work involves designing biocompatible materials based on principles from the integrated circuits industry.
 Max Hodak, who worked on the development of some groundbreaking BMI technology at Miguel Nicolelis’s lab at Duke while also commuting across the country twice a week in college to run Transcriptic, the “robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences” he founded.
  DJ Seo , who while at UC Berkeley in his mid-20s designed a cutting-edge new BMI concept called neural dust—tiny ultrasound sensors that could provide a new way to record brain activity.
  Tim Hanson , whom a colleague described as “one of the best all-around engineers on the planet” and who self-taught himself enough about materials science and microfabrication methods to develop some of the core technology that’ll be used at Neuralink.
  Flip Sabes , a leading researcher whose lab at UCSF has pioneered new ground in BMIs by combining “cortical physiology, computational and theoretical modeling, and human psychophysics and physiology.”
  Tim Gardner , a leading researcher at BU, whose lab works on implanting BMIs in birds, in order to study “how complex songs are assembled from elementary neural units” and learn about “the relationships between patterns of neural activity on different time-scales.” Both Tim and Flip have left tenured positions to join the Neuralink team—pretty good testament to the promise they believe this company has.
And then there’s Elon, both as their CEO/Founder and a fellow team member. Elon being CEO makes this different from other recent things he’s started and puts Neuralink on the top tier for him, where only SpaceX and Tesla have lived. When it comes to neuroscience, Elon has the least technical knowledge on the team—but he also started SpaceX without very much technical knowledge and quickly became a certifiable rocket science expert by reading and by asking questions of the experts on the team. That’ll probably happen again here. (And for good reason—he pointed out: “Without a strong technical understanding, I think it’s hard to make the right decisions.”)
I asked Elon about how he brought this team together. He said that he met with literally over 1,000 people in order to assemble this group, and that part of the challenge was the large number of totally separate areas of expertise required when you’re working on technology that involves neuroscience, brain surgery, microscopic electronics, clinical trials, etc. Because it was such a cross-disciplinary area, he looked for cross-disciplinary experts. And you can see that in those bios—everyone brings their own unique crossover combination to a group that together has the rare ability to think as a single mega-expert. Elon also wanted to find people who were totally on board with the zoomed-out mission—who were more focused on industrial results than producing white papers. Not an easy group to assemble.
But there they were, sitting around the table looking at me, as it hit me 40 seconds in that I should have done a lot more research before coming here.
   
They took the hint and dumbed it down about four notches, and as the discussion went on, I started to wrap my head around things. Throughout the next few weeks, I met with each of the remaining Neuralink team members as well, each time playing the role of the dumbest person in the room. In these meetings, I focused on trying to form a comprehensive picture of the challenges at hand and what the road to a wizard hat might look like. I really wanted to understand these two boxes:
   
The first one was easy. The business side of Neuralink is a brain-machine interface development company. They want to create cutting-edge BMIs—what one of them referred to as “micron-sized devices.” Doing this will support the growth of the company while also providing a perfect vehicle for putting their innovations into practice (the same way SpaceX uses their launches both to sustain the company and experiment with their newest engineering developments).
As for what kind of interface they’re planning to work on first, here’s what Elon said:
 We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years.  
The second box was a lot hazier. It seems obvious to us today that using steam engine technology to harness the power of fire was the thing that had to happen to ignite the Industrial Revolution. But if you talked to someone in 1760 about it, they would have had a lot less clarity—on exactly which hurdles they were trying to get past, what kinds of innovations would allow them to leap over those hurdles, or how long any of this would take. And that’s where we are here—trying to figure out what the match looks like that will ignite the neuro revolution and how to create it.
The starting place for a discussion about innovation is a discussion about hurdles—what are you even trying to innovate past? In Neuralink’s case, a whole lot of things. But given that, here too, engineering will likely prove to be the limiting factor, here are some seemingly large challenges that probably won’t end up being the major roadblock:
 Public skepticism  
Pew recently conducted a survey asking Americans about which future biotechnologies give them the shits the most. It turns out BMIs worry Americans even more than gene editing:44
    
Flip Sabes, one of Neuralink’s ground floor members, doesn’t get it.
 To a scientist, to think about changing the fundamental nature of life—creating viruses, eugenics, etc.—it raises a specter that many biologists find quite worrisome, whereas the neuroscientists that I know, when they think about chips in the brain, it doesn’t seem that foreign, because we already have chips in the brain. We have deep brain stimulation to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, we have early trials of chips to restore vision, we have the cochlear implant—so to us it doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch to put devices into a brain to read information out and to read information back in. 
And after learning all about chips in the brain, I agree—and when Americans eventually learn about it, I think they’ll change their minds.
History supports this prediction. People were super timid about Lasik eye surgery when it first became a thing—20 years ago, 20,000 people a year had the procedure done. Then everyone got used to it and now 2,000,000 people a year get laser eye surgery. Similar story with pacemakers. And defibrillators. And organ transplants—which people at first considered a freakish Frankenstein-esque concept. Brain implants will probably be the same story.
 Our non-understanding of the brain 
You know, the whole “if understanding the brain is a mile, we’re currently three inches in” thing. Flip weighed in on this topic too:
 If it were a prerequisite to understand the brain in order to interact with the brain in a substantive way, we’d have trouble. But it’s possible to decode all of those things in the brain without truly understanding the dynamics of the computation in the brain. Being able to read it out is an engineering problem. Being able to understand its origin and the organization of the neurons in fine detail in a way that would satisfy a neuroscientist to the core—that’s a separate problem. And we don’t need to solve all of those scientific problems in order to make progress. 
If we can just use engineering to get neurons to talk to computers, we’ll have done our job, and machine learning can do much of the rest. Which then, ironically, will teach us about the brain. As Flip points out:
 The flip side of saying, “We don’t need to understand the brain to make engineering progress,” is that making engineering progress will almost certainly advance our scientific knowledge—kind of like the way Alpha Go ended up teaching the world’s best players better strategies for the game. Then this scientific progress can lead to more engineering progress. The engineering and the science are gonna ratchet each other up here. 
 Angry giants 
Tesla and SpaceX are both stepping on some very big toes (like the auto industry, the oil and gas industry, and the military-industrial complex). Big toes don’t like being stepped on, so they’ll usually do whatever they can to hinder the stepper’s progress. Luckily, Neuralink doesn’t really have this problem. There aren’t any massive industries that Neuralink is disrupting (at least not in the foreseeable future—an eventual neuro revolution would disrupt almost every industry).
Neuralink’s hurdles are technology hurdles—and there are many. But two challenges stand out as the largest—challenges that, if conquered, may be impactful enough to trigger all the other hurdles to fall and totally change the trajectory of our future.
 Major Hurdle 1: Bandwidth 
There have never been more than a couple hundred electrodes in a human brain at once. When it comes to vision, that equals a super low-res image. When it comes to motor, that limits the possibilities to simple commands with little control. When it comes to your thoughts, a few hundred electrodes won’t be enough to communicate more than the simplest spelled-out message.
We need higher bandwidth if this is gonna become a big thing. Way higher bandwidth.
The Neuralink team threw out the number “one million simultaneously recorded neurons” when talking about an interface that could really change the world. I’ve also heard 100,000 as a number that would allow for the creation of a wide range of incredibly useful BMIs with a variety of applications.
Early computers had a similar problem. Primitive transistors took up a lot of space and didn’t scale easily. Then in 1959 came the integrated circuit—the computer chip. Now there was a way to scale the number of transistors in a computer, and Moore’s Law—the concept that the number of transistors that can fit onto a computer chip doubles every 18 months—was born.
Until the 90s, electrodes for BMIs were all made by hand. Then we started figuring out how to manufacture those little 100-electrode multielectrode arrays using conventional semiconductor technologies. Neurosurgeon Ben Rapoport believes that “the move from hand manufacturing to Utah Array electrodes was the first hint that BMIs were entering a realm where Moore’s Law could become relevant.”
This is everything for the industry’s potential. Our maximum today is a couple hundred electrodes able to measure about 500 neurons at once—which is either super far from a million or really close, depending on the kind of growth pattern we’re in. If we add 500 more neurons to our maximum every 18 months, we’ll get to a million in the year 5017. If we double our total every 18 months, like we do with computer transistors, we’ll get to a million in the year 2034.
Currently, we seem to be somewhere in between. Ian Stevenson and Konrad Kording published a paper that looked at the maximum number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded at various points throughout the last 50 years (in any animal), and put the results on this graph:45
    
Sometimes called Stevenson’s Law, this research suggests that the number of neurons we can simultaneously record seems to consistently double every 7.4 years. If that rate continues, it’ll take us till the end of this century to reach a million, and until 2225 to record every neuron in the brain and get our totally complete wizard hat.
Whatever the equivalent of the integrated circuit is for BMIs isn’t here yet, because 7.4 years is too big a number to start a revolution. The breakthrough here isn’t the device that can record a million neurons—it’s the paradigm shift that makes the future of that graph look more like Moore’s Law and less like Stevenson’s Law. Once that happens, a million neurons will follow.
 Major Hurdle 2: Implantation 
BMIs won’t sweep the world as long as you need to go in for skull-opening surgery to get involved.
This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team.
On top of being both a major barrier to entry and a major safety issue, invasive brain surgery is expensive and in limited supply. Elon talked about an eventual BMI implantation process that could be automated: “The machine to accomplish this would need to be something like Lasik, an automated process—because otherwise you just get constrained by the limited number of neural surgeons, and the costs are very high. You’d need a Lasik-like machine ultimately to be able to do this at scale.”
Making BMIs high-bandwidth alone would be a huge deal, as would developing a way to non-invasively implant devices. But doing both would start a revolution.
 Other hurdles 
Today’s BMI patients have a wire coming out of their head. In the future, that certainly won’t fly. Neuralink plans to work on devices that will be wireless. But that brings a lot of new challenges with it. You’ll now need your device to be able to send and receive a lot of data wirelessly. Which means the implant also has to take care of things like signal amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and data compression on its own. Oh and it needs to be powered inductively.
Another big one—biocompatibility. Delicate electronics tend to not do well inside a jello ball. And the human body tends to not like having foreign objects in it. But the brain interfaces of the future are intended to last forever without any problems. This means that the device will likely need to be hermetically sealed and robust enough to survive decades of the oozing and shifting of the neurons around it. And the brain—which treats today’s devices like invaders and eventually covers them in scar tissue—will need to somehow be tricked into thinking the device is just a normal brain part doing its thing.29
 Then there’s the space issue. Where exactly are you gonna put your device that can interface with a million neurons in a skull that’s already dealing with making space for 100 billion neurons? A million electrodes using today’s multielectrode arrays would be the size of a baseball. So further miniaturization is another dramatic innovation to add to the list.
There’s also the fact that today’s electrodes are mostly optimized for simple electrical recording or simple electrical stimulation. If we really want an effective brain interface, we’ll need something other than single-function, stiff electrodes—something with the mechanical complexity of neural circuits, that can both record and stimulate, and that can interact with neurons chemically and mechanically as well as electrically.
And just say all of this comes together perfectly—a high-bandwidth, long-lasting, biocompatible, bidirectional communicative, non-invasively-implanted device. Now we can speak back and forth with a million neurons at once! Except this little thing where we actually don’t know how to talk to neurons. It’s complicated enough to decode the static-like firings of 100 neurons, but all we’re really doing is learning what a set of specific firings corresponds to and matching them up to simple commands. That won’t work with millions of signals. It’s like how Google Translate essentially uses two dictionaries to swap words from one dictionary to another—which is very different than understanding language. We’ll need a pretty big leap in machine learning before a computer will be able to actually know a language, and we’ll need just as big a leap for machines to understand the language of the brain—because humans certainly won’t be learning to decipher the code of millions of simultaneously chattering neurons.
How easy does colonizing Mars seem right now.
But I bet the telephone and the car and the moon landing would have seemed like insurmountable technological challenges to people a few decades earlier. Just like I bet this—
   
—would have seemed utterly inconceivable to people at the time of this:
   
And yet, there it is in your pocket. If there’s one thing we should learn from the past, it’s that there will always be ubiquitous technology of the future that’s inconceivable to people of the past. We don’t know which technologies that seem positively impossible to us will turn out to be ubiquitous later in our lives—but there will be some. People always underestimate the Human Colossus.
If everyone you know in 40 years has electronics in their skull, it’ll be because a paradigm shift took place that caused a fundamental shift in this industry. That shift is what the Neuralink team will try to figure out. Other teams are working on it too, and some cool ideas are being developed:
 Current BMI innovations 
A team at the University of Illinois is developing an interface made of silk:46
    
Silk can be rolled up into a thin bundle and inserted into the brain relatively non-invasively. There, it would theoretically spread out around the brain and melt into the contours like shrink wrap. On the silk would be flexible silicon transistor arrays.
In his TEDx Talk, Hong Yeo demonstrated an electrode array printed on his skin, like a temporary tattoo, and researchers say this kind of technique could potentially be used on the brain:47
    
Another group is working on a kind of nano-scale, electrode-lined  neural mesh  so tiny it can be injected into the brain with a syringe:48
    
For scale—that red tube on the right is the tip of a syringe. Nature Magazine has a nice graphic illustrating the concept:
   
Other non-invasive techniques involve going in through veins and arteries. Elon mentioned this: “The least invasive way would be something that comes in like a heart stent like through a femoral artery and ultimately unfolds in the vascular system to interface with the neurons. Neurons use a lot of energy, so there’s basically a road network to every neuron.”
DARPA, the technology innovation arm of the US military,30 through their recently funded BRAIN program, is working on tiny, “closed-loop” neural implants that could replace medication.49
    
A second DARPA project aims to fit a million electrodes into a device the size of two nickels stacked.
Another idea being worked on is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which a magnetic coil outside the head can create electrical pulses inside the brain.50
    
The pulses can stimulate targeted neuron areas, providing a type of deep brain stimulation that’s totally non-invasive.
One of Neuralink’s ground floor members, DJ Seo, led an effort to design an even cooler interface called “neural dust.” Neural dust refers to tiny, 100µm silicon sensors (about the same as the width of a hair) that would be sprinkled through the cortex. Right nearby, above the pia, would be a 3mm-sized device that could communicate with the dust sensors via ultrasound.
This is another example of the innovation benefits that come from an interdisciplinary team. DJ explained to me that “there are technologies that are not really thought about in this domain, but we can bring in some principles of their work.” He says that neural dust is inspired both by microchip technology and RFID (the thing that allows hotel key cards to communicate with the door lock without making physical contact) principles. And you can easily see the multi-field influence in how it works:51
    
Others are working on even more out-there ideas, like  optogenetics  (where you inject a virus that attaches to a brain cell, causing it to thereafter be stimulated by light) or even using  carbon nanotubes —a million of which could be bundled together and sent to the brain via the bloodstream.
These people are all working on this arrow:
   
It’s a relatively small group right now, but when the breakthrough spark happens, that’ll quickly change. Developments will begin to happen rapidly. Brain interface bandwidth will get better and better as the procedures to implant them become simpler and cheaper. Public interest will pick up. And when public interest picks up, the Human Colossus notices an opportunity—and then the rate of development skyrockets. Just like the breakthroughs in computer hardware caused the software industry to explode, major industries will pop up working on cutting-edge machines and intelligent apps to be used in conjunction with brain interfaces, and you’ll tell some little kid in 2052 all about how when you grew up, no one could do any of the things she can do with her brain, and she’ll be bored.
I tried to get the Neuralink team to talk about 2052 with me. I wanted to know what life was going to be like once this all became a thing. I wanted to know what went in the [Pilot ACE : iPhone 7 :: Early BMIs : ____] blank. But it wasn’t easy—this was a team built specifically because of their focus on concrete results, not hype, and I was doing the equivalent of talking to people in the late 1700s who were feverishly trying to create a breakthrough steam engine and prodding them about when they thought there would be airplanes.
But I’d keep pulling teeth until they’d finally talk about their thoughts on the far future to get my hand off their tooth. I also focused a large portion of my talks with Elon on the far future possibilities and had other helpful discussions with Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist friend of mine who works on BMIs and thinks a lot about the long-term outlook. Finally, one reluctant-to-talk-about-his-predictions Neuralink team member told me that of course, he and his colleagues were dreamers—otherwise they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing—and that many of them were inspired to get into this industry by science fiction. He recommended I talk to Ramez Naam, writer of the popular  Nexus Trilogy , a series all about the future of BMIs, and also someone with a hard tech background that includes 19 software-related patents. So I had a chat with Ramez to round out the picture and ask him the 435 remaining questions I had about everything.
And I came out of all of it utterly blown away. I wrote once about how I think if you went back to 1750—a time when there was no electricity or motorized vehicles or telecommunication—and retrieved, say, George Washington, and brought him to today and showed him our world, he’d be so shocked by everything that he’d die. You’d have killed George Washington and messed everything up. Which got me thinking about the concept of how many years one would need to go into the future such that the ensuing shock from the level of progress would kill you. I called it a Die Progress Unit, or DPU.
Ever since the Human Colossus was born, our world has had a weird property to it—it gets more magical as time goes on. That’s why DPUs are a thing. And because advancement begets more rapid advancement, the trend is that as time passes, the DPUs get shorter. For George Washington, a DPU was a couple hundred years, which is outrageously short in the scheme of human history. But we now live in a time where things are moving so fast that we might experience one or even multiple DPUs in our lifetime. The amount that changed between 1750 and 2017 might happen again between now and another time when you’re still alive. This is a ridiculous time to be alive—it’s just hard for us to notice because we live life so zoomed in.
Anyway, I think about DPUs a lot and I always wonder what it would feel like to go forward in a time machine and experience what George would experience coming here. What kind of future could blow my mind so hard that it would kill me? We can talk about things like AI and gene editing—and I have no doubt that progress in those areas could make me die of shock—but it’s always, “Who knows what it’ll be like!” Never a descriptive picture.
  I think I might finally have a descriptive picture of a piece of our shocking future. Let me paint it for you.
 Part 5: The Wizard Era 
   
The budding industry of brain-machine interfaces is the seed of a revolution that will change just about everything. But in many ways, the brain-interface future isn’t really a new thing that’s happening. If you take a step back, it looks more like the next big chapter in a trend that’s been going on for a long time. Language took forever to turn into writing, which then took forever to turn into printing, and that’s where things were when George Washington was around. Then came electricity and the pace picked up. Telephone. Radio. Television. Computers. And just like that, everyone’s homes became magical. Then phones became cordless. Then mobile. Computers went from being devices for work and games to windows into a digital world we all became a part of. Then phones and computers merged into an everything device that brought the magic out of our homes and put it into our hands. And on our wrists. We’re now in the early stages of a virtual and augmented reality revolution that will wrap the magic around our eyes and ears and bring our whole being into the digital world.
You don’t need to be a futurist to see where this is going.
Magic has worked its way from industrial facilities to our homes to our hands and soon it’ll be around our heads. And then it’ll take the next natural step. The magic is heading into our brains.
It will happen by way of a “whole-brain interface,” or what I’ve been calling a wizard hat—a brain interface so complete, so smooth, so biocompatible, and so high-bandwidth that it feels as much a part of you as your cortex and limbic system. A whole-brain interface would give your brain the ability to communicate wirelessly with the cloud, with computers, and with the brains of anyone with a similar interface in their head. This flow of information between your brain and the outside world would be so effortless, it would feel similar to the thinking that goes on in your head today. And though we’ve used the term brain-machine interface so far, I kind of think of a BMI as a specific brain interface to be used for a specific purpose, and the term doesn’t quite capture the everything-of-everything concept of the whole-brain interface. So I’ll call that a wizard hat instead.
Now, to fully absorb the implications of having a wizard hat installed in your head and what that would change about you, you’ll need to wrap your head around (no pun intended) two things:
 1) The intensely mind-bending idea 
 2) The super ridiculously intensely mind-bending idea 
We’ll tackle #1 in this section and save #2 for the last section after you’ve had time to absorb #1.
Elon calls the whole-brain interface and its many capabilities a “digital tertiary layer,” a term that has two levels of meaning that correspond to our two mind-bending ideas above.
The first meaning gets at the idea of physical brain parts. We discussed three layers of brain parts—the brain stem (run by the frog), the limbic system (run by the monkey), and the cortex (run by the rational thinker). We were being thorough, but for the rest of this post, we’re going to leave the frog out of the discussion, since he’s entirely functional and lives mostly behind the scenes.
When Elon refers to a “digital tertiary layer,” he’s considering our existing brain having two layers—our animal limbic system (which could be called our primary layer) and our advanced cortex (which could be called our secondary layer). The wizard hat interface, then, would be our tertiary layer—a new physical brain part to complement the other two.
If thinking about this concept is giving you the willies, Elon has news for you:
 We already have a digital tertiary layer in a sense, in that you have your computer or your phone or your applications. You can ask a question via Google and get an answer instantly. You can access any book or any music. With a spreadsheet, you can do incredible calculations. If you had an Empire State building filled with people—even if they had calculators, let alone if they had to do it with a pencil and paper—one person with a laptop could outdo the Empire State Building filled with people with calculators. You can video chat with someone in freaking Timbuktu for free. This would’ve gotten you burnt for witchcraft in the old days. You can record as much video with sound as you want, take a zillion pictures, have them tagged with who they are and when it took place. You can broadcast communications through social media to millions of people simultaneously for free. These are incredible superpowers that the President of the United States didn’t have twenty years ago. 
 The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything. 
This is a hard point to really absorb, because we don’t feel like cyborgs. We feel like humans who use devices to do things. But think about your digital self—you when you’re interacting with someone on the internet or over FaceTime or when you’re in a YouTube video. Digital you is fully you—as much as in-person you is you—right? The only difference is that you’re not there in person—you’re using magic powers to send yourself to somewhere far away, at light speed, through wires and satellites and electromagnetic waves. The difference is the medium.
Before language, there wasn’t a good way to get a thought from your brain into my brain. Then early humans invented the technology of language, transforming vocal cords and ears into the world’s first communication devices and air as the first communication medium. We use these devices every time we talk to each other in person. It goes:
   
Then we built upon that with another leap, inventing a second layer of devices, with its own medium, allowing us to talk long distance:
   
Or maybe:
   
In that sense, your phone is as much “you” as your vocal cords or your ears or your eyes. All of these things are simply tools to move thoughts from brain to brain—so who cares if the tool is held in your hand, your throat, or your eye sockets? The digital age has made us a dual entity—a physical creature who interacts with its physical environment using its biological parts and a digital creature whose digital devices—whose digital parts—allow it to interact with the digital world.
But because we don’t think of it like that, we’d consider someone with a phone in their head or throat a cyborg and someone else with a phone in their hand, pressed up against their head, not a cyborg. Elon’s point is that the thing that makes a cyborg a cyborg is their capabilities—not from which side of the skull those capabilities are generated.
We’re already a cyborg, we already have superpowers, and we already spend a huge part of our lives in the digital world. And when you think of it like that, you realize how obvious it is to want to upgrade the medium that connects us to that world. This is the change Elon believes is actually happening when the magic goes into our brains:
 You’re already digitally superhuman. The thing that would change is the interface—having a high-bandwidth interface to your digital enhancements. The thing is that today, the interface all necks down to this tiny straw, which is, particularly in terms of output, it’s like poking things with your meat sticks, or using words—either speaking or tapping things with fingers. And in fact, output has gone backwards. It used to be, in your most frequent form, output would be ten-finger typing. Now, it’s like, two-thumb typing.  That’s crazy slow communication. We should be able to improve that by many orders of magnitude with a direct neural interface. 
In other words, putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.
A whole-brain interface is that upgrade. It changes us from creatures whose primary and secondary layers live inside their heads and whose tertiary layer lives in their pocket, in their hand, or on their desk—
   
—to creatures whose three layers all live together.
   
Your life is full of devices, including the one you’re currently using to read this. A wizard hat makes your brain into the device, allowing your thoughts to go straight from your head into the digital world.
Which doesn’t only revolutionize human-computer communication.
Right now humans communicate with each other like this:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
And that’s how it’s been ever since we could communicate. But in a wizard hat world, it would look more like this:
   
   
   
Elon always emphasizes bandwidth when he talks about Neuralink’s wizard hat goals. Interface bandwidth allows incoming images to be HD, incoming sound to be hi-fi, and motor movement commands to be tightly controlled—but it’s also a huge factor in communication. If information were a milkshake, bandwidth would be the width of the straw. Today, the bandwidth-of-communication graph looks something like this:
     
So computers can suck up the milkshake through a giant pipe, a human thinking would be using a large, pleasant-to-use straw, while language would be a frustratingly tiny coffee stirrer straw and typing (let alone texting) would be like trying to drink a milkshake through a syringe needle—you might be able to get a drop out once a minute.
Moran Cerf has gathered data on the actual bandwidth of different parts of the nervous system and on this graph, he compares them to equivalent bandwidths in the computer world:
   
You can see here on Moran’s graph that the disparity in bandwidth between the ways we communicate and our thinking (which is at 30 bits/second on this graph) is even starker than my graph above depicts.
But making our brains the device cuts out those tiny straws, turning all of these:
   
To this:
   
Which preserves all the meaning with none of the fuss—and changes the graph to this:
   
We’d still be using straws, but far bigger, more effective ones.
But it’s not just about the speed of communication. As Elon points out, it’s about the nuance and accuracy of communication as well:
 There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is—your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you. … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person. 
This makes sense—nuance is like a high-resolution thought, which makes the file simply too big to transfer quickly through a coffee straw. The coffee straw gives you two bad options when it comes to nuance: take a lot of time saying a lot of words to really depict the nuanced thought or imagery you want to convey to me, or save time by using succinct language—but inevitably fail to transfer over the nuance. Compounding the effect is the fact that language itself is a low-resolution medium. A word is simply an approximation of a thought—buckets that a whole category of similar-but-distinct thoughts can all be shoved into. If I watch a horror movie and want to describe it to you in words, I’m stuck with a few simple low-res buckets—“scary” or “creepy” or “chilling” or “intense.” My actual impression of that movie is very specific and not exactly like any other movie I’ve seen—but the crude tools of language force my brain to “round to the nearest bucket” and choose the word that most closely resembles my actual impression, and that’s the information you’ll receive from me. You won’t receive the thought—you’ll receive the bucket—and now you’ll have to guess which of the many nuanced impressions that all approximate to that bucket is the most similar to my impression of the movie. You’ll decompress my description—“scary as shit”—into a high-res, nuanced thought that you associate with “scary as shit,” which will inevitably be based on your own experience watching other horror movies, and your own personality. The end result is that a lot has been lost in translation—which is exactly what you’d expect when you try to transfer a high-res file over a low-bandwidth medium, quickly, using low-res tools. That’s why Elon calls language data transfer “lossy.”
We do the best we can with these limitations—and over time, we’ve supplemented language with slightly higher-resolution formats like video to better convey nuanced imagery, or music to better convey nuanced emotion. But compared to the richness and uniqueness of the ideas in our heads, and the large-bandwidth straw our internal thoughts flow through, all human-to-human communication is very lossy.
Thinking about the phenomenon of communication as what it is—brains trying to share things with each other—you see the history of communication not as this:
   
As much as this:
   
Or it could be put this way:
   
It really may be that the second major era of communication—the 100,000-year Era of Indirect Communication—is in its very last moments. If we zoom out on the timeline, it’s possible the entire last 150 years, during which we’ve suddenly been rapidly improving our communication media, will look to far-future humans like one concept: the transition from Era 2 to Era 3. We might be living on the line that divides timeline sections.
   
And because indirect communication requires third-party body parts or digital parts, the end of Era 2 may be looked back upon as the era of physical devices. In an era where your brain is the device, there will be no need to carry anything around. You’ll have your body and, if you want, clothes—and that’s it.
When Elon thinks about wizard hats, this is usually the stuff he’s thinking about—communication bandwidth and resolution. And we’ll explore why in Part 6 of this post.
First, let’s dig into the mind-boggling concept of your brain becoming a device and talk about what a wizard hat world might be like.
___________
One thing to keep in mind as we think about all of this is that none of it will take you by surprise. You won’t go from having nothing in your brain to a digital tertiary layer in your head, just like people didn’t go from the Apple IIGS to using Tinder overnight. The Wizard Era will come gradually, and by the time the shift actually begins to happen, we’ll all be very used to the technology, and it’ll seem normal.
Supporting this point is the fact the staircase up to the Wizard Era has already started, and you haven’t even noticed. But there are thousands of people currently walking around with electrodes in their brain, like those with cochlear implants, retinal implants, and deep brain implants—all benefiting from early BMIs.
The next few steps on the staircase will continue to focus on restoring lost function in different parts of the body—the first people to have their lives transformed by digital brain technology will be the disabled. As specialized BMIs serve more and more forms of disability, the concept of brain implants will work its way in from the fringes and become something we’re all used to—just like no one blinks an eye when you say your friend just got Lasik surgery or your grandmother just got a pacemaker installed.
Elon talks about some types of people early BMIs could help:
 The first use of the technology will be to repair brain injuries as a result of stroke or cutting out a cancer lesion, where somebody’s fundamentally lost a certain cognitive element. It could help with people who are quadriplegics or paraplegics by providing a neural shunt from the motor cortex down to where the muscles are activated. It can help with people who, as they get older, have memory problems and can’t remember the names of their kids, through memory enhancement, which could allow them to function well to a much later time in life—the medically advantageous elements of this for dealing with mental disablement of one kind or another, which of course happens to all of us when we get old enough, are very significant. 
As someone who lost a grandfather to dementia five years before losing him to death, I’m excited to hear this.
And as interface bandwidth improves, disabilities that hinder millions today will start to drop like flies. The concepts of complete blindness and deafness—whether centered in the sensory organs or in the brain31—are already on the way out. And with enough time, perfect vision or hearing will be restorable.
Prosthetic limbs—and eventually sleek, full-body exoskeletons underneath your clothes—will work so well, providing both outgoing motor functions and an incoming sense of touch, that paralysis or amputations will only have a minor long-term effect on people’s lives.
In Alzheimer’s patients, memories themselves are often not lost—only the bridge to those memories. Advanced BMIs could help restore that bridge or serve as a new one.
While this is happening, BMIs will begin to emerge that people without disabilities want. The very early adopters will probably be pretty rich. But so were the early cell phone adopters.52
    
That’s Gordon Gekko, and that 1983, two-pound cell phone cost almost $9,000 in today’s dollars. And now over half of living humans own a mobile phone—all of them far less shitty than Gordon Gekko’s.
As mobile phones got cheaper, and better, they went from new and fancy and futuristic to ubiquitous. As we go down the same road with brain interfaces, things are going to get really cool.
Based on what I learned from my conversations with Elon, Ramez, and a dozen neuroscientists, let’s look at what the world might look like in a few decades. The timeline is uncertain, including the order in which the below developments may become a reality. And, of course, some of the below predictions are sure to be way off the mark, just as there will be other developments in this field that won’t be mentioned here because people today literally can’t imagine them yet.
But some version of a lot of this stuff probably will happen, at some point, and a lot of it could be in your lifetime.
Looking at all the predictions I heard, they seemed to fall into two broad categories: communication capabilities and internal enhancements.
 The Wizard Era: Communication 
   
 Motor communication 
“Communication” in this section can mean human-to-human or human-to-computer. Motor communication is all about human-to-computer—the whole “motor cortex as remote control” thing from earlier, but now the unbelievably rad version.
Like many future categories of brain interface possibility, motor communication will start with restoration applications for the disabled, and as those development efforts continually advance the possibilities, the technology will begin to be used to create augmentation applications for the non-disabled as well. The same technologies that will allow a quadriplegic to use their thoughts as a remote control to move a bionic limb can let anyone use their thoughts as a remote control…to move anything. Well not anything—I’m not talking about telekinesis—anything built to be used with a brain remote. But in the Wizard Era, lots of things will be built that way.
Your car (or whatever people use for transportation at that point) will pull up to your house and your mind will open the car door. You’ll walk up to the house and your mind will unlock and open the front door (all doors at that point will be built with sensors to receive motor cortex commands). You’ll think about wanting coffee and the coffee maker will get that going. As you head to the fridge the door will open and after getting what you need it’ll close as you walk away. When it’s time for bed, you’ll decide you want the heat turned down and the lights turned off, and those systems will feel you make that decision and adjust themselves.
None of this stuff will take any effort or thought—we’ll all get very good at it and it’ll feel as automatic and subconscious as moving your eyes to read this sentence does to you now.
People will play the piano with their thoughts. And do building construction. And steer vehicles. In fact, today, if you’re driving somewhere and something jumps out in the road in front of you, what neuroscientists know is that your brain sees it and begins to react well before your consciousness knows what’s going on or your arms move to steer out of the way. But when your brain is the one steering the car, you’ll have swerved out of the way before you even realize what happened.
 Thought communication 
This is what we discussed up above—but you have to resist the natural instinct to equate a thought conversation with a normal language conversation where you simply hear each other’s voices in your head. As we discussed, words are compressed approximations of uncompressed thoughts, so why would you ever bother with any of that, or deal with lossiness, if you didn’t have to? When you watch a movie, your head is buzzing with thoughts—but do you have a compressed spoken word dialogue going on in your head? Probably not—you’re just thinking. Thought conversations will be like that.
Elon says:
 If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now. 
That’s the thing—it’s difficult to really understand what it would be like to think with someone. We’ve never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that’s all we can imagine.
Even weirder is the concept of a group thinking together. This is what a group brainstorm could look like in the Wizard Era.
   
           
   
And of course, they wouldn’t need to be in the same room. This group could have been in four different countries while this was happening—with no external devices in sight.
Ramez has written about the effect group thinking might have on the world:
 That type of communication would have a huge impact on the pace of innovation, as scientists and engineers could work more fluidly together. And it’s just as likely to have a transformative effect on the public sphere, in the same way that email, blogs, and Twitter have successively changed public discourse. 
The idea of collaboration today is supposed to be two or more brains working together to come up with things none of them could have on their own. And a lot of the time, it works pretty well—but when you consider the “lost in transmission” phenomenon that happens with language, you realize how much more effective group thinking would be.
I asked Elon a question that pops into everyone’s mind when they first hear about thought communication:
“So, um, will everyone be able to know what I’m thinking?”
He assured me they would not. “People won’t be able to read your thoughts—you would have to will it. If you don’t will it, it doesn’t happen. Just like if you don’t will your mouth to talk, it doesn’t talk.” Phew.
You can also think with a computer. Not just to issue a command, but to actually brainstorm something with a computer. You and a computer could strategize something together. You could compose a piece of music together. Ramez talked about using a computer as an imagination collaborator: “You could imagine something, and the computer, which can better forward predict or analyze physical models, could fill in constraints—and that allows you to get feedback.”
One concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts I talked to believed it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it served us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality. Think of how much easier it is for people today to express their individuality and customize life to themselves than it was 50 or 100 or 500 years ago. There’s no reason to believe that trend won’t continue with more progress.
 Multimedia communication 
Similar to thought communication, but imagine how much easier it would be to describe a dream you had or a piece of music stuck in your head or a memory you’re thinking about if you could just beam the thing into someone’s head, like showing them on your computer screen. Or as Elon said, “I could think of a bouquet of flowers and have a very clear picture in my head of what that is. It would take a lot of words for you to even have an approximation of what that bouquet of flowers looks like.”
How much faster could a team of engineers or architects or designers plan out a new bridge or a new building or a new dress if they could beam the vision in their head onto a screen and others could adjust it with their minds, versus sketching things out—which not only takes far longer, but probably is inevitably lossy?
How many symphonies could Mozart have written if he had been able to think the music in his head onto the page? How many Mozarts are out there right now who never learned how to play instruments well enough to get their talent out?
I watched this delightful animated short movie the other day, and below the video the creator, Felix Colgrave, said the video took him two years. How much of that time was spent dreaming up the art versus painstakingly getting it from his head into the software? Maybe in a few decades, I’ll be able to watch animation streaming live out of Felix’s head.
 Emotional communication 
Emotions are the quintessential example of a concept that words are poorly-equipped to accurately describe. If ten people say, “I’m sad,” it actually means ten different things. In the Wizard Era, we’ll probably learn pretty quickly that the specific emotions people feel are as unique to people as their appearance or sense of humor.
This could work as communication—when one person communicates just what they’re feeling, the other person would be able to access the feeling in their own emotional centers. Obvious implications for a future of heightened empathy. But emotional communication could also be used for things like entertainment, where a movie, say, could also project out to the audience—directly into their limbic systems—certain feelings it wants the audience to feel as they watch. This is already what the film score does—another hack—and now it could be done directly.
 Sensory communication 
This one is intense.
Right now, the only two microphones that can act as inputs for the “speaker” in your head—your auditory cortex—are your two ears. The only two cameras that can be hooked up to the projector in your head—your visual cortex—are your two eyes. The only sensory surface that you can feel is your skin. The only thing that lets you experience taste is your tongue.
But in the same way we can currently hook an implant, for example, into someone’s cochlea—which connects a different mic to their auditory cortex—down the road we’ll be able to let sensory input information stream into your wizard hat wirelessly, from anywhere, and channel right into your sensory cortices the same way your bodily sensory organs do today. In the future, sensory organs will be only one set of inputs into your senses—and compared to what our senses will have access to, not a very exciting one.
Now what about output?
Currently, the only speaker your ear inputs can play out of is your auditory cortex. Only you can see what your eye cameras capture and only you can feel what touches your skin—because only you have access to the particular cortices those inputs are wired to. With a wizard hat, it would be a breeze for your brain to beam those input signals out of your head.
So you’ll have sensory input capabilities and sensory output capabilities—or both at the same time. This will open up all kinds of amazing possibilities.
Say you’re on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem—just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he’s there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze and smells the trees and jumps when a bug lands on your arm. You two share the equivalent of a five-minute discussion about the scene—your favorite parts, which other places it reminds you of, etc. along with a shared story from his day—in a 30-second thought session. He says he has to get back to what he was working on, so he cuts off the sense connections except for vision, which he reduces to a little picture-in-picture window on the side of his visual field so he can check out more of the hike from time to time.
A surgeon could control a machine scalpel with her motor cortex instead of holding one in her hand, and she could receive sensory input from that scalpel so that it would feel like an 11th finger to her. So it would be as if one of her fingers was a scalpel and she could do the surgery without holding any tools, giving her much finer control over her incisions. An inexperienced surgeon performing a tough operation could bring a couple of her mentors into the scene as she operates to watch her work through her eyes and think instructions or advice to her. And if something goes really wrong, one of them could “take the wheel” and connect their motor cortex to her outputs to take control of her hands.
There would be no more need for screens of course—because you could just make a virtual screen appear in your visual cortex. Or jump into a VR movie with all your senses. Speaking of VR—Facebook, the maker of the Oculus Rift, is diving into this too. In an interview with Mark Zuckerberg about VR (for an upcoming post), the conversation at one point turned to BMIs. He said: “Touch gives you input and it’s a little bit of haptic feedback. Over the long term, it’s not clear that we won’t just like to have our hands in no controller, and maybe, instead of having buttons that we press, we would just think something.”
The ability to record sensory input means you can also record your memories, or share them—since a memory in the first place is just a not-so-accurate playback of previous sensory input. Or you could play them back as live experiences. In other words, that Black Mirror episode will probably actually happen.
An NBA player could send out a livestream invitation to his fans before a game, which would let them see and hear through his eyes and ears while he plays. Those who miss it could jump into the recording later.
You could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later—or, if you’re not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience. (Needless to say, the porn industry will thrive in the digital brain world.)
Right now, you can go on YouTube and watch a first-hand account of almost anything, for free. This would have blown George Washington’s mind—but in the Wizard Era, you’ll be able to actually experience almost anything for free. The days of fancy experiences being limited to rich people will be long over.
Another idea, via the imagination of Moran Cerf: Maybe player brain injuries will drive the NFL to alter the rules so that the players’ biological bodies stay on the sidelines, while they play the game with an artificial body whose motor cortex they control and whose eyes and ears they see and hear through. I like this idea and think it would be closer to the current NFL than it seems at first. In one way, you’ll still need to be a great athlete to play, since most of what makes a great athlete great is their motor cortex, their muscle memory, and their decision-making. But the other component of being a great athlete—the physical body itself—would now be artificial. The NFL could make all of the artificial playing bodies identical—this would be a cool way to see whose skills were actually best—or they could insist that artificial body matches in every way the biological body of the athlete, to mimic as closely as possible how the game would go if players used their biological bodies like in the old days. Either way, if this rule change happened, you can imagine how crazy it would seem to people that players used to have their actual, fragile brains on the field.
I could go on. The communication possibilities in a wizard hat world, especially when you combine them with each other, are endless—and damn fun to think about.
 The Wizard Era: Internal Control 
   
Communication—the flow of information into and out of your brain—is only one way your wizard hat will be able to serve you.
A whole-brain interface can stimulate any part of your brain in any way—it has to have this capability for the input half of all the communication examples above. But that capability also gives you a whole new level of control over your brain. Here are some ways people of the future might take advantage of that:
 Win the battle in your head for both sides 
Often, the battle in our heads between our prefrontal cortex and limbic system comes down to the fact that both parties are trying to do what’s best for us—it’s just that our limbic system is wrong about what’s best for us because it thinks we live in a tribe 50,000 years ago.
Your limbic system isn’t making you eat your ninth Starburst candy in a row because it’s a dick—it’s making you eat it because it thinks that A) any fruit that sweet and densely chewy must be super rich in calories and B) you might not find food again for the next four days so it’s a good idea to load up on a high-calorie food whenever the opportunity arises.
Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex is just watching in horror like “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS.”
But Moran believes that a good brain interface could fix this problem:53
  Consider eating a chocolate cake. While eating, we feed data to our cognitive apparatus. These data provide the enjoyment of the cake. The enjoyment isn’t in the cake, per se, but in our neural experience of it. Decoupling our sensory desire (the experience of cake) from the underlying survival purpose (nutrition) will soon be within our reach. 
This concept of “sensory decoupling” would make so much sense if we could pull it off. You could get the enjoyment of eating like shit without actually putting shit in your body. Instead, Moran says, what would go in your body would be “nutrition inputs customized for each person based on genomes, microbiomes or other factors. Physical diets released from the tyranny of desire.”54
 The same principle could apply to things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and other pleasures that get people into trouble, healthwise or otherwise.
Ramez Naam talks about how a brain interface could also help us win the discipline battle when it comes to time:55
  We know that stimulating the right centers in the brain can induce sleep or alertness, hunger or satiation, ease or stimulation, as quick as the flip of a switch. Or, if you’re running code, on a schedule. (Siri: Put me to sleep until 7:30, high priority interruptions only. And let’s get hungry for lunch around noon. Turn down the sugar cravings, though.) 
 Take control of mood disorders 
Ramez also emphasized that a great deal of scientific evidence suggests that moods and disorders are tied to what the chemicals in your brain are doing. Right now, we take drugs to alter those chemicals, and Ramez explains why direct neural stimulation is a far better option:56
  Pharmaceuticals enter the brain and then spread out randomly, hitting whatever receptor they work on all across your brain. Neural interfaces, by contrast, can stimulate just one area at a time, can be tuned in real-time, and can carry information out about what’s happening. 
Depression, anxiety, OCD, and other disorders may be easy to eradicate once we can take better control of what goes on in our brain.
 Mess with your senses 
Want to hear what a dog hears? That’s easy. The pitch range we can hear is limited by the dimensions of our cochlea—but pitches out of the ear’s range can be sent straight into our auditory nerve.32
 Or maybe you want a new sense. You love bird watching and want to be able to sense when there’s a bird nearby. So you buy an infrared camera that can detect bird locations by their heat signals and you link it to your brain interface, which stimulates neurons in a certain way to alert you to the presence of a bird and tell you its location. I can’t describe what you’d experience when it alerts you, so I’ll just say words like “feel” or “see,” because I can only imagine the five senses we have. But in the future, there will be more words for new, useful types of senses.
You could also dim or shut off parts of a sense, like pain perhaps. Pain is the body’s way of telling us we need to address something, but in the future, we’ll elect to get that information in much less unpleasant formats.33
  Increase your knowledge  
There’s evidence from experiments with rats that it’s possible to boost how fast a brain can learn—sometimes by 2x or even 3x—just by priming certain neurons to prepare to make a long-term connection.
Your brain would also have access to all the knowledge in the world, at all times. I talked to Ramez about how accessing information in the cloud might work. We parsed it out into four layers of capability, each requiring a more advanced brain interface than the last:
 Level 1: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info—like Googling something with my brain—and the answer, in text, appears in my mind’s eye. Basically what I do now except it all happens in my head.
 Level 2: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info, and then a second later I just know it. No reading was involved—it was more like the way I’d recall something from memory.
 Level 3: I just know the fact I want to know the second I want it. I don’t even know if it came from the cloud or if it was stored in my brain. I can essentially treat the whole cloud like my brain. I don’t know all the info—my brain could never fit it all—but any time I want to know something it downloads into my consciousness so seamlessly and quickly, it’s as if it were there all along.
 Level 4: Beyond just knowing facts, I can deeply understand anything I want to, in a complex way. We discussed the example of Moby Dick. Could I download Moby Dick from the cloud into my memory and then suddenly have it be the same as if I had read the whole book? Where I’d have thoughts and opinions and I could cite passages and have discussions about the themes?
Ramez thinks all four of these are possible with enough time, but that the fourth in particular will take a very long time to happen, if ever.
So there are about 50 delightful potential things about putting a wizard hat on your brain. Now for the undelightful part.
 The scary thing about wizard hats 
As is always the case with the advent of new technologies, when the Wizard Era rolls around, the dicks of the world will do their best to ruin everything.
And this time, the stakes are extra high. Here are some things that could suck:
 Trolls can have an even fielder day. The troll-type personalities of the world have been having a field day ever since the internet came out. They literally can’t believe their luck. But with brain interfaces, they’ll have an even fielder day. Being more connected to each other means a lot of good things—like empathy going up as a result of more exposure to all kinds of people—but it also means a lot of bad things. Just like the internet. Bad guys will have more opportunity to spread hate or build hateful coalitions. The internet has been a godsend for ISIS, and a brain-connected world would be an even more helpful recruiting tool.
 Computers crash. And they have bugs. And normally that’s not the end of the world, because you can try restarting, and if it’s really being a piece of shit, you can just get a new computer. You can’t get a new head. There will have to be a way way higher number of precautions taken here.
 Computers can be hacked. Except this time they have access to your thoughts, sensory input, and memories. Bad times.
 Holy shit computers can be hacked. In the last item I was thinking about bad guys using hacking to steal information from my brain. But brain interfaces can also put information in. Meaning a clever hacker might be able to change your thoughts or your vote or your identity or make you want to do something terrible you normally wouldn’t ever consider. And you wouldn’t know it ever happened. You could feel strongly about voting for a candidate and a little part of you would wonder if someone manipulated your thoughts so you’d feel that way. The darkest possible scenario would be an ISIS-type organization actually influencing millions of people to join their cause by altering their thoughts. This is definitely the scariest paragraph in this post. Let’s get out of here.
 Why the Wizard Era will be a good thing anyway even though there are a lot of dicks 
Physics advancements allow bad guys to make nuclear bombs. Biological advancements allow bad guys to make bioweapons. The invention of cars and planes led to crashes that kill over a million people a year. The internet enabled the spread of fake news, made us vulnerable to cyberattack, made terrorist recruiting efforts easier, and allowed predators to flourish.
And yet—
Would people choose to reverse our understanding of science, go back to the days of riding horses across land and boats across the ocean, or get rid of the internet?
Probably not.
New technology also comes along with real dangers and it always does end up harming a lot of people. But it also always seems to help a lot more people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive.
People also love to hate the concept of new technology—because they worry it’s unhealthy and makes us less human. But those same people, if given the option, usually wouldn’t consider going back to George Washington’s time, when half of children died before the age of 5, when traveling to other parts of the world was impossible for almost everyone, when a far greater number of humanitarian atrocities were being committed than there are today, when women and ethnic minorities had far fewer rights across the world than they do today, when far more people were illiterate and far more people were living under the poverty line than there are today. They wouldn’t go back 250 years—a time right before the biggest explosion of technology in human history happened. Sounds like people who are immensely grateful for technology. And yet their opinion holds—our technology is ruining our lives, people in the old days were much wiser, our world’s going to shit, etc. I don’t think they’ve thought about it hard enough.
So when it comes to what will be a long list of dangers of the Wizard Era—they suck, and they’ll continue to suck as some of them play out into sickening atrocities and catastrophes. But a vastly larger group of good guys will wage war back, as they always do, and a giant “brain security” industry will be born. And I bet, if given the option, people in the Wizard Era wouldn’t for a second consider coming back to 2017.
___________
 The Timeline 
I always know when humanity doesn’t know what the hell is going on with something when all the experts are contradicting each other about it.34
 The timeline for our road to the Wizard Era is one of those times—in large part because no one knows to what extent we’ll be able to make Stevenson’s Law look more like Moore’s Law.
My conversations yielded a wide range of opinions on the timeline. One neuroscientist predicted that I’d have a whole-brain interface in my lifetime. Mark Zuckerberg said: “I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.” One prediction on the longer end came from Ramez Naam, who thought the time of people beginning to install BMIs for reasons other than disability might not come for 50 years and that mass adoption would take even longer.
“I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope that Elon bends the curve on this.”
When I asked Elon about his timeline, he said:
 I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities. 
During another discussion, I had asked him about why he went into this branch of biotech and not into genetics. He responded:
 Genetics is just too slow, that’s the problem. For a human to become an adult takes twenty years. We just don’t have that amount of time. 
A lot of people working on this challenge have a lot of different motivations for doing so, but rarely did I talk to people who felt motivated by urgency. 
Elon’s urgency to get us into the Wizard Era is the final piece of the Neuralink puzzle. Our last box to fill in:
   
With Elon’s companies, there’s always some “result of the goal” that’s his real reason for starting the company—the piece that ties the company’s goal into humanity’s better future. In the case of Neuralink, it’s a piece that takes a lot of tree climbing to understand. But with the view from all the way up here, we’ve got everything we need for our final stretch of the road.
 Part 6: The Great Merger 
   
Imagine an alien explorer is visiting a new star and finds three planets circling it, all with life on them. The first happens to be identical to the way Earth was in 10 million BC. The second happens to be identical to Earth in 50,000 BC. And the third happens to be identical to Earth in 2017 AD.
The alien is no expert on primitive biological life but circles around all three planets, peering down at each with his telescope. On the first, he sees lots of water and trees and mountains and some little signs of animal life. He makes out a herd of elephants on an African plain, a group of dolphins skipping along the ocean’s surface, and a few other scattered critters living out their Tuesday.
He moves on to the second planet and looks around. More critters, not too much different. He notices one new thing—occasional little points of flickering light dotting the land.
Bored, he moves on to the third planet. Whoa. He sees planes crawling around above the land, vast patches of gray land with towering buildings on them, ships of all kinds sprinkled across the seas, long railways stretching across continents, and he has to jerk his spaceship out of the way when a satellite soars by him.
When he heads home, he reports on what he found: “Two planets with primitive life and one planet with intelligent life.”
You can understand why that would be his conclusion—but he’d be wrong.
In fact, it’s the first planet that’s the odd one out. Both the second and third planets have intelligent life on them—equally intelligent life. So equal that you could kidnap a newborn baby from Planet 2 and swap it with a newborn on Planet 3 and both would grow up as normal people on the other’s planet, fitting in seamlessly. Same people.
And yet, how could that be?
   
The Human Colossus. That’s how.
Ever wonder why you’re so often unimpressed by humans and yet so blown away by the accomplishments of humanity?
It’s because humans are still, deep down, those people on Planet 2.
Plop a baby human into a group of chimps and ask them to raise him, Tarzan style, and the human as an adult will know how to run around the forest, climb trees, find food, and masturbate. That’s who each of us actually is.
 Humanity, on the other hand, is a superintelligent, tremendously-knowledgeable, millennia-old Colossus, with 7.5 billion neurons. And that’s who built Planet 3.
The invention of language allowed each human brain to dump its knowledge onto a pile before its death, and the pile became a tower and grew taller and taller until one day, it became the brain of a great Colossus that built us a civilization. The Human Colossus has been inventing things ever since, getting continually better at it with time. Driven only by the desire to create value, the Colossus is now moving at an unprecedented pace—which is why we live in an unprecedented and completely anomalous time in history.
You know how I said we might be living literally on the line between two vast eras of communication?
Well the truth is, we seem to be on a lot of historic timeline boundaries. After 1,000 centuries of human life and 3.8 billion years of Earthly life, it seems like this century will be the one where Earth life makes the leap from the Single-Planetary Era to the Multi-Planetary Era. This century may be the one when an Earthly species finally manages to wrest the genetic code from the forces of evolution and learns to reprogram itself. People alive today could witness the moment when biotechnology finally frees the human lifespan from the will of nature and hands it over to the will of each individual.
The Human Colossus has reached an entirely new level of power—the kind of power that can overthrow 3.8-billion-year eras—positioning us on the verge of multiple tipping points that will lead to unimaginable change. And if our alien friend finds a fourth planet one day that happens to be identical to Earth in 2100, you can be pretty damn sure it’ll look nothing to him like Planet 3.
I hope you enjoyed Planet 3, because we’re leaving it. Planet 4 is where we’re headed, whether we like it or not.
   
__________
If I had to sum up the driving theme behind everything Elon Musk does, it would be pretty simple:
He wants to prepare us for Planet 4.
He lives in the big picture, and his only lens is the maximum zoom-out. That’s why he’s such an unusual visionary. It’s also why he’s so worried.
It’s not that he thinks Planet 4 is definitely a bad place—it’s that he thinks it could be a bad place, and he recognizes that the generations alive today, whether they realize it or not, are the first in history to face real, hardcore existential risk.
At the same time, the people alive today also are the first who can live with the actually realistic hope for a genuinely utopian future—one that defies even death and taxes. Planet 4 could be our promised land.
When you zoom way out, you realize how unfathomably high the stakes actually are.
And the outcome isn’t at the whim of chance—it’s at the whim of the Human Colossus. Planet 4 is only coming because the Colossus is building it. And whether that future is like heaven or hell depends on what the Colossus does—maybe over the next 150 years, maybe over only the next 50. Or 25.
But the unfortunate thing is that the Human Colossus isn’t optimized to maximize the chances of a safe transition to the best possible Planet 4 for the most possible humans—it’s optimized to build Planet 4, in any way possible, as quickly as possible.
Understanding all of this, Elon has dedicated his life to trying to influence the Human Colossus to bring its motivation more in line with the long-term interests of humans. He knows it’s not possible to rewire the Human Colossus—not unless existential risk were suddenly directly in front of each human’s face, which normally doesn’t happen until it’s already too late—so he treats the Colossus like a pet.
If you want your dog to sit, you correlate sitting on command with getting a treat. For the Human Colossus, a treat is a ripe new industry simultaneously exploding in both supply and demand.
Elon saw the Human Colossus dog peeing on the floor in the form of continually adding ancient, deeply-buried carbon into the carbon cycle—and rather than plead with the Colossus to stop peeing on the floor (which a lot of people waste their breath doing) or try to threaten the Colossus into behaving (which governments try to do, with limited success), he’s creating an electric car so rad that everyone will want one. The auto industry sees the shift in consumer preferences this is beginning to create, and in the nine years since Tesla released its first car, the number of major car companies with an electric car in their line went from zero to almost all of them. The Colossus seems to be taking the treat, and a change in behavior may follow.
Elon saw the Human Colossus dog running into traffic in the form of humanity keeping all of its eggs on one planet, despite all of those tipping points on the horizon, so he built SpaceX to learn to land a rocket, which will cut the cost of space travel by about 99% and make dedicating resources to the space industry a much tastier morsel for the Colossus. His plan with Mars isn’t to try to convince humanity that it’s a good idea to build a civilization there in order to buy life insurance for the species—it’s to create an affordable regular cargo and human transit route to Mars, knowing that once that happens, there will be enough value-creation opportunity in Mars development that the Colossus will become determined to make it happen.
But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think. To Elon, and many others, the development of superintelligent AI poses by far the greatest existential threat to humanity. It’s not that hard to see why. Intelligence gives us godlike powers over all other creatures on Earth—which has not been a fun time for the creatures. If any of their body parts are possible value creators, we have major industries processing and selling those body parts. We sometimes kill them for sport. But we’re probably the least fun all the times we’re just doing our thing, for our own reasons, with no hate in our hearts or desire to hurt anyone, and there are creatures, or ecosystems, that just happen to be in our way or in the line of fire of the side effects of what we’re doing. People like to get all mad at humanity about this, but really, we’re just doing what species do—being selfish, first and foremost.
The issue for other creatures isn’t our selfishness—it’s the immense damage our selfishness can do because of the tremendous power we have over them. Power that comes from our intelligence advantage.
So it’s pretty logical to be apprehensive about the prospect of intentionally creating something that will have (perhaps far) more intelligence than we do—especially since every human on the planet is an amateur at creating something like that, because no one has ever done it before.
And things are progressing quickly. Elon talked about the rapid progress made by Google’s game-playing AI:
 I mean, you’ve got these two things where AlphaGo crushes these human players head-on-head, beats Lee Sedol 4 out of 5 games and now it will beat a human every game all the time, while playing the 50 best players, and beating them always, all the time. You know, that’s like one year later.  
 And it’s on a harmless thing like AlphaGo right now. But the degrees of freedom at which the AI can win are increasing. So, Go has many more degrees of freedom than Chess, but if you take something like one of the real-time strategy competitive games like League of Legends or Dota 2, that has vastly more degrees of freedom than Go, so it can’t win at that yet. But it will be able to. And then there’s reality, which has the ultimate number of degrees of freedom. 35
 And for reasons discussed above, that kind of thing worries him:
 What I came to realize in recent years—the last couple years—is that AI is obviously going to surpass human intelligence by a lot. … There’s some risk at that point that something bad happens, something that we can’t control, that humanity can’t control after that point—either a small group of people monopolize AI power, or the AI goes rogue, or something like that. It may not, but it could. 
But in typical Human Colossus form, “the collective will is not attuned to the danger of AI.”
When I interviewed Elon in 2015, I asked him if he would ever join the effort to build superintelligent AI. He said, “My honest opinion is that we shouldn’t build it.” And when I later commented that building something smarter than yourself did seem like a basic Darwinian error (a phrase I stole from Nick Bostrom), Elon responded, “We’re gonna win the Darwin Award, collectively.”
Now, two years later, here’s what he says:
 I was trying to really sound the alarm on the AI front for quite a while, but it was clearly having no impact (laughs) so I was like, “Oh fine, okay, then we’ll have to try to help develop it in a way that’s good.” 
He’s accepted reality—the Human Colossus is not going to quit until the Computer Colossus, one day, wakes up. This is happening.
   
No matter what anyone tells you, no one knows what will happen when the Computer Colossus learns to think. In my long AI explainer, I explored the reasoning of both those who are convinced that superintelligent AI will be the solution to every problem we have, and those who see humanity as a bunch of kids playing with a bomb they don’t understand. I’m personally still torn about which camp I find more convincing, but it seems pretty rational to plan for the worst and do whatever we can to increase our odds. Many experts agree with that logic, but there’s little consensus on the best strategy for creating superintelligent AI safely—just a whole lot of ideas from people who acknowledge they don’t really know the answer. How could anyone know how to take precautions for a future world they have no way to understand?
Elon also acknowledges he doesn’t know the answer—but he’s working on a plan he thinks will give us our best shot.
 Elon’s Plan 
Abraham Lincoln was pleased with himself when he came up with the line:
 —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 
Fair—it’s a good line.
The whole idea of “of the people, by the people, for the people” is the centerpiece of democracy.
Unfortunately, “the people” are unpleasant. So democracy ends up being unpleasant. But unpleasant tends to be a dream compared to the alternatives. Elon talked about this:
 I think that the protection of the collective is important. I think it was Churchill who said, “Democracy’s the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others.” It’s fine if you have Plato’s incredible philosopher king as the king, sure. That would be fine. Now, most dictators do not turn out that way. They tend to be quite horrible. 
In other words, democracy is like escaping from a monster by hiding in a sewer.
There are plenty of times in life when it’s a good strategy to take a risk in order to give yourself a chance for the best possible outcome, but when the stakes are at their absolute highest, the right move is usually to play it safe. Power is one of those times. That’s why, even though democracy essentially guarantees a certain level of mediocrity, Elon says, “I think you’re hard-pressed to find many people in the United States who, no matter what they think of any given president, would advocate for a dictatorship.”
And since Elon sees AI as the ultimate power, he sees AI development as the ultimate “play it safe” situation. Which is why his strategy for minimizing existential AI risk seems to essentially be that AI power needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people.
To try to implement that concept in the realm of AI, Elon has approached the situation from multiple angles.
For the by the people and for the people  parts, he and Sam Altman created OpenAI—a self-described “non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.”
Normally, when humanity is working on something new, it starts with the work of a few innovative pioneers. When they succeed, an industry is born and the Human Colossus jumps on board to build upon what the pioneers started, en masse.
But what if the thing those pioneers were working on was a magic wand that might give whoever owned it immense, unbreakable power over everyone else—including the power to prevent anyone else from making a magic wand? That would be kinda stressful, right?
Well that’s how Elon views today’s early AI development efforts. And since he can’t stop people from trying to make a magic wand, his solution is to create an open, collaborative, transparent magic wand development lab. When a new breakthrough innovation is discovered in the lab, instead of making it a tightly-kept secret like the other magic wand companies, the lab publishes the innovation for anyone to see or borrow for their own magic-wand-making efforts.
On one hand, this could have drawbacks. Bad guys are out there trying to make a magic wand too, and you really don’t want the first magic wand to end up in the hands of a bad guy. And now the bad guys’ development efforts can benefit from all of the innovations being published by the lab. This is a serious concern.
But the lab also boosts the efforts of millions of other people trying to create magic wands. This generates a ton of competition for the secretive early pioneers, and it becomes less likely that any one inventor can create a magic wand long before others also do. More likely is that when the first magic wand is eventually created, there are thousands of others near completion as well—different wands, with different capabilities, made by different people, for different reasons. If we have to have magic wands on Earth, Elon thinks, let’s at least make sure they’re in the hands of a large number of people across the world—not one all-powerful sorcerer. Or as he puts it:
 Essentially, if everyone’s from planet Krypton, that’s great. But if only one of them is Superman and Superman also has the personality of Hitler, then we’ve got a problem. 
More broadly, a single pioneer’s magic wand would likely have been built to serve that inventor’s own needs and purposes. But by turning the future magic wand industry into a collective effort, a wide variety of needs and purposes will have a wand made for them, making it more likely that the capabilities of the world’s aggregate mass of magic wands will overarchingly represent the needs of the masses.
You know, like democracy.
It worked fine for Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers and Alan Turing to jump-start revolutions by jumping way out ahead of the pack. But when you’re dealing with the invention of something unthinkably powerful, you can’t sit back and let the pioneers kick things off—it’s leaving too much to chance.
OpenAI is an effort to democratize the creation of AI, to get the entire Human Colossus working on it during its pioneer phase. Elon sums it up:
 AI is definitely going to vastly surpass human abilities. To the degree that it is linked to human will, particularly the sum of a large number of humans, it would be an outcome that is desired by a large number of humans, because it would be a function of their will. 
So now you’ve maybe got early human-level-or-higher AI superpower being made by the people, for the people—which brings down the likelihood that the world’s AI ends up in the hands of a single bad guy or a tightly-controlled monopoly.
Now all we’ve got left is of the people. 
This one should be easy. Remember, the Human Colossus is creating superintelligent AI for the same reason it created cars, factory machines, and computers—to serve as an extension of itself to which it can outsource work. Cars do our walking, factory machines do our manufacturing, and computers take care of information storage, organization, and computation.
Creating computers that can think will be our greatest invention yet—they’ll allow us to outsource our most important and high-impact work. Thinking is what built everything we have, so just imagine the power that will come from building ourselves a superintelligent thinking extension. And extensions of the people by definition belong to the people—they’re of the people.
There’s just this one thing—
High-caliber AI isn’t quite like those other inventions. The rest of our technology is great at the thing it’s built to do, but in the end, it’s a mindless machine with narrow intelligence. The AI we’re trying to build will be smart, like a person—like a ridiculously smart person. It’s a fundamentally different thing than we’ve ever made before—so why would we expect normal rules to apply?
It’s always been an automatic thing that the technology we make inherently belongs to us—it’s such an obvious point that it almost seems silly to make it. But could it be that if we make something smarter than a person, it might not be so easy to control?
Could it be that a creation that’s better at thinking than any human on Earth might not be fully content to serve as a human extension, even if that’s what it was built to do?
We don’t know how issues will actually manifest—but it seems pretty safe to say that yes, these possibilities could be. 
And if what could be turns out to actually be, we may have a serious problem on our hands.
Because, as the human history case study suggests, when there’s something on the planet way smarter than everyone else, it can be a really bad thing for everyone else. And if AI becomes the new thing on the planet that’s way smarter than everyone else, and it turns out not to clearly belong to us—it means that it’s its own thing. Which drops us into the category of “everyone else.”
So people gaining monopolistic control of AI is its own problem—and one that OpenAI is hoping to solve. But it’s a problem that may pale in comparison to the prospect of AI being uncontrollable.
This is what keeps Elon up at night. He sees it as only a matter of time before superintelligent AI rises up on this planet—and when that happens, he believes that it’s critical that we don’t end up as part of “everyone else.”
That’s why, in a future world made up of AI and everyone else, he thinks we have only one good option:
To be AI.
___________
Remember before when I said that there were two things about wizard hats we had to wrap our heads around?
 1) The intensely mind-bending idea 
 2) The super ridiculously intensely mind-bending idea 
This is where #2 comes in.
These two ideas are the two things Elon means when he refers to the wizard hat as a digital tertiary layer in our brains. The first, as we discussed, is the concept that a whole-brain interface is kind of the same thing as putting our devices in our heads—effectively making your brain the device. Like this:   
Your devices give you cyborg superpowers and a window into the digital world. Your brain’s wizard hat electrode array is a new brain structure, joining your limbic system and cortex.
But your limbic system, cortex, and wizard hat are just the hardware systems. When you experience your limbic system, it’s not the physical system you’re interacting with—it’s the information flow within it. It’s the activity of the physical system that bubbles up in your consciousness, making you feel angry, scared, horny, or hungry.
Same thing for your cortex. The napkin wrapped around your brain stores and organizes information, but it’s the information itself that you experience when you think something, see something, hear something, or feel something. The visual cortex in itself does nothing for you—it’s the stream of photon information flowing through it that gives you the experience of having a visual cortex. When you dig in your memory to find something, you’re not searching for neurons, you’re searching for information stored in the neurons.
The limbic system and cortex themselves are just gray matter. The flow of activity within the gray matter is what forms your familiar internal characters, the monkey brain and the rational human brain.
So what does that mean about your digital tertiary layer?
It means that while what’s actually in your brain is the physical device—the electrode array itself—the component of the tertiary layer that you’ll experience and get to know as a character is the information that flows through the array.
And just like the feelings and urges of the limbic system and the thoughts and chattering voice of the cortex all feel to you like parts of you—like your inner essence—the activity that flows through your wizard hat will feel like a part of you and your essence.
Elon’s vision for the Wizard Era is that among the wizard hat’s many uses, one of its core purposes will be to serve as the interface between your brain and a cloud-based customized AI system. That AI system, he believes, will become as present a character in your mind as your monkey and your human characters—and it will feel like you every bit as much as the others do. He says:
 I think that, conceivably, there’s a way for there to be a tertiary layer that feels like it’s part of you. It’s not some thing that you offload to, it’s you. 
This makes sense on paper. You do most of your “thinking” with your cortex, but then when you get hungry, you don’t say, “My limbic system is hungry,” you say, “I’m hungry.” Likewise, Elon thinks, when you’re trying to figure out the solution to a problem and your AI comes up with the answer, you won’t say, “My AI got it,” you’ll say, “Aha! I got it.” When your limbic system wants to procrastinate and your cortex wants to work, a situation I might be familiar with, it doesn’t feel like you’re arguing with some external being, it feels like a singular you is struggling to be disciplined. Likewise, when you think up a strategy at work and your AI disagrees, that’ll be a genuine disagreement and a debate will ensue—but it will feel like an internal debate, not a debate between you and someone else that just happens to take place in your thoughts. The debate will feel like thinking.  
It makes sense on paper.
But when I first heard Elon talk about this concept, it didn’t really feel right. No matter how hard I tried to get it, I kept framing the idea as something familiar—like an AI system whose voice I could hear in my head, or even one that I could think together with. But in those instances, the AI still seemed like an external system I was communicating with. It didn’t seem like me.
But then, one night while working on the post, I was rereading some of Elon’s quotes about this, and it suddenly clicked. The AI would be me. Fully. I got it.
Then I lost it. The next day, I tried to explain the epiphany to a friend and I left us both confused. I was back in “Wait, but it kind of wouldn’t really be me, it would be communicating with me” land. Since then, I’ve dipped into and out of the idea, never quite able to hold it for long. The best thing I can compare it to is having a moment when it actually makes sense that time is relative and space-time is a single fabric. For a second, it seems intuitive that time moves slower when you’re moving really fast. And then I lose it. As I typed those sentences just now, it did not seem intuitive.
The idea of being AI is especially tough because it combines two mind-numbing concepts—the brain interface and the abilities it would give you, and artificial general intelligence. Humans today are simply not equipped to understand either of those things, because as imaginative as we think we are, our imaginations only really have our life experience as their toolkit, and these concepts are both totally novel. It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen.
That’s why when I hear Elon talk with conviction about this stuff, I’m somewhere in between deeply believing it myself and taking his word for it. I go back and forth. But given that he’s someone who probably found space-time intuitive when he was seven, and given that he’s someone who knows how to colonize Mars, I’m inclined to listen hard to what he says.
And what he says is that this is all about bandwidth. It’s obvious why bandwidth matters when it comes to making a wizard hat useful. But Elon believes that when it comes to interfacing with AI, high bandwidth isn’t just preferred, but actually fundamental to the prospect of being AI, versus simply using AI. Here he is walking me through his thoughts:
 The challenge is the communication bandwidth is extremely slow, particularly output. When you’re outputting on a phone, you’re moving two thumbs very slowly. That’s crazy slow communication. … If the bandwidth is too low, then your integration with AI would be very weak. Given the limits of very low bandwidth, it’s kind of pointless. The AI is just going to go by itself, because it’s too slow to talk to. The faster the communication, the more you’ll be integrated—the slower the communication, the less. And the more separate we are—the more the AI is “other”—the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate, and vastly more intelligent than us, how do you ensure that they don’t have optimization functions that are contrary to the best interests of humanity? … If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and with a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system. 
Elon sees communication bandwidth as the key factor in determining our level of integration with AI, and he sees that level of integration as the key factor in how we’ll fare in the AI world of our future:
 We’re going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet—you know, like a house cat or something—or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI. 
Then, a second later:
 A house cat’s a good outcome, by the way. 
Without really understanding what kinds of AI will be around when we reach the age of superintelligent AI, the idea that human-AI integration will lend itself to the protection of the species makes intuitive sense. Our vulnerabilities in the AI era will come from bad people in control of AI or rogue AI not aligned with human values. In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world’s aggregate AI power—people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it—humans are less vulnerable. People will be a lot more powerful, which is scary, but like Elon said, if everyone is Superman, it’s harder for any one Superman to cause harm on a mass scale—there are lots of checks and balances. And we’re less likely to lose control of AI in general because the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals. 
But time is of the essence here—something Elon emphasized:
 The pace of progress in this direction matters a lot. We don’t want to develop digital superintelligence too far before being able to do a merged brain-computer interface. 
When I thought about all of this, one reservation I had was whether a whole-brain interface would be enough of a change to make integration likely. I brought this up with Elon, noting that there would still be a vast difference between our thinking speed and a computer’s thinking speed. He said:
 Yes, but increasing bandwidth by orders of magnitude would make it better. And it’s directionally correct. Does it solve all problems? No. But is it directionally correct? Yes. If you’re going to go in some direction, well, why would you go in any direction other than this? 
And that’s why Elon started Neuralink.
   
He started Neuralink to accelerate our pace into the Wizard Era—into a world where he says that “everyone who wants to have this AI extension of themselves could have one, so there would be billions of individual human-AI symbiotes who, collectively, make decisions about the future.” A world where AI really could be of the people, by the people, for the people.
   
___________
I’ll guess that right now, some part of you believes this insane world we’ve been living in for the past 38,000 words could really maybe be the future—and another part of you refuses to believe it. I’ve got a little of both of those going on too.
But the insanity part of it shouldn’t be the reason it’s hard to believe. Remember—George Washington died when he saw 2017. And our future will be unfathomably shocking to us. The only difference is that things are moving even faster now than they were in George’s time.
The concept of being blown away by the future speaks to the magic of our collective intelligence—but it also speaks to the naivety of our intuition. Our minds evolved in a time when progress moved at a snail’s pace, so that’s what our hardware is calibrated to. And if we don’t actively override our intuition—the part of us that reads about a future this outlandish and refuses to believe it’s possible—we’re living in denial.
The reality is that we’re whizzing down a very intense road to a very intense place, and no one knows what it’ll be like when we get there. A lot of people find it scary to think about, but I think it’s exciting. Because of when we happened to be born, instead of just living in a normal world like normal people, we’re living inside of a thriller movie. Some people take this information and decide to be like Elon, doing whatever they can to help the movie have a happy ending—and thank god they do. Because I’d rather just be a gawking member of the audience, watching the movie from the edge of my seat and rooting for the good guys.
Either way, I think it’s good to climb a tree from time to time to look out at the view and remind ourselves what a time this is to be alive. And there are a lot of trees around here. Meet you at another one sometime soon.
___________
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The clean version of this post, appropriate for all ages, is free to read here.
To print this post or read it offline, try the PDF.
___________
 More Wait But Why stuff: 
If you want to understand AI better,  here’s my big AI explainer. 
And here’s the full Elon Musk post series:
 Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man  
Part 2, on Tesla:  How Tesla Will Change the World  
Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce  
If you’re sick of science and tech, check these out instead:
  Why Procrastinators Procrastinate  
  Religion for the Nonreligious  
  The Tail End  
Thanks to the Neuralink team for answering my 1,200 questions and explaining things to me like I’m five. Extra thanks to Ben Rapoport, Flip Sabes, and Moran Cerf for being my question-asking go-tos in my many dark moments of despair.
Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html
SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story — Wait But Why
2016-09-28
Tim Urban
<div><div><div><p><em>We made a fancy PDF of this post (original and G-rated versions) for printing and offline viewing. <a href="https://gum.co/wbw-bfr">Buy it here.</a> (Or see a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story-preview.pdf">preview</a>.)</em></p></div>
<p>Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8">unveiled the first real details</a> about the big fucking rocket they’re making.</p>
<p>A couple months ago, when SpaceX first announced that this would be happening in late September, it hit me that I might still have special privileges with them, kind of grandfathered in from my time working with Elon and his companies in 2015 (which resulted in <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">an in-depth four-part blog series</a>). So I reached out and asked if I could learn about the big fucking rocket ahead of time and write a post about it.</p>
<p>They said yes.</p>
<p>A little while later, I got on a call with Elon to discuss the rocket, the timeline, and the big plan this was all a part of. We started off how we always do.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Then I brought up the rocket.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-3.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-4.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-5-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Eventually, we were able to settle in to a fascinating conversation about this insane machine SpaceX is building and what’s going to happen with it.</p>
<p>Now, before we get into things—</p>
<p>This post is only a piece of The SpaceX Story—one of the most amazing stories of our time—and a story I spent three months and 40,000 words telling last year. If you really want to understand this and you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there. The <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">post</a> has three parts, divided into five pages:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/2">Part 2: Musk’s Mission</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 3: How to Colonize Mars</strong><strong><br />
→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/3">Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space</a></strong><br />
<strong>→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/4">Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel</a></strong><br />
<strong>→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/5">Phase 3: Colonize Mars</a></strong></p>
<p>For those who have read the post and want a refresher or those who just want to hear about the big fucking rocket and move on with their day, here’s a quick overview of the background:</p>
<p><strong>The Context</strong></p>
<p>To understand why the big fucking rocket matters, you have to understand this sentence:</p>
<p><em>SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars.</em></p>
<p>Let’s go part by part.</p>
<p><strong>Why make human life multi-planetary?</strong></p>
<p>Two reasons:</p>
<p><strong>1) It’s fun and exciting.</strong> (<a href="https://soundcloud.com/waitbutwhy/2-reasons-to-go-to-mars">Here’s a clip</a> from one of the interviews I did with Elon last year where he articulates this point.)</p>
<p><strong>2) It’s not a great idea to have all of our eggs in one basket. </strong>Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it “life insurance for the species.”</p>
<p><strong>Why Mars?</strong></p>
<p>Venus is a dick, with its lead-melting temperatures, its crushing atmospheric pressure, and its unbearable winds.</p>
<p>The moon has few natural resources, a 29-day day, and with no atmosphere to either provide protection against the sun during the day or warm things up at night, both day and night become murderous. Same deal on Mercury.</p>
<p>Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are just huge balls of gas pretending to be planets.</p>
<p>Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn are possibly habitable, but they’re farther away and colder and darker than Mars, so why would we do that.</p>
<p>Pluto is even farther and colder and darker. Stop asking me about Pluto.</p>
<p>That leaves Mars. Mars isn’t a good time. If Mars were a place on Earth, it’s somewhere no one would want to go. But compared to all of those other options, it’s a dream. It’s cold but not that cold. It’s kind of dark but not that much darker than Earth. It’s far but not that far. Its day is almost the same length as ours, which is nice for us and hugely helpful for growing Earthly vegetation. Its surface gravity isn’t crazy low or crazy high (it’s around a third of Earth’s). It has a ton of (frozen) water and a decent amount of CO<sub>2</sub>, which are critical for early attempts at living there and hugely helpful for future attempts to “terraform” the planet into a place more livable for humans. All things considered, we’re very lucky to have an option as good as Mars—in most other solar systems, we probably wouldn’t.</p>
<p><strong>Why 1,000,000 people?</strong></p>
<p>Because Elon thinks that’s a rough estimate for the number of people you’d need to have on Mars in order for the Mars civilization to be “self-sustaining”—with self-sustaining defined by Elon as: “Even if the spaceships from Earth permanently stop coming, the colony doesn’t eventually die out—which requires a huge industrial base, and a much harder industrial base to create than being on Earth.”</p>
<p>In other words, if hard drive #2 relies on hard drive #1 in order to stay working, then your photo album isn’t really backed up, is it? The whole point of hard drive #2 is to save the day if hard drive #1 permanently crashes.</p>
<p>And while the Earth hard drive could “crash” for many exciting reasons—an asteroid hits us, <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">AI kills us</a>, Trump kills us, ISIS creates some upsetting biological weapon, etc.—Elon also warns about the less dramatic possibility that the Earth ships stop coming simply because Earth civilization stops having the capability to send them:</p>
<p><em>The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight. </em><em>At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo.</em></p>
<p>In other words, let’s not wait on this.</p>
<p><strong>Great, but how the hell do you bring 1,000,000 people to Mars?</strong></p>
<p>You make this green part exist:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Venn3.png"></a></p>
<p>It’s kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars <em>and</em> can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, right now the yellow circle is tiny and the blue circle doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>Elon thinks—and I kind of do too—that if the blue circle can get big enough, the yellow circle will take care of itself. If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you’ll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.</p>
<p>The hard part is the blue circle. Here’s the issue:</p>
<p>Last time the US Congress checked with NASA, the cost to send a five-person crew to Mars was $50 billion. $10 billion a person. Elon thinks that to make the blue circle sufficiently large, it needs to cost $500,000 a person. 1/20,000 of the current cost.</p>
<p>1/20,000.</p>
<p>That’s like looking at the car industry and saying, “Right now a new Honda costs around $20,000. To make this a viable industry, we need to get the cost of a new car down to $1.”</p>
<p>So what the hell?</p>
<p>Here’s the hell:</p>
<p>Imagine if the way planes worked was that they took off, flew to their destination, but then instead of landing, all the passengers parachuted down to the ground and then the plane landed by smashing into the ocean and blowing up. So every plane flew exactly once, and to have a new flight happen, you’d have to build another plane.</p>
<p>A plane ticket would cost $1.5 million.</p>
<p>Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the ocean (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).</p>
<p>When Elon started SpaceX, he was determined to fix this problem. It was a tall order, given that no one had ever done it before—including nations like the US and Russia who had spent billions trying. But SpaceX puzzled away at the problem year after year, and after trying and failing a bunch of times, in late 2015, they nailed it:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Then they nailed it again. And again. And again. Now they nail it more often than not. Here’s a daytime view of a recent landing:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Soon, for the first time, a previously used-and-landed, flight-tested Falcon 9 will carry out a new mission for SpaceX, officially making SpaceX rockets “reusable.”</p>
<p>To fly a mission on a used rocket, you only need to pay for propellant (fuel and liquid oxygen) and a bit of routine maintenance. This cuts the price of space travel down by 100 or even 1,000 times.</p>
<p>That leaves us with somewhere between 19/20 and 199/200 of the cost left to cut. Part of that will happen when SpaceX takes 100 or more people to Mars at a time, instead of five (the number Congress asked NASA about). The rest of it is taken care of by a few simple innovations, like refueling the spaceships in orbit (which lowers the cost by 5-10x) and manufacturing propellant on Mars so you don’t have to carry your return propellant with you (which lowers the cost by another 5-10x). More on those things later.</p>
<p>Suddenly, not only can the price get down to $500,000/ticket, it can probably go even lower (Elon thinks it could eventually cost under $100,000/person). You may not have noticed it yet, but SpaceX’s innovations are in the process of creating a total revolution in the cost of space travel—a change that will open doors we can’t imagine being open today. And when that revolution goes far enough, SpaceX’s vision of putting 1,000,000 people on Mars really—actually—seriously—may happen.</p>
<p>We’re going to Mars. And this week, SpaceX showed us the thing that’s gonna take us there.</p>
<p><strong>The Rocket</strong></p>
<p>“It’s so mind-blowing. It blows my mind, and I see it every week.”</p>
<p>Elon’s pumped. And when you learn about the big fucking rocket he’s building, you’ll understand why.</p>
<p>First, let’s absorb the challenge at hand. It’s often said that space is hard. To this day, only a few hundred people have been in space, only a few countries have the ability to launch something into space, and the history of human space travel is littered with tragic launch failures. Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.</p>
<p>But when we talk about humans going into space, we’re talking mostly about humans going into Low Earth Orbit, a layer of space between 100 and 1,200 miles above the ground—and normally, they’re headed only 250 miles up to the International Space Station. The only time humans have gone farther were the small handful of Americans who made it out to the moon in the 1960s, traveling about 250,000 miles away.</p>
<p>When Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is somewhere between 34 and 60 million miles away—about 200 times farther away than the moon and about 200,000 times farther away than the ISS.</p>
<p>The moon is just over one light second away.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/light-second.png"></a></p>
<p>Mars is more than three light <em>minutes </em>away.</p>
<p>Mars is far.</p>
<p>Elon likes to compare the Earth-to-Mars trip to crossing the Atlantic Ocean, noting that using that scale, going to the moon would only be crossing the English Channel (and going to the ISS would be going to a dock 117 feet off the shore). Continuing with that comparison, he says, “A rocket made to go to Low Earth Orbit or even the moon is basically like a coastal fishing vessel, compared to a colonial transport system that is trying to go 1,000 times further.”</p>
<p>On top of that, it might be worth it to take only a few humans or a single satellite up into Low Earth Orbit—but if you’re going all the way to Mars, you want to take a <em>lot </em>more than that. So you have to take much more mass, much further. Multiplying the distance factor by the payload factor, Elon explains that a Mars transport system “is like literally a million times more capable than what the current world launch system can do. It has to be.”</p>
<p>It also has to be incredibly advanced. Elon says, “It’s not just bigger, it needs to be more efficient. There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to rockets of ‘small and complex’ or ‘big and dumb.’ People talk about the ‘big dumb booster’—that won’t work. You need a big smart booster. If you want to build a Mars colony, you have no choice— you have to make it big and efficient.”</p>
<p>So that’s all you have to do—build a rocket that’s a million times more capable than today’s best rockets but who’s also efficient and smart and great in bed.</p>
<p>SpaceX is building it. Meet the Big Fucking Rocket.<a href="#footnote2-1-5715">1</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BFR-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Hard to quite understand the bigness from that picture. So let’s add in some scale:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BFR-house.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Or how about this?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BFR-field-2-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>It would <em>barely </em>fit diagonally across a football field without going into the stands.</p>
<p>There’s also this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bfr-boston.png"></a></p>
<p>It’s a <em>skyscraper</em>. Or as Elon puts it, “by far the biggest flying object ever.”</p>
<p>In yesterday’s presentation, Elon explained that this isn’t a first crack at how it might look, or an artist’s impression of how it might look—it’s how it’s going to look. This is the thing they’re building.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, SpaceX seems to be going through an existential crisis when it comes to naming this thing—first it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, then (because it can go <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/776939304140414976">way past Mars</a>) it was <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/777325549442232320">renamed</a> the Interplanetary Transport System, then yesterday in the presentation, Elon said they haven’t actually settled on a name yet but that the specific spaceship that makes the maiden voyage to Mars might be called Heart of Gold<a href="#footnote-1-5715">1</a>—so no one knows what to call it.</p>
<p>Which is why—until I hear otherwise—I’ll be calling it something I once heard Elon describe it as in an interview: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).</p>
<p>The Big Fucking Rocket is fucking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan <a href="http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/s/satvb.jpg">Saturn V</a>—the rocket used in the Apollo mission—which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.</p>
<p>Here’s how it stacks up next to a bunch of other rockets in size:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rocket-lineup-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The difference is even more extreme when you compare the rockets by how many kilograms of payload (i.e. cargo and/or people) they can each take to orbit:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rocket-lineup-2.png"></a></p>
<p>For comparison, SpaceX’s badass <a href="http://www.spacex.com/falcon9">Falcon 9</a> rocket will be able to take about 4 tons of payload to Mars, and the <a href="http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy">Falcon Heavy</a>—which is about to be today’s most powerful rocket—will be able to take about 13 tons to Mars. Elon believes the BFR will be able to take a few <em>hundred </em>tons of payload to Mars at first and eventually be able to take <em>1,000 </em>tons. The absurdity of that statistic—that the behemoth Falcon Heavy can only manage a little over 1% of the BFR’s ultimate Mars payload—is pretty hard to absorb.</p>
<p>Now, to be clear—what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rocket-breakdown-2.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>The Big Fucking Booster</strong></p>
<p>Let’s start by talking about the booster. The 25-story-high booster—AKA the actual rocket of the BFR—is what Elon calls “quite a beast.” It’s the biggest booster of all time—by <em>far</em>. By physical size, definitely, but even more so by thrust.</p>
<p>In the SpaceX post, I <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/4">talked about</a> the Falcon 9’s nine <a href="http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/03/26/merlin-engines">Merlin engines</a>, and how each one was powerful enough to lift a stack of 40 cars up into the sky—in total, that meant the Falcon 9 set of engines could lift 360 cars. The Falcon Heavy, with its 27 Merlin engines, could lift a stack of over 1,000 cars up past the clouds.<a href="#footnote-2-5715">2</a>
</p><p>The Big Fucking Booster sits atop a different kind of engine: the Raptor.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Raptor.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference—by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than a Merlin.</p>
<p>A single Raptor engine produces <em>310 tons</em> of thrust—enough to lift 310 tons, or a stack of 172 cars, or <em>an entire Boeing 747 airplane</em>, into the sky. That’s what <em>one </em>Raptor can do.<a href="#footnote-3-5715">3</a>
</p><p>And the BFB has <em>42 of them</em>.<a href="#footnote-4-5715">4</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/42-Raptors.jpg"></a></p>
<p>All together, that’s an unheard of 13,033 tons of thrust, enough to push more than 7,000 cars—or <em>50 </em>large airplanes—up to space.</p>
<p><strong>The Big Fucking Spaceship</strong></p>
<p>So then there’s the spacecraft—which SpaceX calls the Interplanetary Spaceship, and which I’m going to keep calling the Big Fucking Spaceship because it’s more fun. The BFS is the big cool-looking thing on top of the BFB (in case you’re getting Big Fucking Confused—the Big Fucking Spaceship (BFS) on top of the Big Fucking Booster (BFB) together make what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR)). The BFS is what will take the people and cargo to Mars. It’s also what will launch, on its own, off Mars and return to Earth with people who want to come back.</p>
<p>The BFS is itself the size of a tall, 16-story building, and is 55 feet wide at its thickest point. In addition to hundreds, and eventually a thousand tons of cargo, the BFS will be able to carry as many as 100 people at the beginning, and Elon believes that number could grow to 200 and even above 300 people over time—like a cruise ship.</p>
<p>With nine Raptor engines, it’ll have more liftoff thrust on its own than any of today’s rockets—including next year’s Falcon Heavy. For a second-stage, cargo-carrying spacecraft to pack more thrust than even the most powerful first-stage rockets is outrageous.</p>
<p>Here’s a cross-section up close:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/rocket-cross-section.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I asked Elon what it’ll be like to ride in it. He said, “Well, you’d be in a giant spaceship in microgravity.<a href="#footnote-5-5715">5</a> I mean, it would be pretty fun. You’d be floating around.”</p>
<p>Good point.</p>
<p>In the presentation Q&amp;A, he added: “It has to be really fun and exciting, it can’t feel cramped or boring. The crew compartment is set up so that you can do zero-g games, you can float around, there will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant—it’ll be really fun to go.”</p>
<p>Um, yeah, get me on that shit now. <em>A zero gravity cruise ship</em>. With this view:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Observatory_F_HD_3.1.png"></a></p>
<p>And if you were to go, here’s how the whole thing would work:</p>
<p><strong>1) Get on the ship. </strong>The BFR will be taking off from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same pad that the Apollo astronauts left from. This is because that pad was built to be absurdly large since they didn’t know yet how big a rocket they’d be using. When you get there, you head up the tower and across the bridge into the Big Fucking Spaceship.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Air-bridge.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>2) Take off. </strong>You strap in, and the BFR lifts off. After a few minutes, the first-stage BFB separates and heads back down to Earth. The BFS that you’re in continues onward and settles into Earth’s orbit.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29937258946_8345b8ae6e_o.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>3) Refuel in orbit. </strong>After landing back on Earth, the BFB is capped with a new BFS—this one full of propellant (liquid oxygen and methane).<a href="#footnote-6-5715">6</a> It lifts off again and pings the propellant-filled spaceship into orbit, where it rendezvouses<a href="#footnote-7-5715">7</a> with your spaceship. The two connect like two orcas holding hands as the propellant is transferred.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343821794_9e05bfd6d7_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p>This happens a few more times until your spaceship is entirely refueled.<a href="#footnote-8-5715">8</a> This process is critical A) for lowering the cost of the trip, and B) for making the trip much faster. People have always thought a journey to Mars would take six or nine months, but the BFS will get there in three.</p>
<p><strong>4) H</strong><strong>ead to Mars. </strong>Three months of fun times in microgravity and getting really sick of the other people on the ship.<a href="#footnote-9-5715">9</a> During the journey, the spaceship steers using cold gas thrusters, powered by huge solar arrays:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343822854_ec6f4ffad1_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>5) Enter the Mars atmosphere.</strong> Time for the heat shield to be in the shit:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343824424_87236132a0_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>6) Land on Mars. </strong>Upright, the same way the first stage lands on Earth.</p>
<p><strong>7) Live on Mars for a while doing god knows what. </strong>If it’s early on in the colonization process, you’re probably there to work and help build up the initial industries. Later on, it could be anything—research, entrepreneurship, or just simply adventure.</p>
<p><strong>8) Make propellant on Mars. </strong>This will be one of the key early industries to set up on Mars. Propellant consists of liquid oxygen (O<sub>2</sub>) and methane (CH<sub>4</sub>), which are both conveniently easy to make from the massive quantities of H<sub>2</sub>O (ice) and CO<sub>2 </sub>(the main gas in the Martian atmosphere) already sitting on Mars. They’ll use this propellant to load up the spaceship you came there on in preparation for its voyage back to Earth. Doing this spares the massive expense of having to carry propellant all the way from Earth for the return trip.</p>
<p><strong>9) Either stay forever or come back. </strong>If you come back, you’ll do so by boarding one of the BFS’s that came over in the last batch.</p>
<p><strong>10) Land vertically on Earth. </strong>Just like you did on Mars. The spaceship will go through routine maintenance in preparation to head back to Mars two years later.</p>
<p><strong>11) Be that insufferable person who can’t be part of any conversation without figuring out some way to bring up your time on Mars. </strong></p>
<p>Mission complete.</p>
<p>This kind-of-confusing diagram sums it up:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/diagram.png"></a></p>
<p>And this video sums it up very deliciously:</p>
<p></p>
<p>So that’s the deal with the Big Fucking Rocket and how it’ll all work.<a href="#footnote-10-5715">10</a>
</p><p>Now let’s talk about how this all might play out.</p>
<p><strong>The Plan</strong></p>
<p>Back to reality. So how do we get from, “there’s this rad potential rocket that might be ready to launch in five years” to “we’re a thriving multi-planetary civilization with a million people on Mars”?</p>
<p>10,000 flights. That’s how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it’ll take to bring the Mars population to a million.</p>
<p>Why 10,000? Because there will be at least 100 people on most trips, and that number will go up over time—but there will also be some people coming back from Mars each time other people go. In the lower part of each BFS will be a huge cargo compartment. Elon thinks we’ll need to get at least 10 million tons of cargo to Mars for the million-person colony to become self-sustaining, which will happen in a little over 10,000 flights if SpaceX can get the cargo payload capacity up to 1,000 tons relatively quickly, as they hope to.</p>
<p>And when will these 10,000 trips start?</p>
<p>Well let’s take a look at the Mars-Earth Synodic calendar—which deals with the dates when Earth and Mars are closest to each other (called a “Mars opposition”). Earth’s orbit is smaller than Mars’s, so Earth goes around the sun quicker—so much so that every 26 months, Earth laps Mars and they’re briefly next to each other. That’s the one time when Earth-Mars transfers can happen.</p>
<p>We’re currently pretty close to Mars, since the last Mars opposition happened on May 22, 2016. That’s why, if you happen to be an “oh shit there’s a way-too-bright star let me take out my Sky Guide app and figure out which planet that is and then tell everyone I’m with and find that, yet again, no one cares, because everyone is a horrible person” nerd like me, you know that all summer, Mars has been super prominent and bright in our night sky.<a href="#footnote-11-5715">11</a> A year from now, Mars will be on the other side of the sun from us, and we won’t see it in our night sky at all.</p>
<p>The 2016 Earth-Mars opposition is also a special one, because it’s the last time it’ll happen without anybody talking about it.</p>
<p>Why? Because starting with the next one in July of 2018, SpaceX will start sending stuff to Mars each time there’s an opposition, and this will become increasingly big news each time. Here’s the tentative schedule, if everything goes perfectly to plan:</p>
<p><strong>Upcoming Mars Oppositions</strong> – and what SpaceX is planning for each</p>
<p><strong>July, 2018: </strong>Send a <a href="http://www.spacex.com/dragon">Dragon</a> spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo</p>
<p><strong>October, 2020: </strong>Send multiple Dragons with more cargo</p>
<p><strong>December, 2022: </strong>Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.</p>
<p><strong>January, 2025: </strong>First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.</p>
<p>Let’s all go back and read that last line again.</p>
<p><em><strong>January, 2025: </strong>First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.</em></p>
<p>Did you catch that?</p>
<p>If things go to plan,<em> the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now.</em></p>
<p>And zero people are talking about it.</p>
<p>But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.</p>
<p>And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.</p>
<p>This is a thing that’s happening.</p>
<p>Elon doesn’t like when people ask him about this first voyage and the Neil Armstrong of Mars. He says that it’s not about humanity putting a new multi-planetary feather in its cap, and he’s quick to point out, “putting people on the moon was super exciting—but where’s our moon base?” In other words, having humanity give Mars a high five for bragging rights is not what matters—what matters is carrying out the full vision of actually creating a full, self-sustaining civilization on Mars.</p>
<p>And yeah, sure, fine. But <em>I’m excited for 2025</em>. It’s gonna be so fun.</p>
<p>Anyway, so then the next Mars opposition will roll around in 2027. This time, if everything stays on track, multiple BFS’s will make the trek to Mars, carrying more people than were in the original group in 2025. And the spaceship that went over in 2025—the space Mayflower<em>—</em>will make its return trip to Earth, carrying some of the first group of Mars pioneers back home. They’ll return to massive celebration as international heroes, and the legendary spaceship will head off to enjoy its life in the Air and Space Museum.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, we’ll all be glued to the TV<a href="#footnote-12-5715">12</a> as the group of BFS’s arrive on Mars, where the people in them will continue the grueling work started by the 2025 group. The early colonists will have a hard job like early colonists always do—and this will be extra hard. Not only will they have to truly start from scratch—digging mines and quarries and refineries, constructing the first underground village habitat with the first Martian hospitals and schools and greenhouse farms, laying down a giant plumbing system to pump water into the village, building that first rocket propellant plant—but they’ll have to do all of this in a place where they can’t go outside without a spacesuit on, and where everyone and everything they’ve ever known is on a pale blue dot in the night sky.</p>
<p>It’ll be hard, but for the explorers of our world the payoff may be worth it. Elon says: “You can go anywhere on Earth in 24 hours. There’s no physical frontier on Earth anymore. Now, space is that frontier, so it’ll appeal to anyone with that exploratory spirit.”</p>
<p>In April of 2029, SpaceX will send an even larger group of spacecraft, people, and cargo to Mars. This time, it’ll probably get less attention. By 2029, we’ll probably be getting used to the idea that there are people on Mars and that every 26 months, a great two-way migration occurs.</p>
<p>The growing Mars colony will continue to entice the adventurers—those who read about the great sailing exhibitions of the 15th and 16th centuries and yearn to be there. When I asked Elon about how the small colony will grow and evolve, he said: “Think of the Mars colony as an organism that starts off as a zygote, and then becomes multi-cellular, and then gets organ differentiation—so it doesn’t look exactly the same all the way along, any more than the first settlement in Jamestown wasn’t representative of the United States today. It’ll be the same with Mars—Mars will be the new New World.”</p>
<p>The 2031 and 2033 and 2035 oppositions will bring substantially more people to the new New World. By this point, the budding Martian city will be a part of our lives. We’ll follow the Twitter feeds of some of our favorite journalists on Mars to keep up with what’s happening there. We’ll all get hooked on Mars’s first hit reality shows. And some of us will start thinking, “Should I sign up to go to Mars one of these years before I get too old?”</p>
<p>By 2050, there will be over a hundred thousand people on Mars. The company your son works for might have a branch there, and he’ll be saying goodbye to a couple co-workers who are about to head to the planet for a 52-month stint. He tells you that he doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t want to take his ninth-grade daughter away from her life and her friends. But he says she’s applying to a program that would bring her to Mars from the ages of 17 to 23 for an urban planning degree. You worry, even though you know it’s irrational. It’s just that you remember the days when going to Mars was risky and dangerous, and some part of you is still uncomfortable with it. And what if she decides not to come back?</p>
<p>By 2065, the early days of Mars seem primitive. During the first few Mars migrations, only a few spaceships made the trip with only 100 people in each, it was prohibitively expensive to go, it took three months to get there, and there were only a few very grueling industries on Mars to work in.</p>
<p>In 2065, every Mars opposition sees over 1,000 ships make the trip, each carrying over 500 people and a couple thousand tons of cargo. Half a million people make the journey every two years, and about 50,000 less than that come back, because Earth-to-Mars migration capacity grows a little bit each time as more ships are built. The trip, which now takes only 30 days, costs only $60,000 (in 2016 dollars)—and most people just pay off the ticket price with their well-paying job on Mars (labor is in high demand as the early Mars cities continue to expand and new cities are built).</p>
<p>Many people remember those early days of the Mars colony when it was all about SpaceX—funded by SpaceX or their cargo clients and driven by their ambition and their ingenuity and their guts. But now, dozens of companies specialize in Earth-Mars transit and hundreds of companies focus on development and entrepreneurship on Mars. And transit is paid for like planes and trains and buses are paid for today—by passengers buying tickets.</p>
<p>A decade later, the 2074 migration brings the Mars population above a million people. Small celebrations break out around both worlds, as a long-awaited landmark is achieved. Most people though, don’t even notice.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Everything I just said was based on things Elon said on my phone call with him. Some of it was numbers he said directly—like the last paragraph, which came from him saying, “I’m hopeful that we can get to a million roughly 50 years after the start.” Other times it was me extrapolating a possible future, given the predictions I heard from him. It’s all based in reality. At least, it’s based in Elon Musk’s best crack at reality. He was very careful to qualify everything that sounded like a prediction or a projection with, “This is what <em>might </em>happen <em>if</em> things go well—but there’s no way to know, and many things could go wrong along the way.” He emphasized that “it’s not that SpaceX has all the answers and we’ve got it covered or anything like that—it’s that we want to show that it’s possible. But it’s far from a given.” As for things that could go wrong, he listed off a few (like World War III), and one of his biggest concerns is that if he somehow dies young, SpaceX could be taken over by someone who wants to milk the company for profit instead of staying single-mindedly focused on the Mars civilization mission.</p>
<p>But if SpaceX can manage to get this thing started, Elon thinks it could be not just a big deal in itself, it could jumpstart a slew of new possibilities for humanity. He explains:</p>
<p><em>The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive but to really change humanity into a multi-planetary species. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic forcing function of interplanetary commerce, there will be the resources and the incentive to massively improve space transport technology, and I think then things really go to a whole new level. </em></p>
<p><em>What I’m describing may sound really crazy, but it actually will be a small fraction of what is ultimately done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they couldn’t cross the Atlantic. So commerce basically had short-range vessels. Without the forcing function, shipping technology didn’t improve that much—you could do the same things with ships, pretty much, around the time of Julius Caesar as you could around the time of Columbus. 1,500 years later, you could still just cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. There needed to be the American colonies in order for that to happen.</em></p>
<p>The people at SpaceX believe that once we’re on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well. That’s why they didn’t just create images of their Big Fucking Rocket standing proudly on Mars. They showed it flying by Jupiter.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343909374_f5a0c62478_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And Saturn.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343908684_4caef4cd2c_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And bringing human explorers to faraway moons.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343905184_aa6202b3a4_k.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343906874_abb7572f12_k.jpg"></a></p>
<p>They’re planning for a time when any person can go anywhere they want in our vast Solar System—a new golden age for exploration, with uncharted physical frontiers in every direction.</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-bfr"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a>Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Here’s the whole WBW Elon Musk series:</p>
<p><strong>Part 1, on Elon: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man<br />
</a>Part 2, on Tesla: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">How Tesla Will Change the World</a></strong><br />
<strong> Part 3, on SpaceX: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars<br />
</a>Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce</a></strong></p>
<p>Extra Post #1: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/the-deal-with-solar.html">The Deal With Solar City</a><br />
Extra Post #2: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html">The Deal With the Hyperloop</a></p>
<p><br />
Six other Wait But Why explainers:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens?</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html">How Cryonics Works (and Why it Makes Sense)</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">How to Name a Baby</a></strong></p>
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 SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story

 September 28, 2016 By Tim Urban


 We made a fancy PDF of this post (original and G-rated versions) for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)

 Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they’re making.

 A couple months ago, when SpaceX first announced that this would be happening in late September, it hit me that I might still have special privileges with them, kind of grandfathered in from my time working with Elon and his companies in 2015 (which resulted in an in-depth four-part blog series). So I reached out and asked if I could learn about the big fucking rocket ahead of time and write a post about it.

 They said yes.

 A little while later, I got on a call with Elon to discuss the rocket, the timeline, and the big plan this was all a part of. We started off how we always do.

 Then I brought up the rocket.

 Eventually, we were able to settle in to a fascinating conversation about this insane machine SpaceX is building and what’s going to happen with it.

 Now, before we get into things—

 This post is only a piece of The SpaceX Story—one of the most amazing stories of our time—and a story I spent three months and 40,000 words telling last year. If you really want to understand this and you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there. The post has three parts, divided into five pages:

 Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space

 Part 2: Musk’s Mission

 Part 3: How to Colonize Mars
 → Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space
 → Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel
 → Phase 3: Colonize Mars

 For those who have read the post and want a refresher or those who just want to hear about the big fucking rocket and move on with their day, here’s a quick overview of the background:

 The Context

 To understand why the big fucking rocket matters, you have to understand this sentence:

 SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars.

 Let’s go part by part.

 Why make human life multi-planetary?

 Two reasons:

 1) It’s fun and exciting. (Here’s a clip from one of the interviews I did with Elon last year where he articulates this point.)

 2) It’s not a great idea to have all of our eggs in one basket. Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it “life insurance for the species.”

 Why Mars?

 Venus is a dick, with its lead-melting temperatures, its crushing atmospheric pressure, and its unbearable winds.

 The moon has few natural resources, a 29-day day, and with no atmosphere to either provide protection against the sun during the day or warm things up at night, both day and night become murderous. Same deal on Mercury.

 Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are just huge balls of gas pretending to be planets.

 Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn are possibly habitable, but they’re farther away and colder and darker than Mars, so why would we do that.

 Pluto is even farther and colder and darker. Stop asking me about Pluto.

 That leaves Mars. Mars isn’t a good time. If Mars were a place on Earth, it’s somewhere no one would want to go. But compared to all of those other options, it’s a dream. It’s cold but not that cold. It’s kind of dark but not that much darker than Earth. It’s far but not that far. Its day is almost the same length as ours, which is nice for us and hugely helpful for growing Earthly vegetation. Its surface gravity isn’t crazy low or crazy high (it’s around a third of Earth’s). It has a ton of (frozen) water and a decent amount of CO2, which are critical for early attempts at living there and hugely helpful for future attempts to “terraform” the planet into a place more livable for humans. All things considered, we’re very lucky to have an option as good as Mars—in most other solar systems, we probably wouldn’t.

 Why 1,000,000 people?

 Because Elon thinks that’s a rough estimate for the number of people you’d need to have on Mars in order for the Mars civilization to be “self-sustaining”—with self-sustaining defined by Elon as: “Even if the spaceships from Earth permanently stop coming, the colony doesn’t eventually die out—which requires a huge industrial base, and a much harder industrial base to create than being on Earth.”

 In other words, if hard drive #2 relies on hard drive #1 in order to stay working, then your photo album isn’t really backed up, is it? The whole point of hard drive #2 is to save the day if hard drive #1 permanently crashes.

 And while the Earth hard drive could “crash” for many exciting reasons—an asteroid hits us, AI kills us, Trump kills us, ISIS creates some upsetting biological weapon, etc.—Elon also warns about the less dramatic possibility that the Earth ships stop coming simply because Earth civilization stops having the capability to send them:

 The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight. At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo.

 In other words, let’s not wait on this.

 Great, but how the hell do you bring 1,000,000 people to Mars?

 You make this green part exist:

 It’s kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars and can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.

 Unfortunately, right now the yellow circle is tiny and the blue circle doesn’t exist.

 Elon thinks—and I kind of do too—that if the blue circle can get big enough, the yellow circle will take care of itself. If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you’ll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.

 The hard part is the blue circle. Here’s the issue:

 Last time the US Congress checked with NASA, the cost to send a five-person crew to Mars was $50 billion. $10 billion a person. Elon thinks that to make the blue circle sufficiently large, it needs to cost $500,000 a person. 1/20,000 of the current cost.

 1/20,000.

 That’s like looking at the car industry and saying, “Right now a new Honda costs around $20,000. To make this a viable industry, we need to get the cost of a new car down to $1.”

 So what the hell?

 Here’s the hell:

 Imagine if the way planes worked was that they took off, flew to their destination, but then instead of landing, all the passengers parachuted down to the ground and then the plane landed by smashing into the ocean and blowing up. So every plane flew exactly once, and to have a new flight happen, you’d have to build another plane.

 A plane ticket would cost $1.5 million.

 Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the ocean (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).

 When Elon started SpaceX, he was determined to fix this problem. It was a tall order, given that no one had ever done it before—including nations like the US and Russia who had spent billions trying. But SpaceX puzzled away at the problem year after year, and after trying and failing a bunch of times, in late 2015, they nailed it:

 Then they nailed it again. And again. And again. Now they nail it more often than not. Here’s a daytime view of a recent landing:

 Soon, for the first time, a previously used-and-landed, flight-tested Falcon 9 will carry out a new mission for SpaceX, officially making SpaceX rockets “reusable.”

 To fly a mission on a used rocket, you only need to pay for propellant (fuel and liquid oxygen) and a bit of routine maintenance. This cuts the price of space travel down by 100 or even 1,000 times.

 That leaves us with somewhere between 19/20 and 199/200 of the cost left to cut. Part of that will happen when SpaceX takes 100 or more people to Mars at a time, instead of five (the number Congress asked NASA about). The rest of it is taken care of by a few simple innovations, like refueling the spaceships in orbit (which lowers the cost by 5-10x) and manufacturing propellant on Mars so you don’t have to carry your return propellant with you (which lowers the cost by another 5-10x). More on those things later.

 Suddenly, not only can the price get down to $500,000/ticket, it can probably go even lower (Elon thinks it could eventually cost under $100,000/person). You may not have noticed it yet, but SpaceX’s innovations are in the process of creating a total revolution in the cost of space travel—a change that will open doors we can’t imagine being open today. And when that revolution goes far enough, SpaceX’s vision of putting 1,000,000 people on Mars really—actually—seriously—may happen.

 We’re going to Mars. And this week, SpaceX showed us the thing that’s gonna take us there.

 The Rocket

 “It’s so mind-blowing. It blows my mind, and I see it every week.”

 Elon’s pumped. And when you learn about the big fucking rocket he’s building, you’ll understand why.

 First, let’s absorb the challenge at hand. It’s often said that space is hard. To this day, only a few hundred people have been in space, only a few countries have the ability to launch something into space, and the history of human space travel is littered with tragic launch failures. Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.

 But when we talk about humans going into space, we’re talking mostly about humans going into Low Earth Orbit, a layer of space between 100 and 1,200 miles above the ground—and normally, they’re headed only 250 miles up to the International Space Station. The only time humans have gone farther were the small handful of Americans who made it out to the moon in the 1960s, traveling about 250,000 miles away.

 When Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is somewhere between 34 and 60 million miles away—about 200 times farther away than the moon and about 200,000 times farther away than the ISS.

 The moon is just over one light second away.

 Mars is more than three light minutes away.

 Mars is far.

 Elon likes to compare the Earth-to-Mars trip to crossing the Atlantic Ocean, noting that using that scale, going to the moon would only be crossing the English Channel (and going to the ISS would be going to a dock 117 feet off the shore). Continuing with that comparison, he says, “A rocket made to go to Low Earth Orbit or even the moon is basically like a coastal fishing vessel, compared to a colonial transport system that is trying to go 1,000 times further.”

 On top of that, it might be worth it to take only a few humans or a single satellite up into Low Earth Orbit—but if you’re going all the way to Mars, you want to take a lot more than that. So you have to take much more mass, much further. Multiplying the distance factor by the payload factor, Elon explains that a Mars transport system “is like literally a million times more capable than what the current world launch system can do. It has to be.”

 It also has to be incredibly advanced. Elon says, “It’s not just bigger, it needs to be more efficient. There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to rockets of ‘small and complex’ or ‘big and dumb.’ People talk about the ‘big dumb booster’—that won’t work. You need a big smart booster. If you want to build a Mars colony, you have no choice— you have to make it big and efficient.”

 So that’s all you have to do—build a rocket that’s a million times more capable than today’s best rockets but who’s also efficient and smart and great in bed.

 SpaceX is building it. Meet the Big Fucking Rocket.1

 Hard to quite understand the bigness from that picture. So let’s add in some scale:

 Or how about this?

 It would barely fit diagonally across a football field without going into the stands.

 There’s also this:

 It’s a skyscraper. Or as Elon puts it, “by far the biggest flying object ever.”

 In yesterday’s presentation, Elon explained that this isn’t a first crack at how it might look, or an artist’s impression of how it might look—it’s how it’s going to look. This is the thing they’re building.

 Unfortunately, SpaceX seems to be going through an existential crisis when it comes to naming this thing—first it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, then (because it can go way past Mars) it was renamed the Interplanetary Transport System, then yesterday in the presentation, Elon said they haven’t actually settled on a name yet but that the specific spaceship that makes the maiden voyage to Mars might be called Heart of Gold1—so no one knows what to call it.

 Which is why—until I hear otherwise—I’ll be calling it something I once heard Elon describe it as in an interview: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).

 The Big Fucking Rocket is fucking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V—the rocket used in the Apollo mission—which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.

 Here’s how it stacks up next to a bunch of other rockets in size:

 The difference is even more extreme when you compare the rockets by how many kilograms of payload (i.e. cargo and/or people) they can each take to orbit:

 For comparison, SpaceX’s badass Falcon 9 rocket will be able to take about 4 tons of payload to Mars, and the Falcon Heavy—which is about to be today’s most powerful rocket—will be able to take about 13 tons to Mars. Elon believes the BFR will be able to take a few hundred tons of payload to Mars at first and eventually be able to take 1,000 tons. The absurdity of that statistic—that the behemoth Falcon Heavy can only manage a little over 1% of the BFR’s ultimate Mars payload—is pretty hard to absorb.

 Now, to be clear—what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.

 The Big Fucking Booster

 Let’s start by talking about the booster. The 25-story-high booster—AKA the actual rocket of the BFR—is what Elon calls “quite a beast.” It’s the biggest booster of all time—by far. By physical size, definitely, but even more so by thrust.

 In the SpaceX post, I talked about the Falcon 9’s nine Merlin engines, and how each one was powerful enough to lift a stack of 40 cars up into the sky—in total, that meant the Falcon 9 set of engines could lift 360 cars. The Falcon Heavy, with its 27 Merlin engines, could lift a stack of over 1,000 cars up past the clouds.2

 The Big Fucking Booster sits atop a different kind of engine: the Raptor.

 The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference—by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than a Merlin.

 A single Raptor engine produces 310 tons of thrust—enough to lift 310 tons, or a stack of 172 cars, or an entire Boeing 747 airplane, into the sky. That’s what one Raptor can do.3

 And the BFB has 42 of them.4

 All together, that’s an unheard of 13,033 tons of thrust, enough to push more than 7,000 cars—or 50 large airplanes—up to space.

 The Big Fucking Spaceship

 So then there’s the spacecraft—which SpaceX calls the Interplanetary Spaceship, and which I’m going to keep calling the Big Fucking Spaceship because it’s more fun. The BFS is the big cool-looking thing on top of the BFB (in case you’re getting Big Fucking Confused—the Big Fucking Spaceship (BFS) on top of the Big Fucking Booster (BFB) together make what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR)). The BFS is what will take the people and cargo to Mars. It’s also what will launch, on its own, off Mars and return to Earth with people who want to come back.

 The BFS is itself the size of a tall, 16-story building, and is 55 feet wide at its thickest point. In addition to hundreds, and eventually a thousand tons of cargo, the BFS will be able to carry as many as 100 people at the beginning, and Elon believes that number could grow to 200 and even above 300 people over time—like a cruise ship.

 With nine Raptor engines, it’ll have more liftoff thrust on its own than any of today’s rockets—including next year’s Falcon Heavy. For a second-stage, cargo-carrying spacecraft to pack more thrust than even the most powerful first-stage rockets is outrageous.

 Here’s a cross-section up close:

 I asked Elon what it’ll be like to ride in it. He said, “Well, you’d be in a giant spaceship in microgravity.5 I mean, it would be pretty fun. You’d be floating around.”

 Good point.

 In the presentation Q&A, he added: “It has to be really fun and exciting, it can’t feel cramped or boring. The crew compartment is set up so that you can do zero-g games, you can float around, there will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant—it’ll be really fun to go.”

 Um, yeah, get me on that shit now. A zero gravity cruise ship. With this view:

 And if you were to go, here’s how the whole thing would work:

 1) Get on the ship. The BFR will be taking off from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same pad that the Apollo astronauts left from. This is because that pad was built to be absurdly large since they didn’t know yet how big a rocket they’d be using. When you get there, you head up the tower and across the bridge into the Big Fucking Spaceship.

 2) Take off. You strap in, and the BFR lifts off. After a few minutes, the first-stage BFB separates and heads back down to Earth. The BFS that you’re in continues onward and settles into Earth’s orbit.

 3) Refuel in orbit. After landing back on Earth, the BFB is capped with a new BFS—this one full of propellant (liquid oxygen and methane).6 It lifts off again and pings the propellant-filled spaceship into orbit, where it rendezvouses7 with your spaceship. The two connect like two orcas holding hands as the propellant is transferred.

 This happens a few more times until your spaceship is entirely refueled.8 This process is critical A) for lowering the cost of the trip, and B) for making the trip much faster. People have always thought a journey to Mars would take six or nine months, but the BFS will get there in three.

 4) Head to Mars. Three months of fun times in microgravity and getting really sick of the other people on the ship.9 During the journey, the spaceship steers using cold gas thrusters, powered by huge solar arrays:

 5) Enter the Mars atmosphere. Time for the heat shield to be in the shit:

 6) Land on Mars. Upright, the same way the first stage lands on Earth.

 7) Live on Mars for a while doing god knows what. If it’s early on in the colonization process, you’re probably there to work and help build up the initial industries. Later on, it could be anything—research, entrepreneurship, or just simply adventure.

 8) Make propellant on Mars. This will be one of the key early industries to set up on Mars. Propellant consists of liquid oxygen (O2) and methane (CH4), which are both conveniently easy to make from the massive quantities of H2O (ice) and CO2 (the main gas in the Martian atmosphere) already sitting on Mars. They’ll use this propellant to load up the spaceship you came there on in preparation for its voyage back to Earth. Doing this spares the massive expense of having to carry propellant all the way from Earth for the return trip.

 9) Either stay forever or come back. If you come back, you’ll do so by boarding one of the BFS’s that came over in the last batch.

 10) Land vertically on Earth. Just like you did on Mars. The spaceship will go through routine maintenance in preparation to head back to Mars two years later.

 11) Be that insufferable person who can’t be part of any conversation without figuring out some way to bring up your time on Mars.

 Mission complete.

 This kind-of-confusing diagram sums it up:

 And this video sums it up very deliciously:

 So that’s the deal with the Big Fucking Rocket and how it’ll all work.10

 Now let’s talk about how this all might play out.

 The Plan

 Back to reality. So how do we get from, “there’s this rad potential rocket that might be ready to launch in five years” to “we’re a thriving multi-planetary civilization with a million people on Mars”?

 10,000 flights. That’s how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it’ll take to bring the Mars population to a million.

 Why 10,000? Because there will be at least 100 people on most trips, and that number will go up over time—but there will also be some people coming back from Mars each time other people go. In the lower part of each BFS will be a huge cargo compartment. Elon thinks we’ll need to get at least 10 million tons of cargo to Mars for the million-person colony to become self-sustaining, which will happen in a little over 10,000 flights if SpaceX can get the cargo payload capacity up to 1,000 tons relatively quickly, as they hope to.

 And when will these 10,000 trips start?

 Well let’s take a look at the Mars-Earth Synodic calendar—which deals with the dates when Earth and Mars are closest to each other (called a “Mars opposition”). Earth’s orbit is smaller than Mars’s, so Earth goes around the sun quicker—so much so that every 26 months, Earth laps Mars and they’re briefly next to each other. That’s the one time when Earth-Mars transfers can happen.

 We’re currently pretty close to Mars, since the last Mars opposition happened on May 22, 2016. That’s why, if you happen to be an “oh shit there’s a way-too-bright star let me take out my Sky Guide app and figure out which planet that is and then tell everyone I’m with and find that, yet again, no one cares, because everyone is a horrible person” nerd like me, you know that all summer, Mars has been super prominent and bright in our night sky.11 A year from now, Mars will be on the other side of the sun from us, and we won’t see it in our night sky at all.

 The 2016 Earth-Mars opposition is also a special one, because it’s the last time it’ll happen without anybody talking about it.

 Why? Because starting with the next one in July of 2018, SpaceX will start sending stuff to Mars each time there’s an opposition, and this will become increasingly big news each time. Here’s the tentative schedule, if everything goes perfectly to plan:

 Upcoming Mars Oppositions – and what SpaceX is planning for each

 July, 2018: Send a Dragon spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo

 October, 2020: Send multiple Dragons with more cargo

 December, 2022: Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.

 January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.

 Let’s all go back and read that last line again.

 January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.

 Did you catch that?

 If things go to plan, the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now.

 And zero people are talking about it.

 But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.

 And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.

 This is a thing that’s happening.

 Elon doesn’t like when people ask him about this first voyage and the Neil Armstrong of Mars. He says that it’s not about humanity putting a new multi-planetary feather in its cap, and he’s quick to point out, “putting people on the moon was super exciting—but where’s our moon base?” In other words, having humanity give Mars a high five for bragging rights is not what matters—what matters is carrying out the full vision of actually creating a full, self-sustaining civilization on Mars.

 And yeah, sure, fine. But I’m excited for 2025. It’s gonna be so fun.

 Anyway, so then the next Mars opposition will roll around in 2027. This time, if everything stays on track, multiple BFS’s will make the trek to Mars, carrying more people than were in the original group in 2025. And the spaceship that went over in 2025—the space Mayflower—will make its return trip to Earth, carrying some of the first group of Mars pioneers back home. They’ll return to massive celebration as international heroes, and the legendary spaceship will head off to enjoy its life in the Air and Space Museum.

 Meanwhile, we’ll all be glued to the TV12 as the group of BFS’s arrive on Mars, where the people in them will continue the grueling work started by the 2025 group. The early colonists will have a hard job like early colonists always do—and this will be extra hard. Not only will they have to truly start from scratch—digging mines and quarries and refineries, constructing the first underground village habitat with the first Martian hospitals and schools and greenhouse farms, laying down a giant plumbing system to pump water into the village, building that first rocket propellant plant—but they’ll have to do all of this in a place where they can’t go outside without a spacesuit on, and where everyone and everything they’ve ever known is on a pale blue dot in the night sky.

 It’ll be hard, but for the explorers of our world the payoff may be worth it. Elon says: “You can go anywhere on Earth in 24 hours. There’s no physical frontier on Earth anymore. Now, space is that frontier, so it’ll appeal to anyone with that exploratory spirit.”

 In April of 2029, SpaceX will send an even larger group of spacecraft, people, and cargo to Mars. This time, it’ll probably get less attention. By 2029, we’ll probably be getting used to the idea that there are people on Mars and that every 26 months, a great two-way migration occurs.

 The growing Mars colony will continue to entice the adventurers—those who read about the great sailing exhibitions of the 15th and 16th centuries and yearn to be there. When I asked Elon about how the small colony will grow and evolve, he said: “Think of the Mars colony as an organism that starts off as a zygote, and then becomes multi-cellular, and then gets organ differentiation—so it doesn’t look exactly the same all the way along, any more than the first settlement in Jamestown wasn’t representative of the United States today. It’ll be the same with Mars—Mars will be the new New World.”

 The 2031 and 2033 and 2035 oppositions will bring substantially more people to the new New World. By this point, the budding Martian city will be a part of our lives. We’ll follow the Twitter feeds of some of our favorite journalists on Mars to keep up with what’s happening there. We’ll all get hooked on Mars’s first hit reality shows. And some of us will start thinking, “Should I sign up to go to Mars one of these years before I get too old?”

 By 2050, there will be over a hundred thousand people on Mars. The company your son works for might have a branch there, and he’ll be saying goodbye to a couple co-workers who are about to head to the planet for a 52-month stint. He tells you that he doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t want to take his ninth-grade daughter away from her life and her friends. But he says she’s applying to a program that would bring her to Mars from the ages of 17 to 23 for an urban planning degree. You worry, even though you know it’s irrational. It’s just that you remember the days when going to Mars was risky and dangerous, and some part of you is still uncomfortable with it. And what if she decides not to come back?

 By 2065, the early days of Mars seem primitive. During the first few Mars migrations, only a few spaceships made the trip with only 100 people in each, it was prohibitively expensive to go, it took three months to get there, and there were only a few very grueling industries on Mars to work in.

 In 2065, every Mars opposition sees over 1,000 ships make the trip, each carrying over 500 people and a couple thousand tons of cargo. Half a million people make the journey every two years, and about 50,000 less than that come back, because Earth-to-Mars migration capacity grows a little bit each time as more ships are built. The trip, which now takes only 30 days, costs only $60,000 (in 2016 dollars)—and most people just pay off the ticket price with their well-paying job on Mars (labor is in high demand as the early Mars cities continue to expand and new cities are built).

 Many people remember those early days of the Mars colony when it was all about SpaceX—funded by SpaceX or their cargo clients and driven by their ambition and their ingenuity and their guts. But now, dozens of companies specialize in Earth-Mars transit and hundreds of companies focus on development and entrepreneurship on Mars. And transit is paid for like planes and trains and buses are paid for today—by passengers buying tickets.

 A decade later, the 2074 migration brings the Mars population above a million people. Small celebrations break out around both worlds, as a long-awaited landmark is achieved. Most people though, don’t even notice.

 ___________

 Everything I just said was based on things Elon said on my phone call with him. Some of it was numbers he said directly—like the last paragraph, which came from him saying, “I’m hopeful that we can get to a million roughly 50 years after the start.” Other times it was me extrapolating a possible future, given the predictions I heard from him. It’s all based in reality. At least, it’s based in Elon Musk’s best crack at reality. He was very careful to qualify everything that sounded like a prediction or a projection with, “This is what might happen if things go well—but there’s no way to know, and many things could go wrong along the way.” He emphasized that “it’s not that SpaceX has all the answers and we’ve got it covered or anything like that—it’s that we want to show that it’s possible. But it’s far from a given.” As for things that could go wrong, he listed off a few (like World War III), and one of his biggest concerns is that if he somehow dies young, SpaceX could be taken over by someone who wants to milk the company for profit instead of staying single-mindedly focused on the Mars civilization mission.

 But if SpaceX can manage to get this thing started, Elon thinks it could be not just a big deal in itself, it could jumpstart a slew of new possibilities for humanity. He explains:

 The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive but to really change humanity into a multi-planetary species. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic forcing function of interplanetary commerce, there will be the resources and the incentive to massively improve space transport technology, and I think then things really go to a whole new level.

 What I’m describing may sound really crazy, but it actually will be a small fraction of what is ultimately done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they couldn’t cross the Atlantic. So commerce basically had short-range vessels. Without the forcing function, shipping technology didn’t improve that much—you could do the same things with ships, pretty much, around the time of Julius Caesar as you could around the time of Columbus. 1,500 years later, you could still just cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. There needed to be the American colonies in order for that to happen.

 The people at SpaceX believe that once we’re on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well. That’s why they didn’t just create images of their Big Fucking Rocket standing proudly on Mars. They showed it flying by Jupiter.

 And Saturn.

 And bringing human explorers to faraway moons.

 They’re planning for a time when any person can go anywhere they want in our vast Solar System—a new golden age for exploration, with uncharted physical frontiers in every direction.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ___________

 Here’s the whole WBW Elon Musk series:

 Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
 Part 2, on Tesla: How Tesla Will Change the World
 Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
 Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce

 Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
 Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop


 Six other Wait But Why explainers:

 The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln

 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story

 The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence

 The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens?

 How Cryonics Works (and Why it Makes Sense)

 How to Name a Baby

 1. This is a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference. In the book, Heart of Gold was “the first spacecraft to make use of the Infinite Improbability.” Elon likes the name because he thinks SpaceX’s path was highly improbable.↩

 2. To be clear, payload is what the rocket can actually bring to space. Thrust is what the engines can push to space, which has to include both the entire BFR and its contained payload. Almost all of a rocket’s thrust is used to lift the rocket itself, with only a small fraction of it allotted for the payload. When I talk about thrust in these posts and say how many cars a set of engines could push to space, I’m talking about a hypothetical scenario in which there is no rocket, just the rocket’s engines with a platform on top of them and cars stacked on top of the platform.↩

 3. Here’s a video of Raptor’s first test firing, which happened a few days ago. It would be so unfun to put your hand through that column of flame.↩

 4. I asked Elon why there were 42 smaller-sized engines instead of a smaller number of huge ones, and he said that they had imagined larger engines at one point but that “optimization seems to call for more small engines, not fewer big engines.” I can’t explain more than that because I don’t get it.↩

 5. We often think of floating astronauts as being in “zero gravity.” In fact, they’re very much inside of the Earth’s gravity well when they’re floating—they’re just orbiting around the Earth so fast that they’re in constant free fall. The effect is the same—they float—but since they’re not actually in zero gravity, we call it microgravity.↩

 6. The methane part of that is a big innovation. Other rockets, including the Falcons, use kerosene as the primary fuel—but for a bunch of reasons, methane seems to make more sense for a Mars trip.↩

 7. Upsettingly-spelled word.↩

 8. Elon says that this is the plan if the refueling process is quick, like a couple weeks or less. If it takes a lot longer, then the spacecraft will be launched first without people, and then whenever it’s all refueled and ready to go, a spacecraft carrying just people will be launched and it will deliver the crew to the spacecraft for an Earth orbit rendezvous.↩

 9. People like to bring up the dangers of space radiation during this time. Elon thinks the dangers are overstated, and that with proper precautions (like a protective layer of water around the crew cabin), the radiation harm to a crew member would be similar to the damage to your body if you were to become a smoker during those three months and then stop. Not ideal, but not too big a deal.↩

 10. In the presentation, Elon went off on a tangent at one point that delighted me. He talked about the possibility of the BFR’s spaceship doubling as a super-fast way to transport stuff or people around the Earth: “It actually has enough capability that you could maybe even go to orbit with the spaceship…and maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world…We could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes at the longest—most would be maybe 20, 25 minutes. So maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of New York, you could go from New York to Tokyo in 25 minutes. You could cross the Atlantic in 10 minutes. Most of your time would be getting to the ship, and then it would be real quick after that. There are some intriguing possibilities there, but we’re not counting on that.” YES. Amazing glimpse of the world of the future, when someone will text you from Delhi and ask if you want to zip over from San Francisco to grab lunch, and you’ll say, “Sure, but I have a meeting in two hours, so I can’t stay long.” Except you won’t, because you’ll just meet your friend virtually and it’ll feel exactly how it would to be there in person. So there goes that.↩

 11. Right next to Mars all summer has been a pretty bright Saturn—something I’ve also told a bunch of people who don’t care.↩

 12. or whatever 2027 humans are glued to when they’re glued to something↩

 1. All images are from spacex.com, unless they have “waitbutwhy.com” written at the bottom, in which case they were made by me.↩

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We made a fancy PDF of this post (original and G-rated versions) for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)  
Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they’re making.
A couple months ago, when SpaceX first announced that this would be happening in late September, it hit me that I might still have special privileges with them, kind of grandfathered in from my time working with Elon and his companies in 2015 (which resulted in an in-depth four-part blog series). So I reached out and asked if I could learn about the big fucking rocket ahead of time and write a post about it.
They said yes.
A little while later, I got on a call with Elon to discuss the rocket, the timeline, and the big plan this was all a part of. We started off how we always do.
   
   
Then I brought up the rocket.
   
   
   
   
Eventually, we were able to settle in to a fascinating conversation about this insane machine SpaceX is building and what’s going to happen with it.
Now, before we get into things—
This post is only a piece of The SpaceX Story—one of the most amazing stories of our time—and a story I spent three months and 40,000 words telling last year. If you really want to understand this and you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there. The post has three parts, divided into five pages:
  Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space  
  Part 2: Musk’s Mission  
 Part 3: How to Colonize Mars  
→ Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space  
→ Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel  
→ Phase 3: Colonize Mars  
For those who have read the post and want a refresher or those who just want to hear about the big fucking rocket and move on with their day, here’s a quick overview of the background:
 The Context 
To understand why the big fucking rocket matters, you have to understand this sentence:
 SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars. 
Let’s go part by part.
 Why make human life multi-planetary? 
Two reasons:
 1) It’s fun and exciting. (Here’s a clip from one of the interviews I did with Elon last year where he articulates this point.)
 2) It’s not a great idea to have all of our eggs in one basket. Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it “life insurance for the species.”
 Why Mars? 
Venus is a dick, with its lead-melting temperatures, its crushing atmospheric pressure, and its unbearable winds.
The moon has few natural resources, a 29-day day, and with no atmosphere to either provide protection against the sun during the day or warm things up at night, both day and night become murderous. Same deal on Mercury.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are just huge balls of gas pretending to be planets.
Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn are possibly habitable, but they’re farther away and colder and darker than Mars, so why would we do that.
Pluto is even farther and colder and darker. Stop asking me about Pluto.
That leaves Mars. Mars isn’t a good time. If Mars were a place on Earth, it’s somewhere no one would want to go. But compared to all of those other options, it’s a dream. It’s cold but not that cold. It’s kind of dark but not that much darker than Earth. It’s far but not that far. Its day is almost the same length as ours, which is nice for us and hugely helpful for growing Earthly vegetation. Its surface gravity isn’t crazy low or crazy high (it’s around a third of Earth’s). It has a ton of (frozen) water and a decent amount of CO2, which are critical for early attempts at living there and hugely helpful for future attempts to “terraform” the planet into a place more livable for humans. All things considered, we’re very lucky to have an option as good as Mars—in most other solar systems, we probably wouldn’t.
 Why 1,000,000 people? 
Because Elon thinks that’s a rough estimate for the number of people you’d need to have on Mars in order for the Mars civilization to be “self-sustaining”—with self-sustaining defined by Elon as: “Even if the spaceships from Earth permanently stop coming, the colony doesn’t eventually die out—which requires a huge industrial base, and a much harder industrial base to create than being on Earth.”
In other words, if hard drive #2 relies on hard drive #1 in order to stay working, then your photo album isn’t really backed up, is it? The whole point of hard drive #2 is to save the day if hard drive #1 permanently crashes.
And while the Earth hard drive could “crash” for many exciting reasons—an asteroid hits us, AI kills us, Trump kills us, ISIS creates some upsetting biological weapon, etc.—Elon also warns about the less dramatic possibility that the Earth ships stop coming simply because Earth civilization stops having the capability to send them:
 The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight.  At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo. 
In other words, let’s not wait on this.
 Great, but how the hell do you bring 1,000,000 people to Mars? 
You make this green part exist:
   
It’s kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars and can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.
Unfortunately, right now the yellow circle is tiny and the blue circle doesn’t exist.
Elon thinks—and I kind of do too—that if the blue circle can get big enough, the yellow circle will take care of itself. If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you’ll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.
The hard part is the blue circle. Here’s the issue:
Last time the US Congress checked with NASA, the cost to send a five-person crew to Mars was $50 billion. $10 billion a person. Elon thinks that to make the blue circle sufficiently large, it needs to cost $500,000 a person. 1/20,000 of the current cost.
1/20,000.
That’s like looking at the car industry and saying, “Right now a new Honda costs around $20,000. To make this a viable industry, we need to get the cost of a new car down to $1.”
So what the hell?
Here’s the hell:
Imagine if the way planes worked was that they took off, flew to their destination, but then instead of landing, all the passengers parachuted down to the ground and then the plane landed by smashing into the ocean and blowing up. So every plane flew exactly once, and to have a new flight happen, you’d have to build another plane.
A plane ticket would cost $1.5 million.
Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the ocean (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).
When Elon started SpaceX, he was determined to fix this problem. It was a tall order, given that no one had ever done it before—including nations like the US and Russia who had spent billions trying. But SpaceX puzzled away at the problem year after year, and after trying and failing a bunch of times, in late 2015, they nailed it:
 
Then they nailed it again. And again. And again. Now they nail it more often than not. Here’s a daytime view of a recent landing:
 
Soon, for the first time, a previously used-and-landed, flight-tested Falcon 9 will carry out a new mission for SpaceX, officially making SpaceX rockets “reusable.”
To fly a mission on a used rocket, you only need to pay for propellant (fuel and liquid oxygen) and a bit of routine maintenance. This cuts the price of space travel down by 100 or even 1,000 times.
That leaves us with somewhere between 19/20 and 199/200 of the cost left to cut. Part of that will happen when SpaceX takes 100 or more people to Mars at a time, instead of five (the number Congress asked NASA about). The rest of it is taken care of by a few simple innovations, like refueling the spaceships in orbit (which lowers the cost by 5-10x) and manufacturing propellant on Mars so you don’t have to carry your return propellant with you (which lowers the cost by another 5-10x). More on those things later.
Suddenly, not only can the price get down to $500,000/ticket, it can probably go even lower (Elon thinks it could eventually cost under $100,000/person). You may not have noticed it yet, but SpaceX’s innovations are in the process of creating a total revolution in the cost of space travel—a change that will open doors we can’t imagine being open today. And when that revolution goes far enough, SpaceX’s vision of putting 1,000,000 people on Mars really—actually—seriously—may happen.
We’re going to Mars. And this week, SpaceX showed us the thing that’s gonna take us there.
 The Rocket 
“It’s so mind-blowing. It blows my mind, and I see it every week.”
Elon’s pumped. And when you learn about the big fucking rocket he’s building, you’ll understand why.
First, let’s absorb the challenge at hand. It’s often said that space is hard. To this day, only a few hundred people have been in space, only a few countries have the ability to launch something into space, and the history of human space travel is littered with tragic launch failures. Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.
But when we talk about humans going into space, we’re talking mostly about humans going into Low Earth Orbit, a layer of space between 100 and 1,200 miles above the ground—and normally, they’re headed only 250 miles up to the International Space Station. The only time humans have gone farther were the small handful of Americans who made it out to the moon in the 1960s, traveling about 250,000 miles away.
When Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is somewhere between 34 and 60 million miles away—about 200 times farther away than the moon and about 200,000 times farther away than the ISS.
The moon is just over one light second away.
   
Mars is more than three light minutes away.
Mars is far.
Elon likes to compare the Earth-to-Mars trip to crossing the Atlantic Ocean, noting that using that scale, going to the moon would only be crossing the English Channel (and going to the ISS would be going to a dock 117 feet off the shore). Continuing with that comparison, he says, “A rocket made to go to Low Earth Orbit or even the moon is basically like a coastal fishing vessel, compared to a colonial transport system that is trying to go 1,000 times further.”
On top of that, it might be worth it to take only a few humans or a single satellite up into Low Earth Orbit—but if you’re going all the way to Mars, you want to take a lot more than that. So you have to take much more mass, much further. Multiplying the distance factor by the payload factor, Elon explains that a Mars transport system “is like literally a million times more capable than what the current world launch system can do. It has to be.”
It also has to be incredibly advanced. Elon says, “It’s not just bigger, it needs to be more efficient. There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to rockets of ‘small and complex’ or ‘big and dumb.’ People talk about the ‘big dumb booster’—that won’t work. You need a big smart booster. If you want to build a Mars colony, you have no choice— you have to make it big and efficient.”
So that’s all you have to do—build a rocket that’s a million times more capable than today’s best rockets but who’s also efficient and smart and great in bed.
SpaceX is building it. Meet the Big Fucking Rocket.1
    
Hard to quite understand the bigness from that picture. So let’s add in some scale:
   
Or how about this?
   
It would barely fit diagonally across a football field without going into the stands.
There’s also this:
   
It’s a skyscraper. Or as Elon puts it, “by far the biggest flying object ever.”
In yesterday’s presentation, Elon explained that this isn’t a first crack at how it might look, or an artist’s impression of how it might look—it’s how it’s going to look. This is the thing they’re building.
Unfortunately, SpaceX seems to be going through an existential crisis when it comes to naming this thing—first it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, then (because it can go way past Mars) it was renamed the Interplanetary Transport System, then yesterday in the presentation, Elon said they haven’t actually settled on a name yet but that the specific spaceship that makes the maiden voyage to Mars might be called Heart of Gold1—so no one knows what to call it.
Which is why—until I hear otherwise—I’ll be calling it something I once heard Elon describe it as in an interview: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).
The Big Fucking Rocket is fucking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V—the rocket used in the Apollo mission—which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.
Here’s how it stacks up next to a bunch of other rockets in size:
   
The difference is even more extreme when you compare the rockets by how many kilograms of payload (i.e. cargo and/or people) they can each take to orbit:
   
For comparison, SpaceX’s badass Falcon 9 rocket will be able to take about 4 tons of payload to Mars, and the Falcon Heavy—which is about to be today’s most powerful rocket—will be able to take about 13 tons to Mars. Elon believes the BFR will be able to take a few hundred tons of payload to Mars at first and eventually be able to take 1,000 tons. The absurdity of that statistic—that the behemoth Falcon Heavy can only manage a little over 1% of the BFR’s ultimate Mars payload—is pretty hard to absorb.
Now, to be clear—what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.
   
 The Big Fucking Booster 
Let’s start by talking about the booster. The 25-story-high booster—AKA the actual rocket of the BFR—is what Elon calls “quite a beast.” It’s the biggest booster of all time—by far. By physical size, definitely, but even more so by thrust.
In the SpaceX post, I talked about the Falcon 9’s nine Merlin engines, and how each one was powerful enough to lift a stack of 40 cars up into the sky—in total, that meant the Falcon 9 set of engines could lift 360 cars. The Falcon Heavy, with its 27 Merlin engines, could lift a stack of over 1,000 cars up past the clouds.2
 The Big Fucking Booster sits atop a different kind of engine: the Raptor.
   
The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference—by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than a Merlin.
A single Raptor engine produces 310 tons of thrust—enough to lift 310 tons, or a stack of 172 cars, or an entire Boeing 747 airplane, into the sky. That’s what one Raptor can do.3
 And the BFB has 42 of them.4
    
All together, that’s an unheard of 13,033 tons of thrust, enough to push more than 7,000 cars—or 50 large airplanes—up to space.
 The Big Fucking Spaceship 
So then there’s the spacecraft—which SpaceX calls the Interplanetary Spaceship, and which I’m going to keep calling the Big Fucking Spaceship because it’s more fun. The BFS is the big cool-looking thing on top of the BFB (in case you’re getting Big Fucking Confused—the Big Fucking Spaceship (BFS) on top of the Big Fucking Booster (BFB) together make what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR)). The BFS is what will take the people and cargo to Mars. It’s also what will launch, on its own, off Mars and return to Earth with people who want to come back.
The BFS is itself the size of a tall, 16-story building, and is 55 feet wide at its thickest point. In addition to hundreds, and eventually a thousand tons of cargo, the BFS will be able to carry as many as 100 people at the beginning, and Elon believes that number could grow to 200 and even above 300 people over time—like a cruise ship.
With nine Raptor engines, it’ll have more liftoff thrust on its own than any of today’s rockets—including next year’s Falcon Heavy. For a second-stage, cargo-carrying spacecraft to pack more thrust than even the most powerful first-stage rockets is outrageous.
Here’s a cross-section up close:
   
I asked Elon what it’ll be like to ride in it. He said, “Well, you’d be in a giant spaceship in microgravity.5 I mean, it would be pretty fun. You’d be floating around.”
Good point.
In the presentation Q&amp;A, he added: “It has to be really fun and exciting, it can’t feel cramped or boring. The crew compartment is set up so that you can do zero-g games, you can float around, there will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant—it’ll be really fun to go.”
Um, yeah, get me on that shit now. A zero gravity cruise ship. With this view:
   
And if you were to go, here’s how the whole thing would work:
 1) Get on the ship. The BFR will be taking off from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same pad that the Apollo astronauts left from. This is because that pad was built to be absurdly large since they didn’t know yet how big a rocket they’d be using. When you get there, you head up the tower and across the bridge into the Big Fucking Spaceship.
   
 2) Take off. You strap in, and the BFR lifts off. After a few minutes, the first-stage BFB separates and heads back down to Earth. The BFS that you’re in continues onward and settles into Earth’s orbit.
   
 3) Refuel in orbit. After landing back on Earth, the BFB is capped with a new BFS—this one full of propellant (liquid oxygen and methane).6 It lifts off again and pings the propellant-filled spaceship into orbit, where it rendezvouses7 with your spaceship. The two connect like two orcas holding hands as the propellant is transferred.
   
This happens a few more times until your spaceship is entirely refueled.8 This process is critical A) for lowering the cost of the trip, and B) for making the trip much faster. People have always thought a journey to Mars would take six or nine months, but the BFS will get there in three.
 4) H ead to Mars. Three months of fun times in microgravity and getting really sick of the other people on the ship.9 During the journey, the spaceship steers using cold gas thrusters, powered by huge solar arrays:
   
 5) Enter the Mars atmosphere. Time for the heat shield to be in the shit:
   
 6) Land on Mars. Upright, the same way the first stage lands on Earth.
 7) Live on Mars for a while doing god knows what. If it’s early on in the colonization process, you’re probably there to work and help build up the initial industries. Later on, it could be anything—research, entrepreneurship, or just simply adventure.
 8) Make propellant on Mars. This will be one of the key early industries to set up on Mars. Propellant consists of liquid oxygen (O2) and methane (CH4), which are both conveniently easy to make from the massive quantities of H2O (ice) and CO2 (the main gas in the Martian atmosphere) already sitting on Mars. They’ll use this propellant to load up the spaceship you came there on in preparation for its voyage back to Earth. Doing this spares the massive expense of having to carry propellant all the way from Earth for the return trip.
 9) Either stay forever or come back. If you come back, you’ll do so by boarding one of the BFS’s that came over in the last batch.
 10) Land vertically on Earth. Just like you did on Mars. The spaceship will go through routine maintenance in preparation to head back to Mars two years later.
 11) Be that insufferable person who can’t be part of any conversation without figuring out some way to bring up your time on Mars.  
Mission complete.
This kind-of-confusing diagram sums it up:
   
And this video sums it up very deliciously:
 
So that’s the deal with the Big Fucking Rocket and how it’ll all work.10
 Now let’s talk about how this all might play out.
 The Plan 
Back to reality. So how do we get from, “there’s this rad potential rocket that might be ready to launch in five years” to “we’re a thriving multi-planetary civilization with a million people on Mars”?
10,000 flights. That’s how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it’ll take to bring the Mars population to a million.
Why 10,000? Because there will be at least 100 people on most trips, and that number will go up over time—but there will also be some people coming back from Mars each time other people go. In the lower part of each BFS will be a huge cargo compartment. Elon thinks we’ll need to get at least 10 million tons of cargo to Mars for the million-person colony to become self-sustaining, which will happen in a little over 10,000 flights if SpaceX can get the cargo payload capacity up to 1,000 tons relatively quickly, as they hope to.
And when will these 10,000 trips start?
Well let’s take a look at the Mars-Earth Synodic calendar—which deals with the dates when Earth and Mars are closest to each other (called a “Mars opposition”). Earth’s orbit is smaller than Mars’s, so Earth goes around the sun quicker—so much so that every 26 months, Earth laps Mars and they’re briefly next to each other. That’s the one time when Earth-Mars transfers can happen.
We’re currently pretty close to Mars, since the last Mars opposition happened on May 22, 2016. That’s why, if you happen to be an “oh shit there’s a way-too-bright star let me take out my Sky Guide app and figure out which planet that is and then tell everyone I’m with and find that, yet again, no one cares, because everyone is a horrible person” nerd like me, you know that all summer, Mars has been super prominent and bright in our night sky.11 A year from now, Mars will be on the other side of the sun from us, and we won’t see it in our night sky at all.
The 2016 Earth-Mars opposition is also a special one, because it’s the last time it’ll happen without anybody talking about it.
Why? Because starting with the next one in July of 2018, SpaceX will start sending stuff to Mars each time there’s an opposition, and this will become increasingly big news each time. Here’s the tentative schedule, if everything goes perfectly to plan:
 Upcoming Mars Oppositions – and what SpaceX is planning for each
 July, 2018: Send a Dragon spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo
 October, 2020: Send multiple Dragons with more cargo
 December, 2022: Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.
 January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.
Let’s all go back and read that last line again.
  January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars. 
Did you catch that?
If things go to plan, the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now. 
And zero people are talking about it.
But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.
And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.
This is a thing that’s happening.
Elon doesn’t like when people ask him about this first voyage and the Neil Armstrong of Mars. He says that it’s not about humanity putting a new multi-planetary feather in its cap, and he’s quick to point out, “putting people on the moon was super exciting—but where’s our moon base?” In other words, having humanity give Mars a high five for bragging rights is not what matters—what matters is carrying out the full vision of actually creating a full, self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
And yeah, sure, fine. But I’m excited for 2025. It’s gonna be so fun.
Anyway, so then the next Mars opposition will roll around in 2027. This time, if everything stays on track, multiple BFS’s will make the trek to Mars, carrying more people than were in the original group in 2025. And the spaceship that went over in 2025—the space Mayflower—will make its return trip to Earth, carrying some of the first group of Mars pioneers back home. They’ll return to massive celebration as international heroes, and the legendary spaceship will head off to enjoy its life in the Air and Space Museum.
Meanwhile, we’ll all be glued to the TV12 as the group of BFS’s arrive on Mars, where the people in them will continue the grueling work started by the 2025 group. The early colonists will have a hard job like early colonists always do—and this will be extra hard. Not only will they have to truly start from scratch—digging mines and quarries and refineries, constructing the first underground village habitat with the first Martian hospitals and schools and greenhouse farms, laying down a giant plumbing system to pump water into the village, building that first rocket propellant plant—but they’ll have to do all of this in a place where they can’t go outside without a spacesuit on, and where everyone and everything they’ve ever known is on a pale blue dot in the night sky.
It’ll be hard, but for the explorers of our world the payoff may be worth it. Elon says: “You can go anywhere on Earth in 24 hours. There’s no physical frontier on Earth anymore. Now, space is that frontier, so it’ll appeal to anyone with that exploratory spirit.”
In April of 2029, SpaceX will send an even larger group of spacecraft, people, and cargo to Mars. This time, it’ll probably get less attention. By 2029, we’ll probably be getting used to the idea that there are people on Mars and that every 26 months, a great two-way migration occurs.
The growing Mars colony will continue to entice the adventurers—those who read about the great sailing exhibitions of the 15th and 16th centuries and yearn to be there. When I asked Elon about how the small colony will grow and evolve, he said: “Think of the Mars colony as an organism that starts off as a zygote, and then becomes multi-cellular, and then gets organ differentiation—so it doesn’t look exactly the same all the way along, any more than the first settlement in Jamestown wasn’t representative of the United States today. It’ll be the same with Mars—Mars will be the new New World.”
The 2031 and 2033 and 2035 oppositions will bring substantially more people to the new New World. By this point, the budding Martian city will be a part of our lives. We’ll follow the Twitter feeds of some of our favorite journalists on Mars to keep up with what’s happening there. We’ll all get hooked on Mars’s first hit reality shows. And some of us will start thinking, “Should I sign up to go to Mars one of these years before I get too old?”
By 2050, there will be over a hundred thousand people on Mars. The company your son works for might have a branch there, and he’ll be saying goodbye to a couple co-workers who are about to head to the planet for a 52-month stint. He tells you that he doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t want to take his ninth-grade daughter away from her life and her friends. But he says she’s applying to a program that would bring her to Mars from the ages of 17 to 23 for an urban planning degree. You worry, even though you know it’s irrational. It’s just that you remember the days when going to Mars was risky and dangerous, and some part of you is still uncomfortable with it. And what if she decides not to come back?
By 2065, the early days of Mars seem primitive. During the first few Mars migrations, only a few spaceships made the trip with only 100 people in each, it was prohibitively expensive to go, it took three months to get there, and there were only a few very grueling industries on Mars to work in.
In 2065, every Mars opposition sees over 1,000 ships make the trip, each carrying over 500 people and a couple thousand tons of cargo. Half a million people make the journey every two years, and about 50,000 less than that come back, because Earth-to-Mars migration capacity grows a little bit each time as more ships are built. The trip, which now takes only 30 days, costs only $60,000 (in 2016 dollars)—and most people just pay off the ticket price with their well-paying job on Mars (labor is in high demand as the early Mars cities continue to expand and new cities are built).
Many people remember those early days of the Mars colony when it was all about SpaceX—funded by SpaceX or their cargo clients and driven by their ambition and their ingenuity and their guts. But now, dozens of companies specialize in Earth-Mars transit and hundreds of companies focus on development and entrepreneurship on Mars. And transit is paid for like planes and trains and buses are paid for today—by passengers buying tickets.
A decade later, the 2074 migration brings the Mars population above a million people. Small celebrations break out around both worlds, as a long-awaited landmark is achieved. Most people though, don’t even notice.
___________
Everything I just said was based on things Elon said on my phone call with him. Some of it was numbers he said directly—like the last paragraph, which came from him saying, “I’m hopeful that we can get to a million roughly 50 years after the start.” Other times it was me extrapolating a possible future, given the predictions I heard from him. It’s all based in reality. At least, it’s based in Elon Musk’s best crack at reality. He was very careful to qualify everything that sounded like a prediction or a projection with, “This is what might happen if things go well—but there’s no way to know, and many things could go wrong along the way.” He emphasized that “it’s not that SpaceX has all the answers and we’ve got it covered or anything like that—it’s that we want to show that it’s possible. But it’s far from a given.” As for things that could go wrong, he listed off a few (like World War III), and one of his biggest concerns is that if he somehow dies young, SpaceX could be taken over by someone who wants to milk the company for profit instead of staying single-mindedly focused on the Mars civilization mission.
But if SpaceX can manage to get this thing started, Elon thinks it could be not just a big deal in itself, it could jumpstart a slew of new possibilities for humanity. He explains:
 The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive but to really change humanity into a multi-planetary species. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic forcing function of interplanetary commerce, there will be the resources and the incentive to massively improve space transport technology, and I think then things really go to a whole new level.  
 What I’m describing may sound really crazy, but it actually will be a small fraction of what is ultimately done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they couldn’t cross the Atlantic. So commerce basically had short-range vessels. Without the forcing function, shipping technology didn’t improve that much—you could do the same things with ships, pretty much, around the time of Julius Caesar as you could around the time of Columbus. 1,500 years later, you could still just cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. There needed to be the American colonies in order for that to happen. 
The people at SpaceX believe that once we’re on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well. That’s why they didn’t just create images of their Big Fucking Rocket standing proudly on Mars. They showed it flying by Jupiter.
   
And Saturn.
   
And bringing human explorers to faraway moons.
   
   
They’re planning for a time when any person can go anywhere they want in our vast Solar System—a new golden age for exploration, with uncharted physical frontiers in every direction.
   
___________
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
___________
Here’s the whole WBW Elon Musk series:
 Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
Part 2, on Tesla: How Tesla Will Change the World  
 Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce  
Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City 
Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop 
 
Six other Wait But Why explainers:
  The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln  
  From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story  
  The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence  
  The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens?  
  How Cryonics Works (and Why it Makes Sense)  
  How to Name a Baby
SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/08/wait-hi-full-report.html
Wait But Hi — Full Report
2016-08-23
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>Last weekend (August 13th and 14th) was Wait But Hi—a global hangout weekend for Wait But Why readers.</p>
<p>It started with a survey we sent out to the WBW <a>email list</a> in early July. Using what we learned from the surveys, our team spent a large part of the summer strategically matchmaking groups of people together and creating customized activities to fit each group.</p>
<p>Then, on Saturday, it all happened at once—over 3,500 people participated in over 400 events that took place in 168 cities, in these 48 countries:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And Sunday was big group day, with large picnic gatherings in cities all over the world.</p>
<p>It was exciting:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/TomSchepers08/status/764577217108074496"></a></p>
<p>And a lot happened.</p>
<p>Like this dinner in Germany:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/oetting/status/764555009430327296"></a></p>
<p>Or this one in Portugal:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/almeidagoncalo/status/764536546087333888"></a></p>
<p>Or this one in Singapore:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDdiQcAnrP/"></a></p>
<p>And the US:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/achaifetz/status/764720113522053120"></a></p>
<p>And Austria:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEKqq4g8qT/"></a></p>
<p>Canada:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEvn0VAgAW/"></a></p>
<p>Estonia:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDo8tggCk-/"></a></p>
<p>Hong Kong:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDdQuNhxWb/"></a></p>
<p>Russia:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJIhuMuBZw4/"></a></p>
<p>India:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDh7RFDkT7/"></a></p>
<p>New Zealand:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJC2BTejJnL/"></a></p>
<p>Belgium:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJERCFhA8l2/"></a></p>
<p>South Africa:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/MerelLucy/status/764411703169875968/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And the Czech Republic:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDr1TbBWuI/"></a></p>
<p>People picnicked in Paris:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJOjkOQh1Xl/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJERfPJByFh/"></a></p>
<p>And Los Angeles:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Sarbury/status/766461484020805632/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And Amsterdam:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Painted graffiti in London:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/cristin_adriana/status/764552454021189633/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Got a <a href="https://twitter.com/TyrannyoftheP/status/764676011472543744">lesson</a> on blockchain in Chicago:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Looked through telescopes in Berlin:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Aesche/status/764586204792778752"></a></p>
<p>Exchanged gifts in Moscow:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/kaapyth0n/status/764560859079315456/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Played Shuffleboard in Brooklyn:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJO1CKPgwdk/"></a></p>
<p>Mini golf in San Francisco:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEZPNWBOSB/"></a></p>
<p>And escaped the room in Lagos:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEIlCSBDSv/"></a></p>
<p>There were big groups:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Kiwani_Dolean/status/764559374446723073/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>There were small groups:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/aditibhatt/status/765091686741450752/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>People met at the beach:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/skemkar3/status/764654074159468545/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>At the pool:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Amy2203441Amy/status/765237329476751360/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>At the river:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEpgtUglwo/"></a></p>
<p>At the lake:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/girl_inthelab/status/764495200400076800/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>On the rocks:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJCcu0xAt_E/"></a></p>
<p>In the park:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE0QEmgqJ8/"></a></p>
<p>And on the street:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/ffcccc/status/764652242213437440/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>They went to the Louvre:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDzzmegcFc/"></a></p>
<p>The Museum of Natural History:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/ZakMartellucci/status/764546691760529409/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>The Cabinets of Consequence Exhibition:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/bwestenra/status/764757690920861696/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And the dinosaur museum:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/L_L_Hee/status/764332900774928384/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Some people went to restaurants:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJD4AOxgI4B/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/_RaghavJain/status/764854488159154176/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDyKECgOA6/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/_sammyspence/status/764395714688397313/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Other people—over 50—went on blind dates. (But people don’t tend to be into having a picture of them on a date posted on the internet so we’ll leave it at that.)</p>
<p>A bunch of people hosted hangouts in their homes. All over their homes. Like in the living room:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEmfTUBRrY/"></a></p>
<p>On the terrace:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/oxanozaep/status/764584066595381248/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Around the counter:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/the_ranisa/status/764595760872689664/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>On the deck:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/anitramblogger/status/764521388896030722/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>In the kitchen:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDlASJjKrb/"></a></p>
<p>On the patio:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEOj2GgiRA/"></a></p>
<p>In the backyard:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/mjchitty/status/764541527540568064/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>In the playroom:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Pro_Ice/status/764533612662427649/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>On the roof:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Jack_Dille/status/764725826822647808/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Even in the treehouse:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEtjlyjaJN/"></a></p>
<p>Empty tables turned into full tables:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/clemenslm/status/764488434069143552/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/clemenslm/status/764543715616718848/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And then came dinner.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDwHPagaIc/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDIXnLAqfr/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/JenSoliz/status/764692795252625408/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/marshwah/status/764428386211024898/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDZJmQhUKy/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/matthewjrogers/status/764440343576064000/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/matthewjrogers/status/764399604603367425/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEdokZA-2r/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJGmyLthg4L/"></a></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>Dessert:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/senorhookfish/status/764433271933456385/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJD6CQ9gs3R/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDfXSED-Y_/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDRPJkATbe/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/dan_kuria/status/764565224175403008/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDrNddBaxj/"></a></p>
<p>And drinks. Like tea:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/L_L_Hee/status/764387852725596160/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And liquor:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/hartnettkevin/status/764695056007651329/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Bar beer:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/bertgoethals/status/764595593385746432/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Brewery beer:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE2LVtgtTu/"></a></p>
<p>Street beer:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDXVo3DMxF/"></a></p>
<p>Homemade beer:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJC60GihVBb/"></a></p>
<p>And boot beer:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJLZNnmD5iB/"></a></p>
<p>There were Denver dogs:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJJYO0Rjsvl/"></a></p>
<p>And Cluj-Napoca cats:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJD1DMfjQSM/"></a></p>
<p>There were lights in Japan:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/MooreRichardPlz/status/764433119109754880/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And there was <a href="http://www.audium.org/">darkness</a> in San Francisco:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/jeanxin/status/764714786051330048/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>There was snuggling:</p>
<p></p>
<p>There were rides:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJG0dkADvYy/"></a></p>
<p>And lots of games:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE2plrgaEt/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/SiQing_Lin/status/764838731354431489/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/blavery/status/766133918554791936/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJD52PPhT87/"></a></p>
<p>There was yodeling:</p>
<p>and Ws:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/matthewjrogers/status/764452999183802374/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And neighbors who were sick of your heady shit:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/kaiticullerton/status/764732304673484800"></a></p>
<p>We made a few rules for everyone. One rule was that no one could talk or ask about anyone’s job for the first hour of the night.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/LauraGlu/status/764574330617405440"></a></p>
<p>So people learned about each other in other ways. Like guessing which fun fact about their life was written by which person:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/_ouisa/status/764719152875630592"></a></p>
<p>Or explaining why a certain random object defines you:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/AElegria/status/764749131759878144/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Or making a plan for if a shark ever bites you:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/FrancisCamstra/status/764514461642321920/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Another rule was that people had to bring a king of spades card to help identify each other. So there were kings:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDoEoDgDtC/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Nodraak/status/764465672227266560/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/p8d/status/764562401362456576/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Lots of kings.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJFA67_hSSb/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/theVISHESHone/status/764851590033321984/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/jeannieeek/status/764783382727303168/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/CrisLark/status/764850092335509504/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Finally, we asked each group to make a stick drawing about their night. We didn’t specify much more than that—so things varied. A lot of groups drew the scene:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/nateperkins/status/764674364864421888/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/OhGRun/status/764808607418421248/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEn2PqBnOB/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/BOhUiginn/status/764673749635387392/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE15jPg9Xa/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE0QQNDbRB/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEdfyHDjda/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJD-nMIgIXW/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/AndreaScariot/status/764561829997735937/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/jbrandt_design/status/764662217841086465/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Others depicted the characters involved:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/InspectorVast/status/764647746062069762/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/econJahagirdar/status/764525740373209088/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/dan_kuria/status/764559623781253121/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE-JGVgX6E/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEg0PFButG/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/jmcooperart/status/765244601276006400/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/oetting/status/764552975226470400/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Kiwani_Dolean/status/764533108192534528/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEII9yBL2t/"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/sarahjmcgibbon/status/764589372557627392/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/JenSoliz/status/764677222225489920/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/achaifetz/status/764685036712890368/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>There were team efforts:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/FrancisCamstra/status/764563477839089664/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/DLeGrin/status/764551737973833728"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/CasaMazzolini/status/764553691575779330/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/anitramblogger/status/764553838665854977/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And solo projects:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJElP5sDWru/"></a></p>
<p>There were artists:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEy5SxD4kx/"></a></p>
<p>There were not artists:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/herminghaus/status/764752389899444224/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>There were bikes:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJECYkjAnxt/"></a></p>
<p>There were lobsters:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEmvC4hOne/"></a></p>
<p>Some went artsy:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Eva_ptdmg/status/764662576873607168/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/not4funcomics/status/764574140787326976/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Some went Wait But Why-y:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJFXWJNjY66/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDxSPDBLpy/"></a></p>
<p>And some blew my mind:</p>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>There was a Vietnamese tea ceremony in Houston:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/ezinsitz/status/764938291707645952/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>A slanty wine bottle in Poland:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJD2xW_BOWY/"></a></p>
<p>And Tinder profiles in Hong Kong:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDXLLBBR7W/"></a></p>
<p>A bunch of groups depicted the great conversation:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/KittyBroadway/status/764643601888477184/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>About all kinds of things:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/jillricha12/status/764683640563380228/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/udp1024/status/764618492956012545"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/dysanio/status/764566105662844928/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>There were thought-provoking questions:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/dougbrandon/status/764566669486424064/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Controversial opinions:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/rmancini08/status/764638945363845120/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And pressing debates:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/samsambamalam/status/764412476951703552/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Some drawings revealed that things got weird:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/AElegria/status/764592022254718976/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Shuologist/status/765427895263043584/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And apparently some events didn’t go at all as planned. Like when these two militant Red Cross workers forced another attendee to donate blood:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDS1DID1b0/"></a></p>
<p>Or when these two chickens morphed into a person:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/kavi_melb/status/764365152699330560/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Or when these six people forced a baby to dump his things in a river:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/toner_F/status/764551354266312704/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Or when this happened:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEmquMj2n0/"></a></p>
<p>And then there were some that are hard to describe. Like these solemn people underneath a large spoon holding a cherry:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/fackelmann/status/764644055422758913/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Or this zany man:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDXO_FjtDp/"></a></p>
<p>Or these four psychos:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/rurbinasal/status/764535917180755968/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Or whatever the fuck is happening here:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJFFKBqjEt-/"></a></p>
<p>But something the drawings did make clear is that a lot can happen in one night with a group of strangers:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/VaNikolidakis/status/764568012393422850/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Wait But Hi turned out to be a lot of things.</p>
<p>It was far from perfect. We were only able to set up events for 22% of the 16,000 people who applied. And there were mishaps—which people handled the best they could:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/KevinGar77/status/764541164896649216/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/H3rm17/status/764431544630976512/photo/1"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJC-eo9DaQ9/"></a></p>
<p>But mostly, Wait But Hi was full of good things.</p>
<p>Like laughter:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/katemuchoki/status/764576369200271360/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Fabulous conversation:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/janineglee/status/764634094386851841/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Unexpected fun:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/Apurv___/status/764554221484027904/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>And amazing strangers:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/jalagrange/status/764609679003705344/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Who became friends:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJEdHkWg9rP/"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BJDz9HcDIgG/"></a></p>
<p>The weekend was full of wonderful people:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/raulmarcosl/status/764599458327920640"></a></p>
<p>Who made some souls grow more vibrant:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/sammyhayyy/status/764708981612785664"></a></p>
<p>It was something like magic:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Pro_Ice/status/764584263069143040"></a></p>
<p>It was the internet in your living room:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/janel_az/status/764573564259401728/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Or for me and the WBW crew, it was the internet in Central Park:</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/765272445800615936/photo/1"></a></p>
<p>Which was a reminder that WBW readers are the best.</p>
<p>So thanks for throwing yourselves into our summer experiment—an experiment that taught us that we most definitely want to do more stuff like this.</p>
<p>Stay tuned.</p>
<p>________</p>
<p>There are many more pics than I had room to post here—you can see the full set of pictures <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/waitbuthi/">here</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&amp;vertical=default&amp;q=%23waitbuthi&amp;src=tyah">here</a>.</p>
</div></article>||||I|||| * Home

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 * 

 Wait But Hi – Full Report

 August 23, 2016 By Tim Urban


 Last weekend (August 13th and 14th) was Wait But Hi—a global hangout weekend for Wait But Why readers.

 It started with a survey we sent out to the WBW email list in early July. Using what we learned from the surveys, our team spent a large part of the summer strategically matchmaking groups of people together and creating customized activities to fit each group.

 Then, on Saturday, it all happened at once—over 3,500 people participated in over 400 events that took place in 168 cities, in these 48 countries:

 And Sunday was big group day, with large picnic gatherings in cities all over the world.

 It was exciting:

 And a lot happened.

 Like this dinner in Germany:

 Or this one in Portugal:

 Or this one in Singapore:

 And the US:

 And Austria:

 Canada:

 Estonia:

 Hong Kong:

 Russia:

 India:

 New Zealand:

 Belgium:

 South Africa:

 And the Czech Republic:

 People picnicked in Paris:

 And Los Angeles:

 And Amsterdam:

 Painted graffiti in London:

 Got a lesson on blockchain in Chicago:

 Looked through telescopes in Berlin:

 Exchanged gifts in Moscow:

 Played Shuffleboard in Brooklyn:

 Mini golf in San Francisco:

 And escaped the room in Lagos:

 There were big groups:

 There were small groups:

 People met at the beach:

 At the pool:

 At the river:

 At the lake:

 On the rocks:

 In the park:

 And on the street:

 They went to the Louvre:

 The Museum of Natural History:

 The Cabinets of Consequence Exhibition:

 And the dinosaur museum:

 Some people went to restaurants:

 Other people—over 50—went on blind dates. (But people don’t tend to be into having a picture of them on a date posted on the internet so we’ll leave it at that.)

 A bunch of people hosted hangouts in their homes. All over their homes. Like in the living room:

 On the terrace:

 Around the counter:

 On the deck:

 In the kitchen:

 On the patio:

 In the backyard:

 In the playroom:

 On the roof:

 Even in the treehouse:

 Empty tables turned into full tables:

 And then came dinner.

 Dessert:

 And drinks. Like tea:

 And liquor:

 Bar beer:

 Brewery beer:

 Street beer:

 Homemade beer:

 And boot beer:

 There were Denver dogs:

 And Cluj-Napoca cats:

 There were lights in Japan:

 And there was darkness in San Francisco:

 There was snuggling:

 There were rides:

 And lots of games:

 There was yodeling:





 5 strangers, some yodelling and a shit ton of beer. Meeting strangers off the internet doesn’t always involve involuntary organ donation #london #waitbuthi

 A video posted by Ellie Rofe (@ellierofe) on Aug 16, 2016 at 10:36am PDT

 and Ws:

 And neighbors who were sick of your heady shit:

 We made a few rules for everyone. One rule was that no one could talk or ask about anyone’s job for the first hour of the night.

 So people learned about each other in other ways. Like guessing which fun fact about their life was written by which person:

 Or explaining why a certain random object defines you:

 Or making a plan for if a shark ever bites you:

 Another rule was that people had to bring a king of spades card to help identify each other. So there were kings:

 Lots of kings.

 Finally, we asked each group to make a stick drawing about their night. We didn’t specify much more than that—so things varied. A lot of groups drew the scene:

 Others depicted the characters involved:

 There were team efforts:





 #waitbuthi #hyperlapse

 A video posted by Phil Whitehouse (@casablanca) on Aug 13, 2016 at 4:07am PDT

 And solo projects:

 There were artists:

 There were not artists:

 There were bikes:

 There were lobsters:

 Some went artsy:

 Some went Wait But Why-y:

 And some blew my mind:

 View this post on Instagram

 We were hosting a @waitbutwhy meet up and a whole group of strangers became good friends. We made this video to celebrate the #waitbuthi initiative! #waitbutwhy #waitbuthi @elonmusk #coolvideos #stickmen @theowinter #creativevideos #creativevideo

 A post shared by Karen Winter (@kaiwin) on Aug 13, 2016 at 3:46pm PDT

 There was a Vietnamese tea ceremony in Houston:

 A slanty wine bottle in Poland:

 And Tinder profiles in Hong Kong:

 A bunch of groups depicted the great conversation:

 About all kinds of things:

 There were thought-provoking questions:

 Controversial opinions:

 And pressing debates:

 Some drawings revealed that things got weird:

 And apparently some events didn’t go at all as planned. Like when these two militant Red Cross workers forced another attendee to donate blood:

 Or when these two chickens morphed into a person:

 Or when these six people forced a baby to dump his things in a river:

 Or when this happened:

 And then there were some that are hard to describe. Like these solemn people underneath a large spoon holding a cherry:

 Or this zany man:

 Or these four psychos:

 Or whatever the fuck is happening here:

 But something the drawings did make clear is that a lot can happen in one night with a group of strangers:

 Wait But Hi turned out to be a lot of things.

 It was far from perfect. We were only able to set up events for 22% of the 16,000 people who applied. And there were mishaps—which people handled the best they could:

 But mostly, Wait But Hi was full of good things.

 Like laughter:

 Fabulous conversation:

 Unexpected fun:

 And amazing strangers:

 Who became friends:

 The weekend was full of wonderful people:

 Who made some souls grow more vibrant:

 It was something like magic:

 It was the internet in your living room:

 Or for me and the WBW crew, it was the internet in Central Park:

 Which was a reminder that WBW readers are the best.

 So thanks for throwing yourselves into our summer experiment—an experiment that taught us that we most definitely want to do more stuff like this.

 Stay tuned.

 ________

 There are many more pics than I had room to post here—you can see the full set of pictures here and here.

 Tweet

 About Tim Urban

 View all posts by Tim Urban →
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 + new releases
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 + phone cases
 + cards & wrapping paper
 + squishy things
 + men’s tees
 + women’s tees
 + coffee mugs
 + store support
 * support wbw
 * #7246 (no title)
 * Finn’s Cave
 © WaitButWhy 2023 ContactPartner With Us
 Privacy Policy
 * 
 * 
Last weekend (August 13th and 14th) was Wait But Hi—a global hangout weekend for Wait But Why readers.
It started with a survey we sent out to the WBW email list in early July. Using what we learned from the surveys, our team spent a large part of the summer strategically matchmaking groups of people together and creating customized activities to fit each group.
Then, on Saturday, it all happened at once—over 3,500 people participated in over 400 events that took place in 168 cities, in these 48 countries:
 
And Sunday was big group day, with large picnic gatherings in cities all over the world.
It was exciting:
   
And a lot happened.
Like this dinner in Germany:
   
Or this one in Portugal:
   
Or this one in Singapore:
   
And the US:
   
And Austria:
   
Canada:
   
Estonia:
   
Hong Kong:
   
Russia:
   
India:
   
New Zealand:
   
Belgium:
   
South Africa:
   
And the Czech Republic:
   
People picnicked in Paris:
   
   
And Los Angeles:
   
And Amsterdam:
 
Painted graffiti in London:
   
Got a lesson on blockchain in Chicago:
 
Looked through telescopes in Berlin:
   
Exchanged gifts in Moscow:
   
Played Shuffleboard in Brooklyn:
   
Mini golf in San Francisco:
   
And escaped the room in Lagos:
   
There were big groups:
   
There were small groups:
   
People met at the beach:
   
At the pool:
   
At the river:
   
At the lake:
   
On the rocks:
   
In the park:
   
And on the street:
   
They went to the Louvre:
   
The Museum of Natural History:
   
The Cabinets of Consequence Exhibition:
   
And the dinosaur museum:
   
Some people went to restaurants:
   
   
   
   
Other people—over 50—went on blind dates. (But people don’t tend to be into having a picture of them on a date posted on the internet so we’ll leave it at that.)
A bunch of people hosted hangouts in their homes. All over their homes. Like in the living room:
   
On the terrace:
   
Around the counter:
   
On the deck:
   
In the kitchen:
   
On the patio:
   
In the backyard:
   
In the playroom:
   
On the roof:
   
Even in the treehouse:
   
Empty tables turned into full tables:
   
   
And then came dinner.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
 
Dessert:
   
   
   
   
   
   
And drinks. Like tea:
   
And liquor:
   
Bar beer:
   
Brewery beer:
   
Street beer:
   
Homemade beer:
   
And boot beer:
   
There were Denver dogs:
   
And Cluj-Napoca cats:
   
There were lights in Japan:
   
And there was darkness in San Francisco:
   
There was snuggling:
 
There were rides:
   
And lots of games:
   
   
   
   
There was yodeling:
and Ws:
   
And neighbors who were sick of your heady shit:
   
We made a few rules for everyone. One rule was that no one could talk or ask about anyone’s job for the first hour of the night.
   
So people learned about each other in other ways. Like guessing which fun fact about their life was written by which person:
   
Or explaining why a certain random object defines you:
   
Or making a plan for if a shark ever bites you:
   
Another rule was that people had to bring a king of spades card to help identify each other. So there were kings:
   
   
   
Lots of kings.
   
   
   
   
Finally, we asked each group to make a stick drawing about their night. We didn’t specify much more than that—so things varied. A lot of groups drew the scene:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
Others depicted the characters involved:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
There were team efforts:
   
   
   
   
And solo projects:
   
There were artists:
   
There were not artists:
   
There were bikes:
   
There were lobsters:
   
Some went artsy:
   
   
Some went Wait But Why-y:
   
   
And some blew my mind:
There was a Vietnamese tea ceremony in Houston:
   
A slanty wine bottle in Poland:
   
And Tinder profiles in Hong Kong:
   
A bunch of groups depicted the great conversation:
   
About all kinds of things:
   
   
   
There were thought-provoking questions:
   
Controversial opinions:
   
And pressing debates:
   
Some drawings revealed that things got weird:
   
   
And apparently some events didn’t go at all as planned. Like when these two militant Red Cross workers forced another attendee to donate blood:
   
Or when these two chickens morphed into a person:
   
Or when these six people forced a baby to dump his things in a river:
   
Or when this happened:
   
And then there were some that are hard to describe. Like these solemn people underneath a large spoon holding a cherry:
   
Or this zany man:
   
Or these four psychos:
   
Or whatever the fuck is happening here:
   
But something the drawings did make clear is that a lot can happen in one night with a group of strangers:
   
Wait But Hi turned out to be a lot of things.
It was far from perfect. We were only able to set up events for 22% of the 16,000 people who applied. And there were mishaps—which people handled the best they could:
   
   
   
But mostly, Wait But Hi was full of good things.
Like laughter:
   
Fabulous conversation:
   
Unexpected fun:
   
And amazing strangers:
   
Who became friends:
   
   
The weekend was full of wonderful people:
   
Who made some souls grow more vibrant:
   
It was something like magic:
   
It was the internet in your living room:
   
Or for me and the WBW crew, it was the internet in Central Park:
   
Which was a reminder that WBW readers are the best.
So thanks for throwing yourselves into our summer experiment—an experiment that taught us that we most definitely want to do more stuff like this.
Stay tuned.
________
There are many more pics than I had room to post here—you can see the full set of pictures here and here.
Wait But Hi — Full Report
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/08/wait-hi-full-report.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/05/mailbag-1.html
Mailbag #1 — Wait But Why
2016-05-06
Tim Urban
<div><div><p>Welcome to a new Wait But Why thing: the mailbag.</p>
<p>I get a lot of email from readers asking great questions, and there’s just not time to give most of them a proper answer. Unless, of course, I do a full post dedicated to those questions. So that’s what this is.</p>
<p>When the last post went out, I asked <a>our email subscribers</a> to submit mailbag questions, and a lot of you responded. I can group the responses that came in into two categories:</p>
<p>1) Questions whose answers would be somewhere between one sentence and a few paragraphs</p>
<p>2) Questions whose answers would be somewhere between a few paragraphs and 30,000 words</p>
<p>The latter went into my Potential Future Posts List. The former were perfect for the mailbag.</p>
<p>For this mailbag, I started with 46 questions and saved the rest for future mailbags. Moving forward, you can submit a mailbag question anytime to <a href="mailto:mailbag@waitbutwhy.com">mailbag@waitbutwhy.com</a>.</p>
<p>Okay let’s jump in—</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Smooth or crunchy peanut butter?</strong> – <em>James T. (Adelaide, Australia)</em></p>
<p>Smooth. I have a jar of peanut butter and sometimes I take a big spoon of it and eat it, and the next 45 seconds of my life is chaotic and upsetting. Crunchy adds another factor on top of that situation, which is the last thing I need.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What do you think about <em>The Martian</em>? Do you like the book or movie better?</strong> – <em>Scott R. (Richmond, VA)</em></p>
<p>Book for sure. The movie was solid and enjoyable, but kind of just another pretty good movie. The book was special. It was one giant thought experiment that explored, “What would happen if a super-smart astronaut got stranded on Mars?” and you got the answer to the experiment told through the detailed, inner thoughts of the astronaut. I loved how many technical explanations there were in the book as Watney puzzled his way through problems, and the movie lost 90% of that aspect. In fairness, I read the book first and had no idea what was gonna happen, and I watched the movie without that suspense, so I’m not a fully fair judge.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What do you believe that not many other people do? (i.e., what are some of your unpopular opinions?)</strong> – <em>Jeremiah O. (New York, NY)</em></p>
<p>Saying you’re purely pro-life or purely pro-choice are both inane, for different reasons. A post on this is high up in the queue, so not gonna expand here. But that’s what I think.</p>
<p>Being inside is better than being outside in not all but most cases.</p>
<p>The longer the plane ride, the better. Plane rides are the best—as long as I don’t have to work or have to sleep.</p>
<p>Great music without lyrics is better than great music with lyrics.</p>
<p>Black licorice is delicious.</p>
<p>Chocolate is a bad flavor of ice cream.</p>
<p>Animated TV or movies are more fun to watch than real people TV or movies.</p>
<p>Washing your hair every day is a silly thing to do.</p>
<p>Ordering fish in a restaurant is for people who don’t care about happiness.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Would you call yourself a transhumanist? </strong>– <em>Saurabh S. (New Delhi, India)</em></p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure what a transhumanist is. Hold on.</p>
<p>Okay Wikipedia says it’s this:</p>
<p><em>Transhumanism is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. The most common thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.</em></p>
<p>Uh, yeah, definitely. The objectives of transhumanism strike me as the kind of thing a lot of people think is wrong or distasteful or unnatural…until it becomes commonplace. And then people can’t imagine what life was like before and would <em>never </em>want to go back.</p>
<p>I’m always in favor of getting rid of what’s “natural” for something that’s better. Sleeping in caves is natural, and it’s really great that we found a better way. Riding horses is how humans got around for a long time, and driving cars is a huge upgrade for both the human and the horse. I’m sure people thought the concept of the organ transplant was terribly unnatural before the technology became possible, and now they don’t. So yeah, let’s go for it. I’m not at all attached to the biological body I was born with if we can find a better way.</p>
<p>That said, at some point you start running into the question <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html">“what makes you you?”</a> I’ll upgrade any part of my existence in any way available until it gets to the point where doing so kills me by making me not me anymore. If science can replace my brain with a synthetic brain containing the identical data as my own, with the advantage that it’ll never age, it sounds great—unless I suspect that the new me seems like me and acts like me but <em>I </em>don’t actually have access to that consciousness. When an upgrade gets to the point where it’s essentially creating a synthetic clone of me to take my place in the world—that’s right where my transhumanism ends. The exception might be if I was going to die either way and creating the upgraded no-longer-me clone me can serve people on Earth somehow, like someone creating a clone of themselves so their family doesn’t have to lose them.</p>
<p>We don’t know when an upgrade causes you to cease to exist because there’s no clear answer to what makes you you. But we’re a long way from crossing that bridge, so for now, I’m pro-transhumanism.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Will you ever finish up the presidents series?</strong><br />
– <em>Jennifer R. (Davis, CA)<br />
– Danielle P. (Arlington, VA)<br />
<em>– </em>Emily B. (Arlington, VA)<br />
<em>– </em>Ron G. (San Marcos, CA)<br />
<em>– </em>Claire L. (Cape Cod, MA)</em></p>
<p>I know, I know, and I haven’t forgotten about it. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">The presidents series</a> <em>will </em>be completed, probably with two more parts, but I don’t have a specific timeline yet.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you know how to code? Or are you planning to learn it?</strong> – <em>Dawid P. (Sufczyn, Poland)</em></p>
<p>No. But I do know BC Calculus, thank god, because the American public school curriculum was last updated in 1820.</p>
<p>Part of me thinks it’s a no-brainer time investment to learn to code, but part of me also wonders if we might be in a phase of time when it’s an important skill to have, but then that phase ends. There was a time when it was important for computer people to know how to actually use 1’s and 0’s and now there’s no need for that, so maybe people who are being born now will never need to learn how to code? I’d prefer that narrative, because it would mean A) it excuses me from having to deal with learning how to code, and B) I only made a dramatic two-decade mistake by not learning how to code in college and not a lifelong one.</p>
<p>I should probably learn how to code.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Why did you decide to buy a tortoise? </strong>– <em>Samantha K. (Singapore)</em></p>
<p>In 2005, I went to the pet store to get a fighter fish because why not have a little screensaver on your desk. When I got there, I walked by a glass terrarium with a golf-ball-sized tortoise in it. I asked to hold him immediately, lifting him up by pinching his shell between my thumb and index finger. His four legs moved back and forth as he tried to figure out why he was suddenly levitating in mid-air. And the decision was done.</p>
<p>11 years later, Winston and I live happily together. As I type this, he (now the size of a football) is moseying by me, going about his business, living his life.</p>
<p>I’m not really sure why everyone doesn’t own a tortoise. They’re hilarious entities, they’re unthinkably cute, they’re unbelievably chill and require very little from you, they’re a great party trick when you have friends over, and they won’t expire until your grandkids are in their 80s.</p>
<p>I mean:</p>
<p></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What would you do if you could meet antimatter Tim? </strong>– <em>Treyvon C. (Houston, TX)</em></p>
<p>Thanks, Treyvon, for sending me on an hour spiral reading about antimatter and what happens when you combine it with matter.</p>
<p>Here’s the deal. Antimatter is matter made up of antiparticles, which are like normal particles except with the opposite charge—negatively charged protons, positively charged electrons, etc.</p>
<p>Antimatter occurs very rarely in nature and is incredibly hard to produce—so hard that in 1999, NASA <a href="http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/prop12apr99_1/">estimated</a> that the going rate for antimatter was about $62.5 trillion per gram. A later <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/antimatter_spaceship.html">estimate</a> in 2006 brought the price down to only $25 billion a gram nbd.</p>
<p>I weigh about 160 lbs or about 73 kg. So at the cheapest, anti-matter Tim would be worth about $1,825,000,000,000,000 and would be getting mugged constantly.</p>
<p>But if he managed to make it intact to a meeting with me, it would be fun to meet him until we shook hands and the Earth blew up.</p>
<p>Here’s the problem: when matter and antimatter are put together, both of them are annihilated and a lot of energy is released. How much energy? E = mc<sup>2</sup><sub> </sub>much. That example—a gram of antimatter and a gram of matter colliding—comes out like this:</p>
<p>E = mc<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>Mass = 2 grams in this case, and c = the speed of light in meters/second = about 300,000,000 m/s, so:</p>
<p>E = (.002 kg)(300,000,000)<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>E = 1.8 x 10<sup>14</sup><sub> </sub>joules</p>
<p>1 kg of TNT releases 4,184,000 joules of energy. So our gram of antimatter collision produces an explosion equivalent to blowing up about 43 million kg of TNT.</p>
<p>= 43,000 tons of TNT<br />
= 43 kilotons of TNT<br />
= an explosion about three times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb</p>
<p>And that’s a <em>gram </em>of antimatter.</p>
<p>Back to my hangout with antimatter Tim. He and I each weigh about 73,000 grams, so our handshake would be unpleasant for both of us, blowing us both up in an explosion that releases the same energy as 3.1 million kilotons, or 3,100 <em>mega</em>tons of TNT. (A megaton = a million tons = a billion kgs)</p>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitrotoluene">density of TNT</a> is 1.654 g/cm<sup>3</sup>. So a kg of TNT would be about the size of a grapefruit, a ton of TNT would be a little smaller than a car, a kiloton of TNT would be the size of a house, and my handshake with antimatter Tim would be like blowing up a cube of TNT with a side of 1.2 km. Very similar, it turns out, to what I <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html">once figured out</a> was the size of the building needed to hold all the world’s humans:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/TNT-cube-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>It wouldn’t quite blow up the Earth, but with an explosion 200,000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, me meeting antimatter Tim would be bad for everybody.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you have any insights as to how one finds their calling?</strong> – <em>Akshat V. (Bangalore, India)</em></p>
<p>Say two people want to find the love of their life, Person A and Person B.</p>
<p>Person A never goes on dates, opting instead to sit alone debating in her head about who the exact kind of person is she will fall in love with. She scours online profiles, but never contacts anyone. Instead, her plan is to wait until she comes across the profile so perfect for her that she’ll know she’s found The One. Then and only then will she reach out to that person for a date.</p>
<p>Person B goes on a lot of dates, constantly meeting new people and keeping an open mind, because she knows she probably doesn’t know either herself or the type of match that makes sense for her as well as she thinks she does.</p>
<p>Who’s more likely to find the love of their life?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Can you suggest [legal] ways to experience Whoa moments?</strong> – <em>Tóth B.</em></p>
<p>Psychedelic methods aside, I’d say this:</p>
<p>The best way <em>not</em> to experience a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">whoa moment</a> is to live your days exactly how you normally do. You know how when you brush your teeth, you can think about something totally different and it doesn’t affect your ability to brush? Because it’s all being done by your subconscious? Well living your normal routine day is kind of like that—your brain is mostly on autopilot, and you’re living largely in an unconscious and comfortable groove.</p>
<p>To bring heightened clarity and new epiphanies into your life, try getting out of that unconscious groove by forcing conscious thought about things our consciousness doesn’t usually bother with because they’re not important for our daily tasks. I did this recently when I found myself with 15 minutes to kill on a street corner before meeting someone there. Instead of doing what I’d normally do—burying myself in my phone to pass the time—I decided to get into “conscious mode.” I looked up and around me at the architecture, I looked at little details on the sidewalk and the steps of a nearby building, I looked down at my feet and realized it was funny that I was supporting myself vertically on two sticks. And suddenly, everything was weird, and I was having a great time. It was hilarious watching all these people bustling around, all of them on their own two sticks, all of them stuck to the side of a floating rock in space, and none of them thinking about that. Full whoa moment.</p>
<p>But the people I was watching weren’t thinking about being stuck to the side of a rock floating in a huge void—they were completely lost in the unconscious groove we all spend most of our time in.</p>
<p>A whoa moment happens when your conscious mind takes a step back and glimpses reality for a second, which we all have the power to do—we just have to remember to think about it.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Have you ever been to Burning Man? If so, how was your experience? If not, why not?</strong> – <em>Sam B. (Kansas City, MO)</em></p>
<p>Funny you ask. I’m going this year for the first time—at least that’s the plan (I’ve failed so far at getting tickets). I’ve heard about Burning Man a lot, but it always struck me as something very not me-ish to go to. Without really knowing what Burning Man is, I’ve always just pictured a bunch of people standing in the 120º desert acting exactly like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad3TwRtPvfU">this woman</a>, except with no stage or music nearby. And what the hell am I gonna do in that situation. Also very unclear why that video has so many views.</p>
<p>But over the past few years, I’ve heard so many people say so many fascinating things about it that I’ve become enticed enough to give it a try. Any advice from Burning Man veterans is welcome.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What kind of kid were you?</strong> – <em>Mia (Uppsala, Sweden)</em></p>
<p>I said a lot of words. I actually made what I now realize was the world’s first podcast in 1987 when I was five. I had this little tape-player/recorder and I’d regularly put a blank tape in and press record and say some shit for a half hour. Then I’d write “Tim’s Performance” on the tape and give it to my parents to enjoy. At one point, I suspected they were lying about actually listening to my musings, so I tested them by waiting until about 20 minutes into one of my recording sessions and then saying, “The secret number is 128. I’m going to ask you what the secret number is later, and remember, it’s 128.” I later asked my parents what the secret number was and they didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. My podcast was not engaging.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What is one thing that you don’t procrastinate about and why do you think that is?</strong> – <em>Richard R. (Fort Lauderdale, FL)</em></p>
<p>I had to think about this for an upsettingly long time to come up with an answer. What I finally came up with is eating my gummy vitamins each day.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What’s a recent embarrassing YouTube spiral you’ve gone down? </strong><em>– Jackie V. (Perth, Australia)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0">this</a> &gt; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcLNteez3c4">this</a> &gt; <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=hyuna&amp;oq=hyuna&amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l2j69i59j69i61l2.809j0j1&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8">this</a> &gt; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw9CALKOvAI">this</a> &gt; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw9CALKOvAI">this</a> &gt; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw9CALKOvAI">this</a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Has your sense of life purpose changed with a newfound look on human mortality? If so, how? If not, why?</strong> – <em>Will H. (Berkeley, CA)</em></p>
<p>For those unacquainted, I believe Will is referring to the fact that I started Wait But Why 100% sure I was going to die somewhere between 2013 and 2100, and then I wrote posts like the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">Fermi</a> post and the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">AI</a> post and the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">Truthism</a> post and the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html">Cryonics</a> post and now I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Suddenly, the prospect of living till I’m an ultra-cranky 1,280-year-old seems perfectly plausible.</p>
<p>I’m not sure my life purpose has changed because I’m not sure I had a life purpose in mind to begin with. But it’s definitely put me in a better mood about things. An atheist is already at rock bottom when it comes to their personal long-term outlook, so realizing that the world of 2050 might be unrecognizable to us, with totally different rules, is a delightful development.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you have any recurring nightmares? </strong><em>– Daniel J. (Cape Town, South Africa)</em></p>
<p>Yes. About really big numbers. It’s me somewhere, in the shit, while some huge booming voice is telling me I have to do stuff involving huge numbers like a billion and a trillion. It goes all the way back to when I was a kid. I just got the shivers writing this.</p>
<p>_____________</p>
<p><strong>What are your MBTI results?<br />
</strong><strong>As one of the many (I’m assuming here) people out there who read snippets of your posts to an unreceptive spouse, I’m wondering if there are clusters of Myers &amp; Briggs personality types that find your writing particularly appealing. So, I would really enjoy the following: (1)</strong><strong> Your MBTI results, (2) The results of a survey of your email subscribers, and (3) Your thoughts on the whole thing.</strong> – <em>Preston S. (Oklahoma City, OK)</em></p>
<p>For those unacquainted, Myers Briggs is a famous personality test that labels everyone with a four-letter code. It judges personalities on a set of four binary criteria. As explained by the <a href="http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/">Myers Briggs website</a>:</p>
<p><em><u>Favorite world</u></em><em>: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called <strong>Extraversion (E)</strong> or<strong> Introversion (I)</strong>.</em></p>
<p><em><u>Information</u></em><em>: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called <strong>Sensing (S)</strong> or <strong>Intuition (N)</strong>.</em></p>
<p><em><u>Decisions</u></em><em>: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called <strong>Thinking (T)</strong> or <strong>Feeling (F)</strong>.</em></p>
<p><em><u>Structure</u></em><em>: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called <strong>Judging (J)</strong> or <strong>Perceiving (P)</strong>.</em></p>
<p>So one person might be an ENFP while another person might be an ISFJ, and so on. Myers Briggs also lays out the typical characteristics of each of the 16 possible types <a href="http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/the-16-mbti-types.htm">here</a>.</p>
<p>The whole thing seems a little simplistic to me, given how complicated and multi-dimensional humans are. But it’s still fun.</p>
<p>When I took the <a href="https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test">test</a>, I got an INTP. I was close to the I/E border and the S/N border, while very strongly a T and a P.</p>
<p>Preston also asked about doing a survey of email subscribers. Let’s just put a survey <a href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/wbw-mbti">here</a>. We’ll publish the results on the WBW Facebook page.</p><p>
[Update: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/06/myers-briggs-wbw-vs-us.html">MBTI Survey Results</a>]
</p><p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you have any favorite interesting/educational YouTube channels to watch?</strong> – <em>Christopher D. (New Haven, CT)</em></p>
<p>There are so many good ones – it’s incredible how easy it is today to have someone teach you stuff in an entertaining way for free while you’re sitting on the couch. Six favorites:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt">Kurzgesagt<br />
</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey">CGP Grey<br />
</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce">VSauce<br />
</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TEDEducation">TedEd<br />
</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium">Veritasium<br />
</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/scishow">SciShow</a></p>
<p>Would love to hear about others in the comments.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What are your thoughts on routine infant circumcision, beneficial procedure or human rights violation?</strong> – <em>Beau S. (Brisbane, Australia)</em></p>
<p>If I take a step back and look at this from first principles, I start by looking up whether the procedure is important for health reasons. When I find out the answer is probably not, it becomes pretty clear that circumcision is nothing other than a primitive, religious practice of genital mutilation that for some reason is common today. It makes no sense, and once we all stop doing it, it’ll seem like an absurd custom of the past. I had friends recently go through this decision with their new baby, and every argument went against circumcision except one: not circumcising their son would make him different than most of the other guys in his world in a part of life where being different can be mortifying, especially as either a little kid being made fun of by his friends or an already-sexually-insecure teenager. They went with circumcision. And I get it. But it makes no sense, aside from the fact that we’re all doing it (at least in the US). Can we just all agree to stop it with new babies?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you like waffles? </strong>– <em>Matt V. (Bartonsville, PA)</em></p>
<p>I’ve never understood waffles / pancakes / french toast people. A few bites of that on the side, sure, but if I’m hungry at a breakfast restaurant, I want something that involves salt and tabasco sauce. Ordering those sweet things for breakfast seems to me like ordering cake for dinner.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What are some of your favorite movies, and what do you think they say about you?</strong> – <em>Joe S.</em></p>
<p>As I thought about the answer to this question, I realized that the movies I’ve liked the absolute most in my life were movies made for 7-10-year olds when I was 7-10. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Home Alone, The Princess Bride, Back to the Future, etc. Are those movies all incredible, or does this just always happen with whatever happened to be the best movies of your childhood? Not really sure.</p>
<p>For movies I’ve seen from the age of 10 onwards, I’ll give some awards:</p>
<p><strong>Most obvious answer that’s also just really good though: </strong>The Shawshank Redemption (Runners-up: Godfather 1/2, Braveheart)</p>
<p><strong>Less obvious answer that should be more obvious and I’m not sure why it’s not everyone’s favorite movie: </strong>Shutter Island</p>
<p><strong>Movie that is considered good but I probably liked it more than most people cause it was exactly my type of fun plot: </strong>Memento</p>
<p><strong>Movie that’s pretty random to put on this list but I just really liked it:</strong> About Schmidt</p>
<p><strong>Movie I thought was only pretty good but then it stuck with me way more than I realized it would and sometimes makes me wonder if I’m Truman and this thing is happening to me and having me seeing <em>The Truman Show </em>was a really intense, fun part of the plot for everyone watching: </strong>The Truman Show</p>
<p><strong>Most fun movie-watching experience even though I wouldn’t really call it a great movie: </strong>Ocean’s 11 (Runner-up: Limitless)</p>
<p><strong>Movie whose first 70% makes this list but not the last 30% because that part sucked: </strong>Minority Report</p>
<p><strong>Movie that I loved and took fully seriously and then saw again with people who were laughing the whole time and realized it was actually a comedy: </strong>Being John Malkovich. (Runner-up: American Psycho)</p>
<p><strong>Movie that’s not considered very good but I actually think it was great: </strong>The Invention of Lying</p>
<p><strong>Movie that might have been great but also it might have been terrible and I don’t know because I don’t know what the fuck happened: </strong>Mulholland Drive</p>
<p><strong>Documentary that was a terrible experience to watch the entire time but also the best documentary I’ve ever seen: </strong>Dear Zachary</p>
<p><strong>Documentary that was almost as good and it wasn’t a nightmare to watch: </strong>March of the Penguins</p>
<p><strong>Documentary that’s comforting as fuck to watch and I’ve seen it three times and there will be more viewings in the future: </strong>Jiro Dreams of Sushi</p>
<p><strong>Movie that I think about every time I see a person yelling things to no one on the street: </strong>Requiem for a Dream</p>
<p><strong>Movie that was incredibly good and also, kill me:</strong> Life is Beautiful</p>
<p><strong>Movie that is objectively pretty great but it also kind of annoys me how “cool” it is: </strong>Every Quentin Tarantino movie (Runner-up: Every Stanley Kubrik movie)</p>
<p><strong>Movie that ruined my happiness permanently: </strong>The Ring</p>
<p><strong>Movie that’s embarrassing to put on this list but sorry it was just really good: </strong>Love Actually. (Runner-up: Titanic)</p>
<p><strong>Worst movie I’ve ever seen:</strong> American Wedding. (Runner-up: From Hell. And Dodgeball. And Transformers 2. And Next Friday.)</p>
<p>One thing about this list is there are very few comedies. It’s not that I never like comedies—I just think comedy movies are rarely <em>that </em>funny. I can’t think of many movies that can equal the funniness of the funniest TV shows—shows like The Office (UK), Curb, It’s Always Sunny, Family Guy, etc.</p>
<p>As for what these say about me? I don’t really know—that’s for Joe to decide.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Lately I’ve been stumbling into the most frustrating arguments about a ridiculous topic: “The Earth is Flat.”<br />
Well, that’s what a lot of people have been trying to tell me lately and I haven’t been able to convince any of them of the truth. I feel like you would be the best person to break it down and explain how it is just not possible, in a way that they would understand. Anyway, just a request, if you can’t convince people the earth is a globe then no one can. It may sound funny but unfortunately I’m being serious. </strong><em>– Kennard M. (Antioch, CA)</em></p>
<p>Far more interesting than any answer I can give is the specifics of the arguments you’ve been hearing. Please expand in the comments.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What’s your wpm? </strong>– <em>Kevin B. (Riverside, CA)</em></p>
<p>I didn’t know the answer to this, so I tested myself <a href="https://www.keyhero.com/free-typing-test/">here</a>. On my first try I clocked in at 84 words per minute. On the second try I did 92. And on the third try I did 98. Pleased.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-04-24-at-2.01.39-PM-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Then it was ruined when I sent it to Alicia (Wait But Why’s Manager of Lots of Things) to try and she got 147 like a<em> psycho.</em></p>
<p>Anyway, the site has you type out famous quotes, and an unexpected side benefit of doing this was realizing at one point that I was speed-typing Montesquieu summing up life:</p>
<p><em>If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.</em></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Has your curiosity ever been a problem for you?</strong> – <em>Mariam C. (Paris, France)</em></p>
<p>My most prominent emotion when traveling in other countries (or in parts of the US I’m not used to) is curiosity. That’s part of why I often pick destinations that I don’t know much about or that seem super different from my world.</p>
<p>The most interesting experiences happen when I befriend locals, which usually allows me to get a much deeper glimpse into what life is like in that place than I ever could as a voyeuring tourist. I’ve gotten myself invited into homes, weddings, social events, factories, etc.—and it’s usually a great experience.</p>
<p>Usually.</p>
<p>On one of my solo trips, I was out in the Rio nightlife district of Lapa and met two extraordinarily friendly dudes. They really liked me, so much that they invited me to a nearby house party.</p>
<p>A random Brazilian house party! I had no idea what a Brazilian house party was like, and I was super excited to find out. Luckily for me, I had found two guys who just really like befriending random foreign dudes and bringing them to parties.</p>
<p>Then we went to the party, which turned out to be us standing on a silent street a few blocks away from the crowded area while they forcefully took my things and ran away. Interesting party, but they had a better time than I did.</p>
<p>Hilariously, I had taken a selfie with them earlier in the night when we were all still BFFs. It was on a disposable camera, and that was one of the things they decided not to bother taking, so I still have the picture.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/992.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Kind of funny looking at their faces and knowing now that the smiles were, “Oh god yes I think this guy’s actually gonna come with us!”</p>
<p>One other example that came to mind is the time I was about 12 and got curious about what would happen if I put my hamster, Waddles Urban, up my dad’s t-shirt when he was lying on his back on the couch sleeping. It was a very bad experience for both my dad and Waddles and a terrific one for me—kind of the reverse of the Brazil incident.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Would anything ever change your opinion about the existence of God? Would you discount it as a psychological error or hallucination? Could anything ever prove the existence of God to you? – </strong><em>Michael S.</em><em> </em></p>
<p><strong>Why don’t you believe in God? – </strong><em>Luis C. (Dallas, TX)</em></p>
<p><strong>How can you be 100% sure that there isn’t something deeper to life than the material realm? – </strong><em>Noli S. (Prishtina, Kosovo)</em><strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p>When it comes to everything written in the Bible, Quran, Torah, Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, and all the rest, I’m atheist for the same reason I’m atheist about Greek Myths when I read them—they were written by people a long time ago who knew less than we do about the world, not more. No, lightning isn’t caused by Zeus throwing lightning bolts, it’s caused by the interaction of oppositely-charged particles in heavy clouds. And no, ancient rocks and fossils and mountains and canyons weren’t created by a great flood 6,000 years ago, they were created by a bunch of other stuff that happened over the past five billion years—stuff that we now understand. So when it comes to the various gods described in the world’s religions—yes, I’m as atheist as can be. With those gods, the question isn’t “Why don’t I believe in God?” it’s “Why <em>would </em>I believe in God?”</p>
<p>That said, when it comes to the question, “Is there a higher force or higher being or grand creator of some kind?” I’m entirely agnostic. We don’t even know if we’re alone in the universe or not—as far as we know, there are trillions of superintelligent civilizations out there, with capabilities we couldn’t understand even if they tried to explain it to us (could you explain human capabilities to a chicken?). Could one of them have created life on Earth in some lab? Sure, why not?</p>
<p>Could it be that it’s common for higher civilizations to create simulations, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that they might create trillions upon trillions of them, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that there are far more simulation civilizations in existence than real ones, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that just by the percentages, it’s far more likely that we’re one of the simulated ones than one of the real ones? Uh…I guess yeah?<a href="#footnote2-1-5151">1</a>
</p><p>We don’t even know what the universe <em>is</em>. It might be one of hundreds or millions or an infinite number of universes, or it might be the only thing there is. It might be a blip of energy floating around in one of the quarks inside one of the atoms that makes up the toenail of a red and blue baby pig bathing himself in a five-dimensional jelly swamp, and it comes into and out of existence in a nanosecond of the piglet’s life since every second in his world is 10<sup>10<sup>925</sup></sup> years for us. That literally might be what’s happening. It’s as likely as anything else you can come up with.</p>
<p>So it’s outrageous to declare anything about the origin of life, the existence of one or more higher beings, or what our place is in all of this other than “I don’t know.” Agnostic.</p>
<p>And when any fellow human—in 2016 or in 100 A.D.—declares that he knows the deal with God, including a bunch of details, I immediately say “Nope.”</p>
<p>I think that answers Luis and Noli. As for Michael—the answer is yes. I know what I know because of the information I have. If new information presents itself to me, it might change what I believe. But even if some rad supernatural shit happened like some woman levitated on the sidewalk when I walked by and then suddenly went shooting upwards through the clouds, I’d be quicker to assume that it was the work of a biological or AI being from another part of the universe, or that we were in a simulation and the beings running it got bored and decided to fuck with me, than I would be to take what I saw as evidence that one of the Earthly religions was true.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Would you rather be attacked by 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?</strong> – <em>Kyle P. (Cheshire, CT)</em></p>
<p>I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.</p>
<p>I’d go for the 100 little horses. Here’s why:</p>
<p>The duck would be <em>terrifying</em>. Have you seen how ducks act when you throw a piece of bread in the water? They turn into ravenous psychos. They use their wings, beaks, feet, and anything else they can to violently knock the other ducks out of the way. Then they <em>lunge </em>at the bread with their big hard duck beak. Now imagine a huge duck and <em>you’re </em>the bread. You’re done. That cock will charge at you and try to bite your head off. And you can’t run away—because it can <em>fly</em>. And its beak is still narrow enough that if you try to hide somewhere it can probably wedge its beak in there and pull you out. You’re done. It’s over.</p>
<p>The horses would be bad. But not as bad as the duck. Angry horses are pretty angry. And their bite could probably take a chunk out of your leg. Or maybe they’d kick you with their hind legs, which would give you painful little ankle bruises. All of that would be painful, but not lethal. Lethal happens when you’re frantically kicking them one by one and you accidentally fall over. Falling over would be a huge disaster with the little horses. They’d be biting your neck open and kicking you in the crotch and jumping up on your stomach. Done. But unlike with the duck, you could probably escape the horses. You could just climb up on a bench and now what? They’re screwed. They can charge the bench and jump up on their hind legs all they want, but you’re a full foot above their highest jump, and they can’t climb or fly, so you can just lay down and nap on the bench while they tire themselves out. Then when you wake up, you can carefully grab them one at a time and bring it up to the bench and use its tail to tie its back legs together, neutralizing that horse. It would take a while, but eventually they’d all be neutralized, hobbling around on the ground, in the shit with their leg situation, and you could just step over them and walk away.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Why does the atmosphere of the earth circle around the earth? We circle with the earth because we are attached to the ground, but the atmosphere isn’t attached to the ground so why does it circle around with the planet?</strong> – <em>Sinan A. (Baghdad, Iraq)</em></p>
<p>You say “we circle the earth because we are attached to the ground,” but what does “attached” mean? What it really means is there’s friction between our bodies and the surface of the earth that “pulls” our bodies. The oceans are less “attached” to the ground than a solid human body, but oceans rotate with the earth too, because there’s friction between the water molecules and the ocean floor. There’s less friction between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface than there is in the case of solid or liquid matter on the surface, but there’s still friction—which affects the atmosphere enough to pull it, too, along with Earth’s rotation.</p>
<p>But in all of these cases, friction is only why these things <em>initially</em> began to rotate along with the earth. Once something is up to full Earth rotational speed, the reason the atmosphere or anything else continues to rotate with the earth is inertia—an object in motion stays in motion. If the earth suddenly and instantly reversed rotational direction, there would be utter chaos on the surface, and everything would go flying. We, the oceans, and the atmosphere would all still carry the normal rotational velocity and the earth no longer would—kind of like when a moving car slams on the breaks and everything in the car lunges forward. But once the chaos settled down, the rotational velocity of all things on Earth’s surface would eventually be slowed down and reversed to match Earth’s new spin—because of friction. You’d be dead though.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Which are scarier – horror movies about ghosts or serial killers?</strong> <em>– Layla P. (Mexico City, Mexico)</em></p>
<p>Ghosts 100%. Serial killer movies make me edgy as fuck when I leave the theater and I’m walking down the street and there are strangers all around. But ghost movies take a shit in a much deeper part of my soul, and suddenly everything in my apartment—a blank white wall, a picture in a frame, a lamp on my nightstand—is terrifying.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you could pick one future event that you could witness first hand, what would it be?</strong> – <em>Brian G. (Cambridge, UK)</em></p>
<p>On the heels of the recent <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html">cryonics post</a>, I might pick the first time a vitrified person is successfully and fully revived.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>How do you be a good person?</strong> – <em>Katerena K. (Seattle, WA)</em></p>
<p>This warrants a 12,000-word post, but for now, I’ll start with one idea:</p>
<p>I think a great way to be a good person is to get in the habit of consciously thinking about the fact that almost every stranger, co-worker, friend, acquaintance, fling, customer service representative, driver, waiter, customer, client, neighbor, and person on the internet you come across:</p>
<ul>
<li>Has a family who loves them and vice versa</li>
<li>Has hopes and dreams and regrets and frustrations</li>
<li>Has as many thoughts going through their head at all times as you do</li>
<li>Is dealing with random health problems, trying to make ends meet financially, and is probably tired</li>
<li>Might be supporting one or more other human beings</li>
<li>Might be just a little sad all the time about a tragedy in their past</li>
<li>Might be the most important person in someone else’s life</li>
<li>Is just trying to figure out how to be happy</li>
</ul>
<p>i.e. They’re a full human just like you.</p>
<p>Remembering that will make you kinder and more empathetic.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What kind of thermos is your favorite thermos? Is it a Thermos-brand thermos? What color is it? How old is it?</strong> – <em>Maxfield M. (Sacramento, CA)</em></p>
<p>My sister had a blanket she was obsessed with as a toddler that she inexplicably called her Ninee (like “night” without the t and then “knee”). If you tried to take her Ninee away from her she flipped her shit. It was a critical part of her being.</p>
<p>My thermos is my Ninee. My ideal way to drink coffee is to slowly have one 16-ounce cup of black coffee over a four-hour span. Coffee in an open mug stays hot for like eight minutes. In a covered, paper take-out cup, maybe 15 minutes. Both totally unacceptable. I suffered for my whole life with this issue until I realized thermoses existed a few years ago. I got <a href="http://amzn.to/1W36cpp">this one</a> and it solved all my problems, with the added benefit of it being closable, so I can pop a full thermos in my bag or put it on the floor on an airplane (upright in my shoe).</p>
<p>Because I’m a child, I lose my thermos by leaving it somewhere about twice a year on average, but at $22, it’s only a little devastating every time it happens.</p>
<p>I’ve also recently gotten into the <a href="http://www.swellbottle.com/product/thermo-vacuum-insulated-reusable-water-bottle-shimmer-collection-silver-lining/?size=9oz">small S’well thermos</a>, which I use when I don’t have my bag because unlike my normal one, it fits in my jeans pocket.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What is happiness?</strong> – <em>Frank P. (Tokyo, Japan)</em></p>
<p>Reality minus expectations.</p>
<p>I have a much longer answer, but saving it for a post.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What do you think about hypnotherapy?<br />
</strong><strong>A relative of mine who is a very critical thinker recently became a “qualified hypnotherapist” which made me ponder how credible this field is. How does it work? Is it effective? And so on… </strong>– <em>Matt B. (Leicester, UK)</em></p>
<p>I’m pretty sure those absurd stage hypnosis charades with a bunch of “hypnotized” people barking like a dog or having an orgasm or forgetting the number two on stage in front of a laughing crowd have to be some combo of people enjoying attention, peer pressure, and some element of placebo effect. No way that can be real.</p>
<p>But serious, one-on-one hypnotherapy? Sure, why not? The brain is weird, so why wouldn’t a trance-like state be able to be induced? From what I’ve read, hypnosis is just an extension of the phenomenon of a person getting so wrapped up in a thought that when someone calls their name, they don’t even hear it. That kind of hypnosis seems to be real, though it works on some people better than others and for some not at all. The problem for the credibility of hypnosis is all the fictional, cartoony hypnosis we’ve seen in movies, where the person is a robot who will do whatever the hypnotist says—pretty sure it doesn’t work like that.</p>
<p>I have a friend who’s been doing a type of hypnosis called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing">EMDR</a> with his therapist and claims that while doing so, a memory of <em>himself breastfeeding</em> flashed in his consciousness for a second. Nahhh, right? Or could it be possible?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>In what other aspects of your life do you apply the rationale you use to avoid a Vegan/Vegetarian lifestyle? (i.e. “This action/choice is indefensible but I’ll do it anyway since it’s 1. enjoyable, and 2. socially permissible.”)</strong> –<em> Ndi S. (New York, NY)</em></p>
<p>If I’m understanding correctly, the question is: “You’ve <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/table/is-it-ethical-to-eat-meat">admitted</a> that despite knowing how wrong it is to support the torture and brutal slaughter of helpless animals, you do it anyway because you’re kind of a dick. Where else in your life are you kind of a dick in a similar way?”</p>
<p>Good question. Let’s see…</p>
<p>I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro made in a Chinese factory of nightmares and suicide.</p>
<p>I buy plastic things a lot and only recycle them if it’s easy.</p>
<p>I’m wearing clothes most likely sewn by a melancholy 11-year-old somewhere far away in “Let’s just not think about that!” land.</p>
<p>I sometimes leave the water running while I’m brushing my teeth even though lack of clean water is destroying like 50% of the world’s happiness.</p>
<p>I hire unpaid interns sometimes.</p>
<p>I walk by 15 homeless people a day and give them money only when I have change in my pocket and then walk into a coffee shop and tip the barista a dollar or two even though they definitely have a bed.</p>
<p>If I walk by someone’s house and a mean-looking dog is in the yard behind a fence, I bark at him to get him worked up because it’s funny and he doesn’t know how to open the gate.</p>
<p>I leave my phone on LTE until the plane gets too high to get a signal.</p>
<p>I sneak down to better seats at the Red Sox game.</p>
<p>I sometimes sign Andrew up for the mailing lists of fortune tellers and other mystics when I have a few minutes to kill on the internet.</p>
<p>I cohabitate with a tortoise in a small apartment even though he belongs in the desert.</p>
<p>Thanks Ndi.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>How do you choose what to work on for WBW? When you run out of ideas, how do you plan to source new ideas? </strong>– <em>Ricky Y. (San Francisco, CA)</em></p>
<p>One thing that will never be a problem for me is a shortage of post topics. I currently have a 116-page Word document full of topics, thoughts, questions, and random brainstorms I want to make into posts. Whenever I’m in an interesting conversation, or think of a funny observation, or find myself with an intriguing question, I write it in the doc. And if you just get in that habit, the potential-post-topic doc becomes long pretty quickly. To make it into the doc, a topic generally has to satisfy at least one of these:</p>
<ul>
<li>It’s something I think people know about and hear about but generally don’t understand</li>
<li>It’s something about life we all notice subconsciously but we don’t usually think about it or put it into words</li>
<li>It’s something that many of us are feeling or thinking secretly but no one is saying</li>
<li>It’s something important that we don’t think about very intelligently because we don’t have a useful framework in our heads, or an important psychological concept that we should have a concrete label for but don’t</li>
<li>It’s something I come across that blows my mind and I know it’ll blow readers’ minds too</li>
</ul>
<p>When it’s time to start a new post, I scan down the big doc and pick something that excites me at that time. I get really exhausted by a topic by the time I’m done with it, so I try to mix things up—if the last post was really researchy, the next one might be more brainstormy, or if the last topic was heavy, I might pick something lighter next.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What Chrome extensions do you use?</strong> <em>– Kyle</em></p>
<p><a href="https://getpocket.com/chrome/">Pocket</a> – to save articles I want to read later or offline</p>
<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/googl-url-shortener/iblijlcdoidgdpfknkckljiocdbnlagk?hl=en">goo.gl URL shortener</a></p>
<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en">The Great Suspender </a>– freezes tabs I have open but haven’t used in a while which goes a long way to reduce Chrome’s insane memory burden.</p>
<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl?hl=en">Tabs Outliner</a> – So when Chrome crashes or I lose my tabs for any other reason I can easily restore them.</p>
<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfknpbbblfpciffpaejjkokdgca?hl=en">Momentum</a> – Makes my day 0.5% better every day so why not.</p>
<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-calendar-by-google/gmbgaklkmjakoegficnlkhebmhkjfich?hl=en">Google Calendar</a></p>
<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/honey/bmnlcjabgnpnenekpadlanbbkooimhnj?hl=en-US">Honey</a> – finds discount codes</p>
<p>Another Chrome thing I did once which was very worth the time: I put the 30 or so sites I go to most in the bookmarks bar, but I left each with a blank name, so the bookmarks bar is just a big line of logos. This makes basically every site I ever go to just a button click.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What do I do if I always feel stupid?</strong><br />
<strong>There are so many awesome things in our world, e.g. gravitational astronomy, physics of superconducters, neuroscience, genetics, AI, space exploration, math problems, WBW posts. Well, you get it. Much more than an average person could ever learn, I guess. Therefore my question is: what do I do if I always feel stupid? Like, really, always.</strong> –<em> Katie S. (Russia)</em></p>
<p>Stupid is when you don’t know that much about anything and you feel like everyone else does. The good news is, everyone else doesn’t. At all. The world is full of exciting, complex things that almost no one understands. Once you realize this, all the stuff you don’t know isn’t upsetting, it’s <em>exciting</em>.</p>
<p>It’s like reading. I’ve read a bunch of good books, but there are 1,000 times as many that I haven’t read. If I believed that most people had read most books and for some reason I had not, I’d feel embarrassingly not-well-read. But because I know that most people haven’t read most books, I can take my own situation out of the thought process and just enjoy the fact that I’ll never run out of good new books to read.</p>
<p>So even though people sometimes present themselves as more knowledgeable about more things than they really are, remember that really, most people don’t know much about anything, and try to get excited about the fact that with every year of your life that goes by, you’ll know more and more and more.</p>
<p>And remember, to actually learn about a topic you don’t get, you have to build a tree trunk foundation of understanding before you can start tacking onto that foundation by adding on branches and leaves (like news articles about recent developments). The thing that makes people feel stupid is trying to absorb branches and leaves when they don’t yet have a tree trunk, so it always goes in one ear and out the other and you feel like it’s hopeless for you to ever grasp the topic—but it’s not.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you cook much? If so, what is your favorite cookbook (or chef, cooking website, etc)?</strong> – <em>Al T. (Charlottesville, VA)</em></p>
<p>Cooking some elaborate thing using a recipe is for me like reading fiction—when I do it, I thoroughly enjoy it, but I do it like once a year. Mostly, I keep it to things like stir frying vegetables and rice, which is an excuse to have a condiment/spices party.</p>
<p>As for cookbooks, I recently got J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s <a href="http://amzn.to/1SE5cEB">The Food Lab</a>, which is delightful so far. Not a big chef fanboy person, although I had a phase with Bobby Flay’s <a href="http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/boy-meets-grill.html"><em>Boy Meets Grill</em></a> show at one point and I’m pretty infatuated with how cocky and rad <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Bowien">Danny Bowien</a> is (the Mission Chinese guy).</p>
<p>My greatest culinary passion is whichever 15 hot sauces I happen to have in my fridge at any given time. Currently:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_3255.jpg"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>How does wind work? What is the mechanism behind wind happening? Why does it happen?</strong> –<em> Steven H. (Cape Girardeau, MO)</em></p>
<p>I’ll need to read about how weather works for 30 hours before I can give a proper answer to this question, but I’ll take a crack.</p>
<p>The key to wind is air <em>pressure</em>. Forget the atmosphere for a second and take a breath in. What happens? Air from outside your body rushes into your body. Now exhale—and air rushes back out. What’s happening is that the air outside your body is staying at the same pressure level, but when you inhale, you’re increasing the volume in your lungs, which lowers the air molecules / volume ratio in your lungs, which lowers the air pressure in your lungs. Air always “wants” to <em>even </em>things out, so air rushes into your lungs to accommodate for the extra space created by your inhale and equalize the pressure inside and outside of you. When you exhale, you’re decreasing the volume in your lungs, which increases the air pressure to a level higher than the air outside your body, so air rushes out to make things equal.</p>
<p>When the sun heats up parts of the atmosphere, the air rises, which leaves less air down near the surface than normal—a low pressure system. Hot air rising and leaving a void underneath is kind of like the atmosphere “inhaling.” Just like what happens in your expanding lungs, air from higher pressure systems surrounding the low pressure system rushes in to equalize things—i.e. the low pressure area “sucks” in surrounding air. In the reverse situation, when there’s a higher-than-normal pressure system in the atmosphere, it’s like a human exhaling. The higher pressure system presses outward into lower pressure areas and the air rushes there to equalize things. That rushing air is what we experience as wind. Wind is just air moving from areas of higher pressure to areas of lower pressure.</p>
<p>Relatedly, <a href="http://hint.fm/wind/">this is cool</a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>I would be interested to know in what position two similar sized human bodies are touching the most. Surface mapping? I would like to create a mathematically correct sculpture.</strong> – <em>Ludescher S. (Vienna, Austria)</em></p>
<p>No idea. But I included this odd question so someone who knows can explain it to all of us in the comments.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What’s one of the most important life lessons you’ve learned in your years so far that you would give to a young adult/college student?</strong> – <em>Cathy J. (Toronto, Canada)</em></p>
<p>Making really close lifelong friends is a hard thing to do for most people, and it gets even harder once you hit the real world and everyone lives in isolated apartments and spends their days at work. Really close friendships are built by spending a ton of hours with the same person or group of people again and again, and there’s nowhere better to foster that than college or the years after college when people often live with roommates.</p>
<p>Given that, one piece of advice would be to first, assess your friendships and figure out who’s in Q1 (<a href="http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Graph.png">here’s a refresher</a> on what Q1 is, from <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">this post</a>).</p>
<p>Then, invest in those friendships, and remember that lazy afternoons sitting around doing nothing with them might seem mundane, but it’s actually building a foundation of closeness and comfort that you’ll be thankful for later. It’s time well spent.</p>
<p>And if you don’t think many of your friends are in Q1, ask yourself why that might be. Maybe you’re not hanging out with the right kind of people for you.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Can you share any advice on becoming a good writer?</strong> – <em>James M. (Dublin, Ireland)</em></p>
<p>1) Write. I wrote 300 blog posts between the ages of 23 and 29 before starting Wait But Why. It can take a while to find your voice and your tone and your style. At the beginning, you’ll be all over the place, the same way you are when you try a new sport or video game or musical instrument. That’s good—you’re experimenting on a canvas. Don’t judge your own writing at this phase—you’re experimenting and searching and playing—you’re not doing your best writing yet. If your <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">mammoth</a> is freaking out too much and ruining things, start with an anonymous blog.</p>
<p>2) Don’t be a complete perfectionist, but don’t settle for writing you know isn’t working. Even if you’re experimenting, if something you’re trying isn’t working, try to figure out why, rewrite parts, start over and try a new approach, etc.—keep fiddling until it clicks. Each time you go through the hard, painful work of agonizing over writing that isn’t working and eventually get it to click, you become a better writer.</p>
<p>3) Read a lot. It’s like fertilizer.</p>
<p>4) On one side of the spectrum, you’re completely copying the exact style and even the wording of another writer you like—let’s call that a 1. On the other side, you’re completely unique, writing in a way the world has never seen before—let’s call it a 10. Your goal is to start somewhere in the middle and then work your way up the scale as you mature as a writer. That said, having influences is inevitable and perfectly okay, because true 10s don’t exist. This same concept applies to stand-up comedy, music, or any other type of art. It’s a badge of honor to say The Beatles are one of your influences, but no one likes a songwriter who’s blatantly copying The Beatles. Without getting to a 7 or 8 on the uniqueness spectrum, there’s likely a ceiling on how high your writing career can go.</p>
<p>5) While you’re experimenting with your writing, keep your mind open to all creative possibilities. The first 290 of the 300 blog posts I wrote in my 20s had no visuals. Only towards the very end did I try drawing something one night. And only then did I realize how much I liked combining hand-drawn visuals with my writing. That could have easily never happened, and if it hadn’t, Wait But Why would be an all-text blog today.</p>
<p>6) If you get feedback as you grow as a writer, be careful who it’s coming from. The person giving feedback should A) believe in you, B) be rooting for you, and C) be completely aware that what they’re reading isn’t your max potential but you experimenting, gaining confidence, and trying to figure out your voice. A person who satisfies all of those is great to get feedback from. Someone who fails any of those criteria is going to do you more harm than good, and will often be the person who makes you quit prematurely and never try again (even if you don’t realize they’re the reason that happened).</p>
<p>7) Remember that in most cases, the ideas behind the writing are more important than the quality of the writing itself. You’d rather have great ideas and pretty good writing than the other way around.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Do you speak any other languages? </strong><em>– Ricardo K. (Vinhedo, Brazil)</em></p>
<p>I speak 1.43 languages:</p>
<ul>
<li>English</li>
<li>40% of Spanish</li>
<li>1% of French</li>
<li>0.1% of about 20 other languages because I learned how to say a few sentences when I visited a country where that was the language</li>
</ul>
<p>My .4 Spanish capabilities are super useful when I visit Spanish-speaking countries, but mostly when I need to say something to someone. Once I finish, the party’s over. For some reason, my brain decided to not ever learn to understand what the fuck anyone is saying when they speak Spanish to me.</p>
<p>My problem is that I never learned Spanish well enough to do that thing where you have a Spanish part of your brain. So instead, I’ve memorized a ton of Spanish words and when I speak to someone, I’m doing what people who are bad at languages do—I’m rapid-fire translating in my head with each word that comes out of my mouth. I’m proficient enough to get around a Spanish-speaking country and even have conversations with people—as long as they don’t say anything back. When they do, it’s like someone throwing five tennis balls at me every second and expecting me to somehow catch all of them. So I go into a panic and just keep saying “lentamente” until their pace comes down so far that I can figure out what they’re saying.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you could eat one non-edible thing, what would it be? </strong><em>– Tandice O. (New York, NY)</em></p>
<p>The sticky hand.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Sticky-hand.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>How many people have ever lived? </strong></p>
<p><strong>I have a question I figured only WBW could answer properly. </strong><strong>It came up when I took a shower and I thought: “Wow, it’s kinda crazy that most people from the beginning of time till now haven’t felt the pressure of a hot shower,” since I guess that showers as we know it were invented only a couple of centuries ago (hot bath doesn’t count). </strong><strong>But then I thought… Is it true? There are approximately 7.4 billion people in the world today, and I think the numbers got that big only recently.</strong></p>
<p><strong>This made me ponder: how many people have lived on Earth since the beginning of humanity? What percentage of them lived in the last 200 years? </strong>–<em> Zohar A. (Tel Aviv, Israel)</em></p>
<p>I’ve thought about the shower thing before. It’s incredible. Imagine being stranded on an island with only basic tools and trying to create an extended hot shower for yourself. Not gonna happen. A hot shower requires a ton of technology. In the interest of not spending two hours reading enough about the history of showers to be able to piece together an estimate for the number of people who have ever had access to a hot shower, I’ll leave it at that thought for now—though I’d be delighted if a reader would like to figure this out and put it in the comments.</p>
<p>As for the number of people who have ever lived, Carl Haub at the <a href="http://www.prb.org/">Population Reference Bureau</a> <a href="http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf">estimated</a> in 2011 that about 107 billion people have lived:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-05-01-at-7.05.37-PM.png"></a></p>
<p>I made a chart about this stat once in a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html">post</a>:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/108B-1024x787.png"></a></p>
<p>Of course, Haub’s or anyone else’s estimate for this is imprecise and up for debate, especially since people aren’t even in agreement about when humans “started”. Either way, the fact that around 1/15 of all people who have ever lived are currently alive struck me as very high, considering that the past century accounts for at most 1/500 of the <em>time </em>humans have been around.</p>
<p>In the same <a href="http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf">article</a>, Haub estimates that about 40% of those who have ever lived died before their first birthday and estimates that “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy_at_birth">life expectancy at birth</a> probably averaged only about ten years for most of human history.” If he’s right, it would mean that 1/10 of all humans age 1 or older who have ever lived are currently alive, and that fraction would become higher and higher as you increase the age. So maybe 1/5 of all 30+ year olds who have ever lived are currently alive and maybe a third of people who ever lived to 60 are still alive. And I’d bet that the <em>majority</em> of people 90 or over who have ever lived are alive right now. All guesses, but it seems logical.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>What do you think about this picture?</strong><br />
<strong>I’ve been having a social issue over a photo of puppies I found on the Internet. Yes, a photo of puppies. I was bored (and admittedly in the dark playground), so I decided to search “adorable dogs” on Google images. I found the picture and was immediately in love. So, I decided to save it and show my family. I was taken aback when they reacted with disgust. My sister seems to think they look like “ugly pigs” and my mother has mentioned that they are too fat to be cute. It’s become a pretty heated debate. You seem to have good judgment, so if you have time, tell me what you think. </strong>– <em>Abigail </em><em>S. (Hartford, CT)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.dumpaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/feeding-the-cute-puppies.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Fuckin shit, Abigail. This is literally what would happen if a human and a dog could breed. And in trying to figure out my thoughts on what you’ve presented to me, I’ve stared at it so long—especially the dog on the right—that I now have no idea what these creatures are. Also, I can only picture them having the same texture and consistency as a Stretch Armstrong toy if you pressed into their flesh. Like I’m picturing their skin being frictiony and rubbery, not anything like a biological creature. I’ve gone through a lot in the last few minutes—too much to really answer your question. If I had to answer, I’d say affection is closer to what I’m feeling than disgust, so I guess I agree with you.</p>
<p>And with that, let’s call it a day.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a>Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a super unannoying list, don’t worry.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>To submit a question for a future mailbag, email <a href="mailto:mailbag@waitbutwhy.com">mailbag@waitbutwhy.com</a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Check these out next:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/secretly-hate-bars.html">Why You Secretly Hate Bars</a></strong> – The world’s least fun fun activity</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">How to Name a Baby</a></strong> – Beware the name fad</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-i-learned-while-i-was-in.html">20 Things I Learned in North Korea</a></strong> – They’re positive the 1950–1953 Korean War is still in full force</p>
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 Mailbag #1

 May 6, 2016 By Tim Urban


 Welcome to a new Wait But Why thing: the mailbag.

 I get a lot of email from readers asking great questions, and there’s just not time to give most of them a proper answer. Unless, of course, I do a full post dedicated to those questions. So that’s what this is.

 When the last post went out, I asked our email subscribers to submit mailbag questions, and a lot of you responded. I can group the responses that came in into two categories:

 1) Questions whose answers would be somewhere between one sentence and a few paragraphs

 2) Questions whose answers would be somewhere between a few paragraphs and 30,000 words

 The latter went into my Potential Future Posts List. The former were perfect for the mailbag.

 For this mailbag, I started with 46 questions and saved the rest for future mailbags. Moving forward, you can submit a mailbag question anytime to mailbag@waitbutwhy.com.

 Okay let’s jump in—

 ___________

 Smooth or crunchy peanut butter? – James T. (Adelaide, Australia)

 Smooth. I have a jar of peanut butter and sometimes I take a big spoon of it and eat it, and the next 45 seconds of my life is chaotic and upsetting. Crunchy adds another factor on top of that situation, which is the last thing I need.

 ___________

 What do you think about The Martian? Do you like the book or movie better? – Scott R. (Richmond, VA)

 Book for sure. The movie was solid and enjoyable, but kind of just another pretty good movie. The book was special. It was one giant thought experiment that explored, “What would happen if a super-smart astronaut got stranded on Mars?” and you got the answer to the experiment told through the detailed, inner thoughts of the astronaut. I loved how many technical explanations there were in the book as Watney puzzled his way through problems, and the movie lost 90% of that aspect. In fairness, I read the book first and had no idea what was gonna happen, and I watched the movie without that suspense, so I’m not a fully fair judge.

 ___________

 What do you believe that not many other people do? (i.e., what are some of your unpopular opinions?) – Jeremiah O. (New York, NY)

 Saying you’re purely pro-life or purely pro-choice are both inane, for different reasons. A post on this is high up in the queue, so not gonna expand here. But that’s what I think.

 Being inside is better than being outside in not all but most cases.

 The longer the plane ride, the better. Plane rides are the best—as long as I don’t have to work or have to sleep.

 Great music without lyrics is better than great music with lyrics.

 Black licorice is delicious.

 Chocolate is a bad flavor of ice cream.

 Animated TV or movies are more fun to watch than real people TV or movies.

 Washing your hair every day is a silly thing to do.

 Ordering fish in a restaurant is for people who don’t care about happiness.

 ___________

 Would you call yourself a transhumanist? – Saurabh S. (New Delhi, India)

 I’m not entirely sure what a transhumanist is. Hold on.

 Okay Wikipedia says it’s this:

 Transhumanism is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. The most common thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.

 Uh, yeah, definitely. The objectives of transhumanism strike me as the kind of thing a lot of people think is wrong or distasteful or unnatural…until it becomes commonplace. And then people can’t imagine what life was like before and would never want to go back.

 I’m always in favor of getting rid of what’s “natural” for something that’s better. Sleeping in caves is natural, and it’s really great that we found a better way. Riding horses is how humans got around for a long time, and driving cars is a huge upgrade for both the human and the horse. I’m sure people thought the concept of the organ transplant was terribly unnatural before the technology became possible, and now they don’t. So yeah, let’s go for it. I’m not at all attached to the biological body I was born with if we can find a better way.

 That said, at some point you start running into the question “what makes you you?” I’ll upgrade any part of my existence in any way available until it gets to the point where doing so kills me by making me not me anymore. If science can replace my brain with a synthetic brain containing the identical data as my own, with the advantage that it’ll never age, it sounds great—unless I suspect that the new me seems like me and acts like me but I don’t actually have access to that consciousness. When an upgrade gets to the point where it’s essentially creating a synthetic clone of me to take my place in the world—that’s right where my transhumanism ends. The exception might be if I was going to die either way and creating the upgraded no-longer-me clone me can serve people on Earth somehow, like someone creating a clone of themselves so their family doesn’t have to lose them.

 We don’t know when an upgrade causes you to cease to exist because there’s no clear answer to what makes you you. But we’re a long way from crossing that bridge, so for now, I’m pro-transhumanism.

 ___________

 Will you ever finish up the presidents series?
 – Jennifer R. (Davis, CA)
 – Danielle P. (Arlington, VA)
 – Emily B. (Arlington, VA)
 – Ron G. (San Marcos, CA)
 – Claire L. (Cape Cod, MA)

 I know, I know, and I haven’t forgotten about it. The presidents series will be completed, probably with two more parts, but I don’t have a specific timeline yet.

 ___________

 Do you know how to code? Or are you planning to learn it? – Dawid P. (Sufczyn, Poland)

 No. But I do know BC Calculus, thank god, because the American public school curriculum was last updated in 1820.

 Part of me thinks it’s a no-brainer time investment to learn to code, but part of me also wonders if we might be in a phase of time when it’s an important skill to have, but then that phase ends. There was a time when it was important for computer people to know how to actually use 1’s and 0’s and now there’s no need for that, so maybe people who are being born now will never need to learn how to code? I’d prefer that narrative, because it would mean A) it excuses me from having to deal with learning how to code, and B) I only made a dramatic two-decade mistake by not learning how to code in college and not a lifelong one.

 I should probably learn how to code.

 ___________

 Why did you decide to buy a tortoise? – Samantha K. (Singapore)

 In 2005, I went to the pet store to get a fighter fish because why not have a little screensaver on your desk. When I got there, I walked by a glass terrarium with a golf-ball-sized tortoise in it. I asked to hold him immediately, lifting him up by pinching his shell between my thumb and index finger. His four legs moved back and forth as he tried to figure out why he was suddenly levitating in mid-air. And the decision was done.

 11 years later, Winston and I live happily together. As I type this, he (now the size of a football) is moseying by me, going about his business, living his life.

 I’m not really sure why everyone doesn’t own a tortoise. They’re hilarious entities, they’re unthinkably cute, they’re unbelievably chill and require very little from you, they’re a great party trick when you have friends over, and they won’t expire until your grandkids are in their 80s.

 I mean:

 ___________

 What would you do if you could meet antimatter Tim? – Treyvon C. (Houston, TX)

 Thanks, Treyvon, for sending me on an hour spiral reading about antimatter and what happens when you combine it with matter.

 Here’s the deal. Antimatter is matter made up of antiparticles, which are like normal particles except with the opposite charge—negatively charged protons, positively charged electrons, etc.

 Antimatter occurs very rarely in nature and is incredibly hard to produce—so hard that in 1999, NASA estimated that the going rate for antimatter was about $62.5 trillion per gram. A later estimate in 2006 brought the price down to only $25 billion a gram nbd.

 I weigh about 160 lbs or about 73 kg. So at the cheapest, anti-matter Tim would be worth about $1,825,000,000,000,000 and would be getting mugged constantly.

 But if he managed to make it intact to a meeting with me, it would be fun to meet him until we shook hands and the Earth blew up.

 Here’s the problem: when matter and antimatter are put together, both of them are annihilated and a lot of energy is released. How much energy? E = mc2 much. That example—a gram of antimatter and a gram of matter colliding—comes out like this:

 E = mc2

 Mass = 2 grams in this case, and c = the speed of light in meters/second = about 300,000,000 m/s, so:

 E = (.002 kg)(300,000,000)2

 E = 1.8 x 1014 joules

 1 kg of TNT releases 4,184,000 joules of energy. So our gram of antimatter collision produces an explosion equivalent to blowing up about 43 million kg of TNT.

 = 43,000 tons of TNT
 = 43 kilotons of TNT
 = an explosion about three times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb

 And that’s a gram of antimatter.

 Back to my hangout with antimatter Tim. He and I each weigh about 73,000 grams, so our handshake would be unpleasant for both of us, blowing us both up in an explosion that releases the same energy as 3.1 million kilotons, or 3,100 megatons of TNT. (A megaton = a million tons = a billion kgs)

 The density of TNT is 1.654 g/cm3. So a kg of TNT would be about the size of a grapefruit, a ton of TNT would be a little smaller than a car, a kiloton of TNT would be the size of a house, and my handshake with antimatter Tim would be like blowing up a cube of TNT with a side of 1.2 km. Very similar, it turns out, to what I once figured out was the size of the building needed to hold all the world’s humans:

 It wouldn’t quite blow up the Earth, but with an explosion 200,000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, me meeting antimatter Tim would be bad for everybody.

 ___________

 Do you have any insights as to how one finds their calling? – Akshat V. (Bangalore, India)

 Say two people want to find the love of their life, Person A and Person B.

 Person A never goes on dates, opting instead to sit alone debating in her head about who the exact kind of person is she will fall in love with. She scours online profiles, but never contacts anyone. Instead, her plan is to wait until she comes across the profile so perfect for her that she’ll know she’s found The One. Then and only then will she reach out to that person for a date.

 Person B goes on a lot of dates, constantly meeting new people and keeping an open mind, because she knows she probably doesn’t know either herself or the type of match that makes sense for her as well as she thinks she does.

 Who’s more likely to find the love of their life?

 ___________

 Can you suggest [legal] ways to experience Whoa moments? – Tóth B.

 Psychedelic methods aside, I’d say this:

 The best way not to experience a whoa moment is to live your days exactly how you normally do. You know how when you brush your teeth, you can think about something totally different and it doesn’t affect your ability to brush? Because it’s all being done by your subconscious? Well living your normal routine day is kind of like that—your brain is mostly on autopilot, and you’re living largely in an unconscious and comfortable groove.

 To bring heightened clarity and new epiphanies into your life, try getting out of that unconscious groove by forcing conscious thought about things our consciousness doesn’t usually bother with because they’re not important for our daily tasks. I did this recently when I found myself with 15 minutes to kill on a street corner before meeting someone there. Instead of doing what I’d normally do—burying myself in my phone to pass the time—I decided to get into “conscious mode.” I looked up and around me at the architecture, I looked at little details on the sidewalk and the steps of a nearby building, I looked down at my feet and realized it was funny that I was supporting myself vertically on two sticks. And suddenly, everything was weird, and I was having a great time. It was hilarious watching all these people bustling around, all of them on their own two sticks, all of them stuck to the side of a floating rock in space, and none of them thinking about that. Full whoa moment.

 But the people I was watching weren’t thinking about being stuck to the side of a rock floating in a huge void—they were completely lost in the unconscious groove we all spend most of our time in.

 A whoa moment happens when your conscious mind takes a step back and glimpses reality for a second, which we all have the power to do—we just have to remember to think about it.

 ___________

 Have you ever been to Burning Man? If so, how was your experience? If not, why not? – Sam B. (Kansas City, MO)

 Funny you ask. I’m going this year for the first time—at least that’s the plan (I’ve failed so far at getting tickets). I’ve heard about Burning Man a lot, but it always struck me as something very not me-ish to go to. Without really knowing what Burning Man is, I’ve always just pictured a bunch of people standing in the 120º desert acting exactly like this woman, except with no stage or music nearby. And what the hell am I gonna do in that situation. Also very unclear why that video has so many views.

 But over the past few years, I’ve heard so many people say so many fascinating things about it that I’ve become enticed enough to give it a try. Any advice from Burning Man veterans is welcome.

 ___________

 What kind of kid were you? – Mia (Uppsala, Sweden)

 I said a lot of words. I actually made what I now realize was the world’s first podcast in 1987 when I was five. I had this little tape-player/recorder and I’d regularly put a blank tape in and press record and say some shit for a half hour. Then I’d write “Tim’s Performance” on the tape and give it to my parents to enjoy. At one point, I suspected they were lying about actually listening to my musings, so I tested them by waiting until about 20 minutes into one of my recording sessions and then saying, “The secret number is 128. I’m going to ask you what the secret number is later, and remember, it’s 128.” I later asked my parents what the secret number was and they didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. My podcast was not engaging.

 ___________

 What is one thing that you don’t procrastinate about and why do you think that is? – Richard R. (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

 I had to think about this for an upsettingly long time to come up with an answer. What I finally came up with is eating my gummy vitamins each day.

 ___________

 What’s a recent embarrassing YouTube spiral you’ve gone down? – Jackie V. (Perth, Australia)

 this > this > this > this > this > this

 ___________

 Has your sense of life purpose changed with a newfound look on human mortality? If so, how? If not, why? – Will H. (Berkeley, CA)

 For those unacquainted, I believe Will is referring to the fact that I started Wait But Why 100% sure I was going to die somewhere between 2013 and 2100, and then I wrote posts like the Fermi post and the AI post and the Truthism post and the Cryonics post and now I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Suddenly, the prospect of living till I’m an ultra-cranky 1,280-year-old seems perfectly plausible.

 I’m not sure my life purpose has changed because I’m not sure I had a life purpose in mind to begin with. But it’s definitely put me in a better mood about things. An atheist is already at rock bottom when it comes to their personal long-term outlook, so realizing that the world of 2050 might be unrecognizable to us, with totally different rules, is a delightful development.

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 Do you have any recurring nightmares? – Daniel J. (Cape Town, South Africa)

 Yes. About really big numbers. It’s me somewhere, in the shit, while some huge booming voice is telling me I have to do stuff involving huge numbers like a billion and a trillion. It goes all the way back to when I was a kid. I just got the shivers writing this.

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 What are your MBTI results?
 As one of the many (I’m assuming here) people out there who read snippets of your posts to an unreceptive spouse, I’m wondering if there are clusters of Myers & Briggs personality types that find your writing particularly appealing. So, I would really enjoy the following: (1) Your MBTI results, (2) The results of a survey of your email subscribers, and (3) Your thoughts on the whole thing. – Preston S. (Oklahoma City, OK)

 For those unacquainted, Myers Briggs is a famous personality test that labels everyone with a four-letter code. It judges personalities on a set of four binary criteria. As explained by the Myers Briggs website:

 Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

 Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

 Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

 Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

 So one person might be an ENFP while another person might be an ISFJ, and so on. Myers Briggs also lays out the typical characteristics of each of the 16 possible types here.

 The whole thing seems a little simplistic to me, given how complicated and multi-dimensional humans are. But it’s still fun.

 When I took the test, I got an INTP. I was close to the I/E border and the S/N border, while very strongly a T and a P.

 Preston also asked about doing a survey of email subscribers. Let’s just put a survey here. We’ll publish the results on the WBW Facebook page.

 [Update: MBTI Survey Results]

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 Do you have any favorite interesting/educational YouTube channels to watch? – Christopher D. (New Haven, CT)

 There are so many good ones – it’s incredible how easy it is today to have someone teach you stuff in an entertaining way for free while you’re sitting on the couch. Six favorites:

 Kurzgesagt
 CGP Grey
 VSauce
 TedEd
 Veritasium
 SciShow

 Would love to hear about others in the comments.

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 What are your thoughts on routine infant circumcision, beneficial procedure or human rights violation? – Beau S. (Brisbane, Australia)

 If I take a step back and look at this from first principles, I start by looking up whether the procedure is important for health reasons. When I find out the answer is probably not, it becomes pretty clear that circumcision is nothing other than a primitive, religious practice of genital mutilation that for some reason is common today. It makes no sense, and once we all stop doing it, it’ll seem like an absurd custom of the past. I had friends recently go through this decision with their new baby, and every argument went against circumcision except one: not circumcising their son would make him different than most of the other guys in his world in a part of life where being different can be mortifying, especially as either a little kid being made fun of by his friends or an already-sexually-insecure teenager. They went with circumcision. And I get it. But it makes no sense, aside from the fact that we’re all doing it (at least in the US). Can we just all agree to stop it with new babies?

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 Do you like waffles? – Matt V. (Bartonsville, PA)

 I’ve never understood waffles / pancakes / french toast people. A few bites of that on the side, sure, but if I’m hungry at a breakfast restaurant, I want something that involves salt and tabasco sauce. Ordering those sweet things for breakfast seems to me like ordering cake for dinner.

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 What are some of your favorite movies, and what do you think they say about you? – Joe S.

 As I thought about the answer to this question, I realized that the movies I’ve liked the absolute most in my life were movies made for 7-10-year olds when I was 7-10. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Home Alone, The Princess Bride, Back to the Future, etc. Are those movies all incredible, or does this just always happen with whatever happened to be the best movies of your childhood? Not really sure.

 For movies I’ve seen from the age of 10 onwards, I’ll give some awards:

 Most obvious answer that’s also just really good though: The Shawshank Redemption (Runners-up: Godfather 1/2, Braveheart)

 Less obvious answer that should be more obvious and I’m not sure why it’s not everyone’s favorite movie: Shutter Island

 Movie that is considered good but I probably liked it more than most people cause it was exactly my type of fun plot: Memento

 Movie that’s pretty random to put on this list but I just really liked it: About Schmidt

 Movie I thought was only pretty good but then it stuck with me way more than I realized it would and sometimes makes me wonder if I’m Truman and this thing is happening to me and having me seeing The Truman Show was a really intense, fun part of the plot for everyone watching: The Truman Show

 Most fun movie-watching experience even though I wouldn’t really call it a great movie: Ocean’s 11 (Runner-up: Limitless)

 Movie whose first 70% makes this list but not the last 30% because that part sucked: Minority Report

 Movie that I loved and took fully seriously and then saw again with people who were laughing the whole time and realized it was actually a comedy: Being John Malkovich. (Runner-up: American Psycho)

 Movie that’s not considered very good but I actually think it was great: The Invention of Lying

 Movie that might have been great but also it might have been terrible and I don’t know because I don’t know what the fuck happened: Mulholland Drive

 Documentary that was a terrible experience to watch the entire time but also the best documentary I’ve ever seen: Dear Zachary

 Documentary that was almost as good and it wasn’t a nightmare to watch: March of the Penguins

 Documentary that’s comforting as fuck to watch and I’ve seen it three times and there will be more viewings in the future: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

 Movie that I think about every time I see a person yelling things to no one on the street: Requiem for a Dream

 Movie that was incredibly good and also, kill me: Life is Beautiful

 Movie that is objectively pretty great but it also kind of annoys me how “cool” it is: Every Quentin Tarantino movie (Runner-up: Every Stanley Kubrik movie)

 Movie that ruined my happiness permanently: The Ring

 Movie that’s embarrassing to put on this list but sorry it was just really good: Love Actually. (Runner-up: Titanic)

 Worst movie I’ve ever seen: American Wedding. (Runner-up: From Hell. And Dodgeball. And Transformers 2. And Next Friday.)

 One thing about this list is there are very few comedies. It’s not that I never like comedies—I just think comedy movies are rarely that funny. I can’t think of many movies that can equal the funniness of the funniest TV shows—shows like The Office (UK), Curb, It’s Always Sunny, Family Guy, etc.

 As for what these say about me? I don’t really know—that’s for Joe to decide.

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 Lately I’ve been stumbling into the most frustrating arguments about a ridiculous topic: “The Earth is Flat.”
 Well, that’s what a lot of people have been trying to tell me lately and I haven’t been able to convince any of them of the truth. I feel like you would be the best person to break it down and explain how it is just not possible, in a way that they would understand. Anyway, just a request, if you can’t convince people the earth is a globe then no one can. It may sound funny but unfortunately I’m being serious. – Kennard M. (Antioch, CA)

 Far more interesting than any answer I can give is the specifics of the arguments you’ve been hearing. Please expand in the comments.

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 What’s your wpm? – Kevin B. (Riverside, CA)

 I didn’t know the answer to this, so I tested myself here. On my first try I clocked in at 84 words per minute. On the second try I did 92. And on the third try I did 98. Pleased.

 Then it was ruined when I sent it to Alicia (Wait But Why’s Manager of Lots of Things) to try and she got 147 like a psycho.

 Anyway, the site has you type out famous quotes, and an unexpected side benefit of doing this was realizing at one point that I was speed-typing Montesquieu summing up life:

 If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

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 Has your curiosity ever been a problem for you? – Mariam C. (Paris, France)

 My most prominent emotion when traveling in other countries (or in parts of the US I’m not used to) is curiosity. That’s part of why I often pick destinations that I don’t know much about or that seem super different from my world.

 The most interesting experiences happen when I befriend locals, which usually allows me to get a much deeper glimpse into what life is like in that place than I ever could as a voyeuring tourist. I’ve gotten myself invited into homes, weddings, social events, factories, etc.—and it’s usually a great experience.

 Usually.

 On one of my solo trips, I was out in the Rio nightlife district of Lapa and met two extraordinarily friendly dudes. They really liked me, so much that they invited me to a nearby house party.

 A random Brazilian house party! I had no idea what a Brazilian house party was like, and I was super excited to find out. Luckily for me, I had found two guys who just really like befriending random foreign dudes and bringing them to parties.

 Then we went to the party, which turned out to be us standing on a silent street a few blocks away from the crowded area while they forcefully took my things and ran away. Interesting party, but they had a better time than I did.

 Hilariously, I had taken a selfie with them earlier in the night when we were all still BFFs. It was on a disposable camera, and that was one of the things they decided not to bother taking, so I still have the picture.

 Kind of funny looking at their faces and knowing now that the smiles were, “Oh god yes I think this guy’s actually gonna come with us!”

 One other example that came to mind is the time I was about 12 and got curious about what would happen if I put my hamster, Waddles Urban, up my dad’s t-shirt when he was lying on his back on the couch sleeping. It was a very bad experience for both my dad and Waddles and a terrific one for me—kind of the reverse of the Brazil incident.

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 Would anything ever change your opinion about the existence of God? Would you discount it as a psychological error or hallucination? Could anything ever prove the existence of God to you? – Michael S.

 Why don’t you believe in God? – Luis C. (Dallas, TX)

 How can you be 100% sure that there isn’t something deeper to life than the material realm? – Noli S. (Prishtina, Kosovo)

 When it comes to everything written in the Bible, Quran, Torah, Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, and all the rest, I’m atheist for the same reason I’m atheist about Greek Myths when I read them—they were written by people a long time ago who knew less than we do about the world, not more. No, lightning isn’t caused by Zeus throwing lightning bolts, it’s caused by the interaction of oppositely-charged particles in heavy clouds. And no, ancient rocks and fossils and mountains and canyons weren’t created by a great flood 6,000 years ago, they were created by a bunch of other stuff that happened over the past five billion years—stuff that we now understand. So when it comes to the various gods described in the world’s religions—yes, I’m as atheist as can be. With those gods, the question isn’t “Why don’t I believe in God?” it’s “Why would I believe in God?”

 That said, when it comes to the question, “Is there a higher force or higher being or grand creator of some kind?” I’m entirely agnostic. We don’t even know if we’re alone in the universe or not—as far as we know, there are trillions of superintelligent civilizations out there, with capabilities we couldn’t understand even if they tried to explain it to us (could you explain human capabilities to a chicken?). Could one of them have created life on Earth in some lab? Sure, why not?

 Could it be that it’s common for higher civilizations to create simulations, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that they might create trillions upon trillions of them, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that there are far more simulation civilizations in existence than real ones, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that just by the percentages, it’s far more likely that we’re one of the simulated ones than one of the real ones? Uh…I guess yeah?1

 We don’t even know what the universe is. It might be one of hundreds or millions or an infinite number of universes, or it might be the only thing there is. It might be a blip of energy floating around in one of the quarks inside one of the atoms that makes up the toenail of a red and blue baby pig bathing himself in a five-dimensional jelly swamp, and it comes into and out of existence in a nanosecond of the piglet’s life since every second in his world is 10 10 925 years for us. That literally might be what’s happening. It’s as likely as anything else you can come up with.

 So it’s outrageous to declare anything about the origin of life, the existence of one or more higher beings, or what our place is in all of this other than “I don’t know.” Agnostic.

 And when any fellow human—in 2016 or in 100 A.D.—declares that he knows the deal with God, including a bunch of details, I immediately say “Nope.”

 I think that answers Luis and Noli. As for Michael—the answer is yes. I know what I know because of the information I have. If new information presents itself to me, it might change what I believe. But even if some rad supernatural shit happened like some woman levitated on the sidewalk when I walked by and then suddenly went shooting upwards through the clouds, I’d be quicker to assume that it was the work of a biological or AI being from another part of the universe, or that we were in a simulation and the beings running it got bored and decided to fuck with me, than I would be to take what I saw as evidence that one of the Earthly religions was true.

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 Would you rather be attacked by 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck? – Kyle P. (Cheshire, CT)

 I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.

 I’d go for the 100 little horses. Here’s why:

 The duck would be terrifying. Have you seen how ducks act when you throw a piece of bread in the water? They turn into ravenous psychos. They use their wings, beaks, feet, and anything else they can to violently knock the other ducks out of the way. Then they lunge at the bread with their big hard duck beak. Now imagine a huge duck and you’re the bread. You’re done. That cock will charge at you and try to bite your head off. And you can’t run away—because it can fly. And its beak is still narrow enough that if you try to hide somewhere it can probably wedge its beak in there and pull you out. You’re done. It’s over.

 The horses would be bad. But not as bad as the duck. Angry horses are pretty angry. And their bite could probably take a chunk out of your leg. Or maybe they’d kick you with their hind legs, which would give you painful little ankle bruises. All of that would be painful, but not lethal. Lethal happens when you’re frantically kicking them one by one and you accidentally fall over. Falling over would be a huge disaster with the little horses. They’d be biting your neck open and kicking you in the crotch and jumping up on your stomach. Done. But unlike with the duck, you could probably escape the horses. You could just climb up on a bench and now what? They’re screwed. They can charge the bench and jump up on their hind legs all they want, but you’re a full foot above their highest jump, and they can’t climb or fly, so you can just lay down and nap on the bench while they tire themselves out. Then when you wake up, you can carefully grab them one at a time and bring it up to the bench and use its tail to tie its back legs together, neutralizing that horse. It would take a while, but eventually they’d all be neutralized, hobbling around on the ground, in the shit with their leg situation, and you could just step over them and walk away.

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 Why does the atmosphere of the earth circle around the earth? We circle with the earth because we are attached to the ground, but the atmosphere isn’t attached to the ground so why does it circle around with the planet? – Sinan A. (Baghdad, Iraq)

 You say “we circle the earth because we are attached to the ground,” but what does “attached” mean? What it really means is there’s friction between our bodies and the surface of the earth that “pulls” our bodies. The oceans are less “attached” to the ground than a solid human body, but oceans rotate with the earth too, because there’s friction between the water molecules and the ocean floor. There’s less friction between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface than there is in the case of solid or liquid matter on the surface, but there’s still friction—which affects the atmosphere enough to pull it, too, along with Earth’s rotation.

 But in all of these cases, friction is only why these things initially began to rotate along with the earth. Once something is up to full Earth rotational speed, the reason the atmosphere or anything else continues to rotate with the earth is inertia—an object in motion stays in motion. If the earth suddenly and instantly reversed rotational direction, there would be utter chaos on the surface, and everything would go flying. We, the oceans, and the atmosphere would all still carry the normal rotational velocity and the earth no longer would—kind of like when a moving car slams on the breaks and everything in the car lunges forward. But once the chaos settled down, the rotational velocity of all things on Earth’s surface would eventually be slowed down and reversed to match Earth’s new spin—because of friction. You’d be dead though.

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 Which are scarier – horror movies about ghosts or serial killers? – Layla P. (Mexico City, Mexico)

 Ghosts 100%. Serial killer movies make me edgy as fuck when I leave the theater and I’m walking down the street and there are strangers all around. But ghost movies take a shit in a much deeper part of my soul, and suddenly everything in my apartment—a blank white wall, a picture in a frame, a lamp on my nightstand—is terrifying.

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 If you could pick one future event that you could witness first hand, what would it be? – Brian G. (Cambridge, UK)

 On the heels of the recent cryonics post, I might pick the first time a vitrified person is successfully and fully revived.

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 How do you be a good person? – Katerena K. (Seattle, WA)

 This warrants a 12,000-word post, but for now, I’ll start with one idea:

 I think a great way to be a good person is to get in the habit of consciously thinking about the fact that almost every stranger, co-worker, friend, acquaintance, fling, customer service representative, driver, waiter, customer, client, neighbor, and person on the internet you come across:

 * Has a family who loves them and vice versa
 * Has hopes and dreams and regrets and frustrations
 * Has as many thoughts going through their head at all times as you do
 * Is dealing with random health problems, trying to make ends meet financially, and is probably tired
 * Might be supporting one or more other human beings
 * Might be just a little sad all the time about a tragedy in their past
 * Might be the most important person in someone else’s life
 * Is just trying to figure out how to be happy

 i.e. They’re a full human just like you.

 Remembering that will make you kinder and more empathetic.

 ___________

 What kind of thermos is your favorite thermos? Is it a Thermos-brand thermos? What color is it? How old is it? – Maxfield M. (Sacramento, CA)

 My sister had a blanket she was obsessed with as a toddler that she inexplicably called her Ninee (like “night” without the t and then “knee”). If you tried to take her Ninee away from her she flipped her shit. It was a critical part of her being.

 My thermos is my Ninee. My ideal way to drink coffee is to slowly have one 16-ounce cup of black coffee over a four-hour span. Coffee in an open mug stays hot for like eight minutes. In a covered, paper take-out cup, maybe 15 minutes. Both totally unacceptable. I suffered for my whole life with this issue until I realized thermoses existed a few years ago. I got this one and it solved all my problems, with the added benefit of it being closable, so I can pop a full thermos in my bag or put it on the floor on an airplane (upright in my shoe).

 Because I’m a child, I lose my thermos by leaving it somewhere about twice a year on average, but at $22, it’s only a little devastating every time it happens.

 I’ve also recently gotten into the small S’well thermos, which I use when I don’t have my bag because unlike my normal one, it fits in my jeans pocket.

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 What is happiness? – Frank P. (Tokyo, Japan)

 Reality minus expectations.

 I have a much longer answer, but saving it for a post.

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 What do you think about hypnotherapy?
 A relative of mine who is a very critical thinker recently became a “qualified hypnotherapist” which made me ponder how credible this field is. How does it work? Is it effective? And so on… – Matt B. (Leicester, UK)

 I’m pretty sure those absurd stage hypnosis charades with a bunch of “hypnotized” people barking like a dog or having an orgasm or forgetting the number two on stage in front of a laughing crowd have to be some combo of people enjoying attention, peer pressure, and some element of placebo effect. No way that can be real.

 But serious, one-on-one hypnotherapy? Sure, why not? The brain is weird, so why wouldn’t a trance-like state be able to be induced? From what I’ve read, hypnosis is just an extension of the phenomenon of a person getting so wrapped up in a thought that when someone calls their name, they don’t even hear it. That kind of hypnosis seems to be real, though it works on some people better than others and for some not at all. The problem for the credibility of hypnosis is all the fictional, cartoony hypnosis we’ve seen in movies, where the person is a robot who will do whatever the hypnotist says—pretty sure it doesn’t work like that.

 I have a friend who’s been doing a type of hypnosis called EMDR with his therapist and claims that while doing so, a memory of himself breastfeeding flashed in his consciousness for a second. Nahhh, right? Or could it be possible?

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 In what other aspects of your life do you apply the rationale you use to avoid a Vegan/Vegetarian lifestyle? ( i.e. “This action/choice is indefensible but I’ll do it anyway since it’s 1. enjoyable, and 2. socially permissible.”) – Ndi S. (New York, NY)

 If I’m understanding correctly, the question is: “You’ve admitted that despite knowing how wrong it is to support the torture and brutal slaughter of helpless animals, you do it anyway because you’re kind of a dick. Where else in your life are you kind of a dick in a similar way?”

 Good question. Let’s see…

 I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro made in a Chinese factory of nightmares and suicide.

 I buy plastic things a lot and only recycle them if it’s easy.

 I’m wearing clothes most likely sewn by a melancholy 11-year-old somewhere far away in “Let’s just not think about that!” land.

 I sometimes leave the water running while I’m brushing my teeth even though lack of clean water is destroying like 50% of the world’s happiness.

 I hire unpaid interns sometimes.

 I walk by 15 homeless people a day and give them money only when I have change in my pocket and then walk into a coffee shop and tip the barista a dollar or two even though they definitely have a bed.

 If I walk by someone’s house and a mean-looking dog is in the yard behind a fence, I bark at him to get him worked up because it’s funny and he doesn’t know how to open the gate.

 I leave my phone on LTE until the plane gets too high to get a signal.

 I sneak down to better seats at the Red Sox game.

 I sometimes sign Andrew up for the mailing lists of fortune tellers and other mystics when I have a few minutes to kill on the internet.

 I cohabitate with a tortoise in a small apartment even though he belongs in the desert.

 Thanks Ndi.

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 How do you choose what to work on for WBW? When you run out of ideas, how do you plan to source new ideas? – Ricky Y. (San Francisco, CA)

 One thing that will never be a problem for me is a shortage of post topics. I currently have a 116-page Word document full of topics, thoughts, questions, and random brainstorms I want to make into posts. Whenever I’m in an interesting conversation, or think of a funny observation, or find myself with an intriguing question, I write it in the doc. And if you just get in that habit, the potential-post-topic doc becomes long pretty quickly. To make it into the doc, a topic generally has to satisfy at least one of these:

 * It’s something I think people know about and hear about but generally don’t understand
 * It’s something about life we all notice subconsciously but we don’t usually think about it or put it into words
 * It’s something that many of us are feeling or thinking secretly but no one is saying
 * It’s something important that we don’t think about very intelligently because we don’t have a useful framework in our heads, or an important psychological concept that we should have a concrete label for but don’t
 * It’s something I come across that blows my mind and I know it’ll blow readers’ minds too

 When it’s time to start a new post, I scan down the big doc and pick something that excites me at that time. I get really exhausted by a topic by the time I’m done with it, so I try to mix things up—if the last post was really researchy, the next one might be more brainstormy, or if the last topic was heavy, I might pick something lighter next.

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 What Chrome extensions do you use? – Kyle

 Pocket – to save articles I want to read later or offline

 goo.gl URL shortener

 The Great Suspender – freezes tabs I have open but haven’t used in a while which goes a long way to reduce Chrome’s insane memory burden.

 Tabs Outliner – So when Chrome crashes or I lose my tabs for any other reason I can easily restore them.

 Momentum – Makes my day 0.5% better every day so why not.

 Google Calendar

 Honey – finds discount codes

 Another Chrome thing I did once which was very worth the time: I put the 30 or so sites I go to most in the bookmarks bar, but I left each with a blank name, so the bookmarks bar is just a big line of logos. This makes basically every site I ever go to just a button click.

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 What do I do if I always feel stupid?
 There are so many awesome things in our world, e.g. gravitational astronomy, physics of superconducters, neuroscience, genetics, AI, space exploration, math problems, WBW posts. Well, you get it. Much more than an average person could ever learn, I guess. Therefore my question is: what do I do if I always feel stupid? Like, really, always. – Katie S. (Russia)

 Stupid is when you don’t know that much about anything and you feel like everyone else does. The good news is, everyone else doesn’t. At all. The world is full of exciting, complex things that almost no one understands. Once you realize this, all the stuff you don’t know isn’t upsetting, it’s exciting.

 It’s like reading. I’ve read a bunch of good books, but there are 1,000 times as many that I haven’t read. If I believed that most people had read most books and for some reason I had not, I’d feel embarrassingly not-well-read. But because I know that most people haven’t read most books, I can take my own situation out of the thought process and just enjoy the fact that I’ll never run out of good new books to read.

 So even though people sometimes present themselves as more knowledgeable about more things than they really are, remember that really, most people don’t know much about anything, and try to get excited about the fact that with every year of your life that goes by, you’ll know more and more and more.

 And remember, to actually learn about a topic you don’t get, you have to build a tree trunk foundation of understanding before you can start tacking onto that foundation by adding on branches and leaves (like news articles about recent developments). The thing that makes people feel stupid is trying to absorb branches and leaves when they don’t yet have a tree trunk, so it always goes in one ear and out the other and you feel like it’s hopeless for you to ever grasp the topic—but it’s not.

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 Do you cook much? If so, what is your favorite cookbook (or chef, cooking website, etc)? – Al T. (Charlottesville, VA)

 Cooking some elaborate thing using a recipe is for me like reading fiction—when I do it, I thoroughly enjoy it, but I do it like once a year. Mostly, I keep it to things like stir frying vegetables and rice, which is an excuse to have a condiment/spices party.

 As for cookbooks, I recently got J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab, which is delightful so far. Not a big chef fanboy person, although I had a phase with Bobby Flay’s Boy Meets Grill show at one point and I’m pretty infatuated with how cocky and rad Danny Bowien is (the Mission Chinese guy).

 My greatest culinary passion is whichever 15 hot sauces I happen to have in my fridge at any given time. Currently:

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 How does wind work? What is the mechanism behind wind happening? Why does it happen? – Steven H. (Cape Girardeau, MO)

 I’ll need to read about how weather works for 30 hours before I can give a proper answer to this question, but I’ll take a crack.

 The key to wind is air pressure. Forget the atmosphere for a second and take a breath in. What happens? Air from outside your body rushes into your body. Now exhale—and air rushes back out. What’s happening is that the air outside your body is staying at the same pressure level, but when you inhale, you’re increasing the volume in your lungs, which lowers the air molecules / volume ratio in your lungs, which lowers the air pressure in your lungs. Air always “wants” to even things out, so air rushes into your lungs to accommodate for the extra space created by your inhale and equalize the pressure inside and outside of you. When you exhale, you’re decreasing the volume in your lungs, which increases the air pressure to a level higher than the air outside your body, so air rushes out to make things equal.

 When the sun heats up parts of the atmosphere, the air rises, which leaves less air down near the surface than normal—a low pressure system. Hot air rising and leaving a void underneath is kind of like the atmosphere “inhaling.” Just like what happens in your expanding lungs, air from higher pressure systems surrounding the low pressure system rushes in to equalize things—i.e. the low pressure area “sucks” in surrounding air. In the reverse situation, when there’s a higher-than-normal pressure system in the atmosphere, it’s like a human exhaling. The higher pressure system presses outward into lower pressure areas and the air rushes there to equalize things. That rushing air is what we experience as wind. Wind is just air moving from areas of higher pressure to areas of lower pressure.

 Relatedly, this is cool.

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 I would be interested to know in what position two similar sized human bodies are touching the most. Surface mapping? I would like to create a mathematically correct sculpture. – Ludescher S. (Vienna, Austria)

 No idea. But I included this odd question so someone who knows can explain it to all of us in the comments.

 ___________

 What’s one of the most important life lessons you’ve learned in your years so far that you would give to a young adult/college student? – Cathy J. (Toronto, Canada)

 Making really close lifelong friends is a hard thing to do for most people, and it gets even harder once you hit the real world and everyone lives in isolated apartments and spends their days at work. Really close friendships are built by spending a ton of hours with the same person or group of people again and again, and there’s nowhere better to foster that than college or the years after college when people often live with roommates.

 Given that, one piece of advice would be to first, assess your friendships and figure out who’s in Q1 (here’s a refresher on what Q1 is, from this post).

 Then, invest in those friendships, and remember that lazy afternoons sitting around doing nothing with them might seem mundane, but it’s actually building a foundation of closeness and comfort that you’ll be thankful for later. It’s time well spent.

 And if you don’t think many of your friends are in Q1, ask yourself why that might be. Maybe you’re not hanging out with the right kind of people for you.

 ___________

 Can you share any advice on becoming a good writer? – James M. (Dublin, Ireland)

 1) Write. I wrote 300 blog posts between the ages of 23 and 29 before starting Wait But Why. It can take a while to find your voice and your tone and your style. At the beginning, you’ll be all over the place, the same way you are when you try a new sport or video game or musical instrument. That’s good—you’re experimenting on a canvas. Don’t judge your own writing at this phase—you’re experimenting and searching and playing—you’re not doing your best writing yet. If your mammoth is freaking out too much and ruining things, start with an anonymous blog.

 2) Don’t be a complete perfectionist, but don’t settle for writing you know isn’t working. Even if you’re experimenting, if something you’re trying isn’t working, try to figure out why, rewrite parts, start over and try a new approach, etc.—keep fiddling until it clicks. Each time you go through the hard, painful work of agonizing over writing that isn’t working and eventually get it to click, you become a better writer.

 3) Read a lot. It’s like fertilizer.

 4) On one side of the spectrum, you’re completely copying the exact style and even the wording of another writer you like—let’s call that a 1. On the other side, you’re completely unique, writing in a way the world has never seen before—let’s call it a 10. Your goal is to start somewhere in the middle and then work your way up the scale as you mature as a writer. That said, having influences is inevitable and perfectly okay, because true 10s don’t exist. This same concept applies to stand-up comedy, music, or any other type of art. It’s a badge of honor to say The Beatles are one of your influences, but no one likes a songwriter who’s blatantly copying The Beatles. Without getting to a 7 or 8 on the uniqueness spectrum, there’s likely a ceiling on how high your writing career can go.

 5) While you’re experimenting with your writing, keep your mind open to all creative possibilities. The first 290 of the 300 blog posts I wrote in my 20s had no visuals. Only towards the very end did I try drawing something one night. And only then did I realize how much I liked combining hand-drawn visuals with my writing. That could have easily never happened, and if it hadn’t, Wait But Why would be an all-text blog today.

 6) If you get feedback as you grow as a writer, be careful who it’s coming from. The person giving feedback should A) believe in you, B) be rooting for you, and C) be completely aware that what they’re reading isn’t your max potential but you experimenting, gaining confidence, and trying to figure out your voice. A person who satisfies all of those is great to get feedback from. Someone who fails any of those criteria is going to do you more harm than good, and will often be the person who makes you quit prematurely and never try again (even if you don’t realize they’re the reason that happened).

 7) Remember that in most cases, the ideas behind the writing are more important than the quality of the writing itself. You’d rather have great ideas and pretty good writing than the other way around.

 ___________

 Do you speak any other languages? – Ricardo K. (Vinhedo, Brazil)

 I speak 1.43 languages:

 * English
 * 40% of Spanish
 * 1% of French
 * 0.1% of about 20 other languages because I learned how to say a few sentences when I visited a country where that was the language

 My .4 Spanish capabilities are super useful when I visit Spanish-speaking countries, but mostly when I need to say something to someone. Once I finish, the party’s over. For some reason, my brain decided to not ever learn to understand what the fuck anyone is saying when they speak Spanish to me.

 My problem is that I never learned Spanish well enough to do that thing where you have a Spanish part of your brain. So instead, I’ve memorized a ton of Spanish words and when I speak to someone, I’m doing what people who are bad at languages do—I’m rapid-fire translating in my head with each word that comes out of my mouth. I’m proficient enough to get around a Spanish-speaking country and even have conversations with people—as long as they don’t say anything back. When they do, it’s like someone throwing five tennis balls at me every second and expecting me to somehow catch all of them. So I go into a panic and just keep saying “lentamente” until their pace comes down so far that I can figure out what they’re saying.

 ___________

 If you could eat one non-edible thing, what would it be? – Tandice O. (New York, NY)

 The sticky hand.

 How many people have ever lived?

 I have a question I figured only WBW could answer properly. It came up when I took a shower and I thought: “Wow, it’s kinda crazy that most people from the beginning of time till now haven’t felt the pressure of a hot shower,” since I guess that showers as we know it were invented only a couple of centuries ago (hot bath doesn’t count). But then I thought… Is it true? There are approximately 7.4 billion people in the world today, and I think the numbers got that big only recently.

 This made me ponder: how many people have lived on Earth since the beginning of humanity? What percentage of them lived in the last 200 years? – Zohar A. (Tel Aviv, Israel)

 I’ve thought about the shower thing before. It’s incredible. Imagine being stranded on an island with only basic tools and trying to create an extended hot shower for yourself. Not gonna happen. A hot shower requires a ton of technology. In the interest of not spending two hours reading enough about the history of showers to be able to piece together an estimate for the number of people who have ever had access to a hot shower, I’ll leave it at that thought for now—though I’d be delighted if a reader would like to figure this out and put it in the comments.

 As for the number of people who have ever lived, Carl Haub at the Population Reference Bureau estimated in 2011 that about 107 billion people have lived:

 I made a chart about this stat once in a post:

 Of course, Haub’s or anyone else’s estimate for this is imprecise and up for debate, especially since people aren’t even in agreement about when humans “started”. Either way, the fact that around 1/15 of all people who have ever lived are currently alive struck me as very high, considering that the past century accounts for at most 1/500 of the time humans have been around.

 In the same article, Haub estimates that about 40% of those who have ever lived died before their first birthday and estimates that “life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about ten years for most of human history.” If he’s right, it would mean that 1/10 of all humans age 1 or older who have ever lived are currently alive, and that fraction would become higher and higher as you increase the age. So maybe 1/5 of all 30+ year olds who have ever lived are currently alive and maybe a third of people who ever lived to 60 are still alive. And I’d bet that the majority of people 90 or over who have ever lived are alive right now. All guesses, but it seems logical.

 ___________

 What do you think about this picture?
 I’ve been having a social issue over a photo of puppies I found on the Internet. Yes, a photo of puppies. I was bored (and admittedly in the dark playground), so I decided to search “adorable dogs” on Google images. I found the picture and was immediately in love. So, I decided to save it and show my family. I was taken aback when they reacted with disgust. My sister seems to think they look like “ugly pigs” and my mother has mentioned that they are too fat to be cute. It’s become a pretty heated debate. You seem to have good judgment, so if you have time, tell me what you think. – Abigail S. (Hartford, CT)

 Fuckin shit, Abigail. This is literally what would happen if a human and a dog could breed. And in trying to figure out my thoughts on what you’ve presented to me, I’ve stared at it so long—especially the dog on the right—that I now have no idea what these creatures are. Also, I can only picture them having the same texture and consistency as a Stretch Armstrong toy if you pressed into their flesh. Like I’m picturing their skin being frictiony and rubbery, not anything like a biological creature. I’ve gone through a lot in the last few minutes—too much to really answer your question. If I had to answer, I’d say affection is closer to what I’m feeling than disgust, so I guess I agree with you.

 And with that, let’s call it a day.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a super unannoying list, don’t worry.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 To submit a question for a future mailbag, email mailbag@waitbutwhy.com.

 ___________

 Check these out next:

 Why You Secretly Hate Bars – The world’s least fun fun activity

 How to Name a Baby – Beware the name fad

 20 Things I Learned in North Korea – They’re positive the 1950–1953 Korean War is still in full force

 1. Argument via Nick Bostrom.↩

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 * 
Welcome to a new Wait But Why thing: the mailbag.
I get a lot of email from readers asking great questions, and there’s just not time to give most of them a proper answer. Unless, of course, I do a full post dedicated to those questions. So that’s what this is.
When the last post went out, I asked our email subscribers to submit mailbag questions, and a lot of you responded. I can group the responses that came in into two categories:
1) Questions whose answers would be somewhere between one sentence and a few paragraphs
2) Questions whose answers would be somewhere between a few paragraphs and 30,000 words
The latter went into my Potential Future Posts List. The former were perfect for the mailbag.
For this mailbag, I started with 46 questions and saved the rest for future mailbags. Moving forward, you can submit a mailbag question anytime to mailbag@waitbutwhy.com.
Okay let’s jump in—
___________
 Smooth or crunchy peanut butter? – James T. (Adelaide, Australia) 
Smooth. I have a jar of peanut butter and sometimes I take a big spoon of it and eat it, and the next 45 seconds of my life is chaotic and upsetting. Crunchy adds another factor on top of that situation, which is the last thing I need.
___________
 What do you think about The Martian? Do you like the book or movie better? – Scott R. (Richmond, VA) 
Book for sure. The movie was solid and enjoyable, but kind of just another pretty good movie. The book was special. It was one giant thought experiment that explored, “What would happen if a super-smart astronaut got stranded on Mars?” and you got the answer to the experiment told through the detailed, inner thoughts of the astronaut. I loved how many technical explanations there were in the book as Watney puzzled his way through problems, and the movie lost 90% of that aspect. In fairness, I read the book first and had no idea what was gonna happen, and I watched the movie without that suspense, so I’m not a fully fair judge.
___________
 What do you believe that not many other people do? (i.e., what are some of your unpopular opinions?) – Jeremiah O. (New York, NY) 
Saying you’re purely pro-life or purely pro-choice are both inane, for different reasons. A post on this is high up in the queue, so not gonna expand here. But that’s what I think.
Being inside is better than being outside in not all but most cases.
The longer the plane ride, the better. Plane rides are the best—as long as I don’t have to work or have to sleep.
Great music without lyrics is better than great music with lyrics.
Black licorice is delicious.
Chocolate is a bad flavor of ice cream.
Animated TV or movies are more fun to watch than real people TV or movies.
Washing your hair every day is a silly thing to do.
Ordering fish in a restaurant is for people who don’t care about happiness.
___________
 Would you call yourself a transhumanist? – Saurabh S. (New Delhi, India) 
I’m not entirely sure what a transhumanist is. Hold on.
Okay Wikipedia says it’s this:
 Transhumanism is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. The most common thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings. 
Uh, yeah, definitely. The objectives of transhumanism strike me as the kind of thing a lot of people think is wrong or distasteful or unnatural…until it becomes commonplace. And then people can’t imagine what life was like before and would never want to go back.
I’m always in favor of getting rid of what’s “natural” for something that’s better. Sleeping in caves is natural, and it’s really great that we found a better way. Riding horses is how humans got around for a long time, and driving cars is a huge upgrade for both the human and the horse. I’m sure people thought the concept of the organ transplant was terribly unnatural before the technology became possible, and now they don’t. So yeah, let’s go for it. I’m not at all attached to the biological body I was born with if we can find a better way.
That said, at some point you start running into the question “what makes you you?” I’ll upgrade any part of my existence in any way available until it gets to the point where doing so kills me by making me not me anymore. If science can replace my brain with a synthetic brain containing the identical data as my own, with the advantage that it’ll never age, it sounds great—unless I suspect that the new me seems like me and acts like me but I don’t actually have access to that consciousness. When an upgrade gets to the point where it’s essentially creating a synthetic clone of me to take my place in the world—that’s right where my transhumanism ends. The exception might be if I was going to die either way and creating the upgraded no-longer-me clone me can serve people on Earth somehow, like someone creating a clone of themselves so their family doesn’t have to lose them.
We don’t know when an upgrade causes you to cease to exist because there’s no clear answer to what makes you you. But we’re a long way from crossing that bridge, so for now, I’m pro-transhumanism.
___________
 Will you ever finish up the presidents series? 
– Jennifer R. (Davis, CA)
– Danielle P. (Arlington, VA)
– Emily B. (Arlington, VA)
– Ron G. (San Marcos, CA)
– Claire L. (Cape Cod, MA) 
I know, I know, and I haven’t forgotten about it. The presidents series will be completed, probably with two more parts, but I don’t have a specific timeline yet.
___________
 Do you know how to code? Or are you planning to learn it? – Dawid P. (Sufczyn, Poland) 
No. But I do know BC Calculus, thank god, because the American public school curriculum was last updated in 1820.
Part of me thinks it’s a no-brainer time investment to learn to code, but part of me also wonders if we might be in a phase of time when it’s an important skill to have, but then that phase ends. There was a time when it was important for computer people to know how to actually use 1’s and 0’s and now there’s no need for that, so maybe people who are being born now will never need to learn how to code? I’d prefer that narrative, because it would mean A) it excuses me from having to deal with learning how to code, and B) I only made a dramatic two-decade mistake by not learning how to code in college and not a lifelong one.
I should probably learn how to code.
___________
 Why did you decide to buy a tortoise? – Samantha K. (Singapore) 
In 2005, I went to the pet store to get a fighter fish because why not have a little screensaver on your desk. When I got there, I walked by a glass terrarium with a golf-ball-sized tortoise in it. I asked to hold him immediately, lifting him up by pinching his shell between my thumb and index finger. His four legs moved back and forth as he tried to figure out why he was suddenly levitating in mid-air. And the decision was done.
11 years later, Winston and I live happily together. As I type this, he (now the size of a football) is moseying by me, going about his business, living his life.
I’m not really sure why everyone doesn’t own a tortoise. They’re hilarious entities, they’re unthinkably cute, they’re unbelievably chill and require very little from you, they’re a great party trick when you have friends over, and they won’t expire until your grandkids are in their 80s.
I mean:
 
___________
 What would you do if you could meet antimatter Tim? – Treyvon C. (Houston, TX) 
Thanks, Treyvon, for sending me on an hour spiral reading about antimatter and what happens when you combine it with matter.
Here’s the deal. Antimatter is matter made up of antiparticles, which are like normal particles except with the opposite charge—negatively charged protons, positively charged electrons, etc.
Antimatter occurs very rarely in nature and is incredibly hard to produce—so hard that in 1999, NASA estimated that the going rate for antimatter was about $62.5 trillion per gram. A later estimate in 2006 brought the price down to only $25 billion a gram nbd.
I weigh about 160 lbs or about 73 kg. So at the cheapest, anti-matter Tim would be worth about $1,825,000,000,000,000 and would be getting mugged constantly.
But if he managed to make it intact to a meeting with me, it would be fun to meet him until we shook hands and the Earth blew up.
Here’s the problem: when matter and antimatter are put together, both of them are annihilated and a lot of energy is released. How much energy? E = mc2  much. That example—a gram of antimatter and a gram of matter colliding—comes out like this:
E = mc2 
Mass = 2 grams in this case, and c = the speed of light in meters/second = about 300,000,000 m/s, so:
E = (.002 kg)(300,000,000)2 
E = 1.8 x 1014  joules
1 kg of TNT releases 4,184,000 joules of energy. So our gram of antimatter collision produces an explosion equivalent to blowing up about 43 million kg of TNT.
= 43,000 tons of TNT
= 43 kilotons of TNT
= an explosion about three times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb
And that’s a gram of antimatter.
Back to my hangout with antimatter Tim. He and I each weigh about 73,000 grams, so our handshake would be unpleasant for both of us, blowing us both up in an explosion that releases the same energy as 3.1 million kilotons, or 3,100 megatons of TNT. (A megaton = a million tons = a billion kgs)
The density of TNT is 1.654 g/cm3. So a kg of TNT would be about the size of a grapefruit, a ton of TNT would be a little smaller than a car, a kiloton of TNT would be the size of a house, and my handshake with antimatter Tim would be like blowing up a cube of TNT with a side of 1.2 km. Very similar, it turns out, to what I once figured out was the size of the building needed to hold all the world’s humans:
   
It wouldn’t quite blow up the Earth, but with an explosion 200,000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, me meeting antimatter Tim would be bad for everybody.
___________
 Do you have any insights as to how one finds their calling? – Akshat V. (Bangalore, India) 
Say two people want to find the love of their life, Person A and Person B.
Person A never goes on dates, opting instead to sit alone debating in her head about who the exact kind of person is she will fall in love with. She scours online profiles, but never contacts anyone. Instead, her plan is to wait until she comes across the profile so perfect for her that she’ll know she’s found The One. Then and only then will she reach out to that person for a date.
Person B goes on a lot of dates, constantly meeting new people and keeping an open mind, because she knows she probably doesn’t know either herself or the type of match that makes sense for her as well as she thinks she does.
Who’s more likely to find the love of their life?
___________
 Can you suggest [legal] ways to experience Whoa moments? – Tóth B. 
Psychedelic methods aside, I’d say this:
The best way not to experience a whoa moment is to live your days exactly how you normally do. You know how when you brush your teeth, you can think about something totally different and it doesn’t affect your ability to brush? Because it’s all being done by your subconscious? Well living your normal routine day is kind of like that—your brain is mostly on autopilot, and you’re living largely in an unconscious and comfortable groove.
To bring heightened clarity and new epiphanies into your life, try getting out of that unconscious groove by forcing conscious thought about things our consciousness doesn’t usually bother with because they’re not important for our daily tasks. I did this recently when I found myself with 15 minutes to kill on a street corner before meeting someone there. Instead of doing what I’d normally do—burying myself in my phone to pass the time—I decided to get into “conscious mode.” I looked up and around me at the architecture, I looked at little details on the sidewalk and the steps of a nearby building, I looked down at my feet and realized it was funny that I was supporting myself vertically on two sticks. And suddenly, everything was weird, and I was having a great time. It was hilarious watching all these people bustling around, all of them on their own two sticks, all of them stuck to the side of a floating rock in space, and none of them thinking about that. Full whoa moment.
But the people I was watching weren’t thinking about being stuck to the side of a rock floating in a huge void—they were completely lost in the unconscious groove we all spend most of our time in.
A whoa moment happens when your conscious mind takes a step back and glimpses reality for a second, which we all have the power to do—we just have to remember to think about it.
___________
 Have you ever been to Burning Man? If so, how was your experience? If not, why not? – Sam B. (Kansas City, MO) 
Funny you ask. I’m going this year for the first time—at least that’s the plan (I’ve failed so far at getting tickets). I’ve heard about Burning Man a lot, but it always struck me as something very not me-ish to go to. Without really knowing what Burning Man is, I’ve always just pictured a bunch of people standing in the 120º desert acting exactly like this woman, except with no stage or music nearby. And what the hell am I gonna do in that situation. Also very unclear why that video has so many views.
But over the past few years, I’ve heard so many people say so many fascinating things about it that I’ve become enticed enough to give it a try. Any advice from Burning Man veterans is welcome.
___________
 What kind of kid were you? – Mia (Uppsala, Sweden) 
I said a lot of words. I actually made what I now realize was the world’s first podcast in 1987 when I was five. I had this little tape-player/recorder and I’d regularly put a blank tape in and press record and say some shit for a half hour. Then I’d write “Tim’s Performance” on the tape and give it to my parents to enjoy. At one point, I suspected they were lying about actually listening to my musings, so I tested them by waiting until about 20 minutes into one of my recording sessions and then saying, “The secret number is 128. I’m going to ask you what the secret number is later, and remember, it’s 128.” I later asked my parents what the secret number was and they didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. My podcast was not engaging.
___________
 What is one thing that you don’t procrastinate about and why do you think that is? – Richard R. (Fort Lauderdale, FL) 
I had to think about this for an upsettingly long time to come up with an answer. What I finally came up with is eating my gummy vitamins each day.
___________
 What’s a recent embarrassing YouTube spiral you’ve gone down?  – Jackie V. (Perth, Australia) 
 this &gt; this &gt; this &gt; this &gt; this &gt; this 
___________
 Has your sense of life purpose changed with a newfound look on human mortality? If so, how? If not, why? – Will H. (Berkeley, CA) 
For those unacquainted, I believe Will is referring to the fact that I started Wait But Why 100% sure I was going to die somewhere between 2013 and 2100, and then I wrote posts like the Fermi post and the AI post and the Truthism post and the Cryonics post and now I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Suddenly, the prospect of living till I’m an ultra-cranky 1,280-year-old seems perfectly plausible.
I’m not sure my life purpose has changed because I’m not sure I had a life purpose in mind to begin with. But it’s definitely put me in a better mood about things. An atheist is already at rock bottom when it comes to their personal long-term outlook, so realizing that the world of 2050 might be unrecognizable to us, with totally different rules, is a delightful development.
___________
 Do you have any recurring nightmares?  – Daniel J. (Cape Town, South Africa) 
Yes. About really big numbers. It’s me somewhere, in the shit, while some huge booming voice is telling me I have to do stuff involving huge numbers like a billion and a trillion. It goes all the way back to when I was a kid. I just got the shivers writing this.
_____________
 What are your MBTI results?
 As one of the many (I’m assuming here) people out there who read snippets of your posts to an unreceptive spouse, I’m wondering if there are clusters of Myers &amp; Briggs personality types that find your writing particularly appealing. So, I would really enjoy the following: (1)  Your MBTI results, (2) The results of a survey of your email subscribers, and (3) Your thoughts on the whole thing. – Preston S. (Oklahoma City, OK) 
For those unacquainted, Myers Briggs is a famous personality test that labels everyone with a four-letter code. It judges personalities on a set of four binary criteria. As explained by the Myers Briggs website:
  Favorite world  : Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I). 
  Information  : Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N). 
  Decisions  : When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F). 
  Structure  : In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). 
So one person might be an ENFP while another person might be an ISFJ, and so on. Myers Briggs also lays out the typical characteristics of each of the 16 possible types here.
The whole thing seems a little simplistic to me, given how complicated and multi-dimensional humans are. But it’s still fun.
When I took the test, I got an INTP. I was close to the I/E border and the S/N border, while very strongly a T and a P.
Preston also asked about doing a survey of email subscribers. Let’s just put a survey here. We’ll publish the results on the WBW Facebook page. 
[Update: MBTI Survey Results]
 ___________
 Do you have any favorite interesting/educational YouTube channels to watch? – Christopher D. (New Haven, CT) 
There are so many good ones – it’s incredible how easy it is today to have someone teach you stuff in an entertaining way for free while you’re sitting on the couch. Six favorites:
 Kurzgesagt
 CGP Grey
 VSauce
 TedEd
 Veritasium
 SciShow 
Would love to hear about others in the comments.
___________
 What are your thoughts on routine infant circumcision, beneficial procedure or human rights violation? – Beau S. (Brisbane, Australia) 
If I take a step back and look at this from first principles, I start by looking up whether the procedure is important for health reasons. When I find out the answer is probably not, it becomes pretty clear that circumcision is nothing other than a primitive, religious practice of genital mutilation that for some reason is common today. It makes no sense, and once we all stop doing it, it’ll seem like an absurd custom of the past. I had friends recently go through this decision with their new baby, and every argument went against circumcision except one: not circumcising their son would make him different than most of the other guys in his world in a part of life where being different can be mortifying, especially as either a little kid being made fun of by his friends or an already-sexually-insecure teenager. They went with circumcision. And I get it. But it makes no sense, aside from the fact that we’re all doing it (at least in the US). Can we just all agree to stop it with new babies?
___________
 Do you like waffles? – Matt V. (Bartonsville, PA) 
I’ve never understood waffles / pancakes / french toast people. A few bites of that on the side, sure, but if I’m hungry at a breakfast restaurant, I want something that involves salt and tabasco sauce. Ordering those sweet things for breakfast seems to me like ordering cake for dinner.
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 What are some of your favorite movies, and what do you think they say about you? – Joe S. 
As I thought about the answer to this question, I realized that the movies I’ve liked the absolute most in my life were movies made for 7-10-year olds when I was 7-10. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Home Alone, The Princess Bride, Back to the Future, etc. Are those movies all incredible, or does this just always happen with whatever happened to be the best movies of your childhood? Not really sure.
For movies I’ve seen from the age of 10 onwards, I’ll give some awards:
 Most obvious answer that’s also just really good though: The Shawshank Redemption (Runners-up: Godfather 1/2, Braveheart)
 Less obvious answer that should be more obvious and I’m not sure why it’s not everyone’s favorite movie: Shutter Island
 Movie that is considered good but I probably liked it more than most people cause it was exactly my type of fun plot: Memento
 Movie that’s pretty random to put on this list but I just really liked it: About Schmidt
 Movie I thought was only pretty good but then it stuck with me way more than I realized it would and sometimes makes me wonder if I’m Truman and this thing is happening to me and having me seeing The Truman Show was a really intense, fun part of the plot for everyone watching: The Truman Show
 Most fun movie-watching experience even though I wouldn’t really call it a great movie: Ocean’s 11 (Runner-up: Limitless)
 Movie whose first 70% makes this list but not the last 30% because that part sucked: Minority Report
 Movie that I loved and took fully seriously and then saw again with people who were laughing the whole time and realized it was actually a comedy: Being John Malkovich. (Runner-up: American Psycho)
 Movie that’s not considered very good but I actually think it was great: The Invention of Lying
 Movie that might have been great but also it might have been terrible and I don’t know because I don’t know what the fuck happened: Mulholland Drive
 Documentary that was a terrible experience to watch the entire time but also the best documentary I’ve ever seen: Dear Zachary
 Documentary that was almost as good and it wasn’t a nightmare to watch: March of the Penguins
 Documentary that’s comforting as fuck to watch and I’ve seen it three times and there will be more viewings in the future: Jiro Dreams of Sushi
 Movie that I think about every time I see a person yelling things to no one on the street: Requiem for a Dream
 Movie that was incredibly good and also, kill me: Life is Beautiful
 Movie that is objectively pretty great but it also kind of annoys me how “cool” it is: Every Quentin Tarantino movie (Runner-up: Every Stanley Kubrik movie)
 Movie that ruined my happiness permanently: The Ring
 Movie that’s embarrassing to put on this list but sorry it was just really good: Love Actually. (Runner-up: Titanic)
 Worst movie I’ve ever seen: American Wedding. (Runner-up: From Hell. And Dodgeball. And Transformers 2. And Next Friday.)
One thing about this list is there are very few comedies. It’s not that I never like comedies—I just think comedy movies are rarely that funny. I can’t think of many movies that can equal the funniness of the funniest TV shows—shows like The Office (UK), Curb, It’s Always Sunny, Family Guy, etc.
As for what these say about me? I don’t really know—that’s for Joe to decide.
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 Lately I’ve been stumbling into the most frustrating arguments about a ridiculous topic: “The Earth is Flat.”
Well, that’s what a lot of people have been trying to tell me lately and I haven’t been able to convince any of them of the truth. I feel like you would be the best person to break it down and explain how it is just not possible, in a way that they would understand. Anyway, just a request, if you can’t convince people the earth is a globe then no one can. It may sound funny but unfortunately I’m being serious.  – Kennard M. (Antioch, CA) 
Far more interesting than any answer I can give is the specifics of the arguments you’ve been hearing. Please expand in the comments.
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 What’s your wpm? – Kevin B. (Riverside, CA) 
I didn’t know the answer to this, so I tested myself here. On my first try I clocked in at 84 words per minute. On the second try I did 92. And on the third try I did 98. Pleased.
   
Then it was ruined when I sent it to Alicia (Wait But Why’s Manager of Lots of Things) to try and she got 147 like a psycho. 
Anyway, the site has you type out famous quotes, and an unexpected side benefit of doing this was realizing at one point that I was speed-typing Montesquieu summing up life:
 If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. 
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 Has your curiosity ever been a problem for you? – Mariam C. (Paris, France) 
My most prominent emotion when traveling in other countries (or in parts of the US I’m not used to) is curiosity. That’s part of why I often pick destinations that I don’t know much about or that seem super different from my world.
The most interesting experiences happen when I befriend locals, which usually allows me to get a much deeper glimpse into what life is like in that place than I ever could as a voyeuring tourist. I’ve gotten myself invited into homes, weddings, social events, factories, etc.—and it’s usually a great experience.
Usually.
On one of my solo trips, I was out in the Rio nightlife district of Lapa and met two extraordinarily friendly dudes. They really liked me, so much that they invited me to a nearby house party.
A random Brazilian house party! I had no idea what a Brazilian house party was like, and I was super excited to find out. Luckily for me, I had found two guys who just really like befriending random foreign dudes and bringing them to parties.
Then we went to the party, which turned out to be us standing on a silent street a few blocks away from the crowded area while they forcefully took my things and ran away. Interesting party, but they had a better time than I did.
Hilariously, I had taken a selfie with them earlier in the night when we were all still BFFs. It was on a disposable camera, and that was one of the things they decided not to bother taking, so I still have the picture.
   
Kind of funny looking at their faces and knowing now that the smiles were, “Oh god yes I think this guy’s actually gonna come with us!”
One other example that came to mind is the time I was about 12 and got curious about what would happen if I put my hamster, Waddles Urban, up my dad’s t-shirt when he was lying on his back on the couch sleeping. It was a very bad experience for both my dad and Waddles and a terrific one for me—kind of the reverse of the Brazil incident.
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 Would anything ever change your opinion about the existence of God? Would you discount it as a psychological error or hallucination? Could anything ever prove the existence of God to you? –  Michael S.   
 Why don’t you believe in God? –  Luis C. (Dallas, TX) 
 How can you be 100% sure that there isn’t something deeper to life than the material realm? –  Noli S. (Prishtina, Kosovo)  
 
When it comes to everything written in the Bible, Quran, Torah, Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, and all the rest, I’m atheist for the same reason I’m atheist about Greek Myths when I read them—they were written by people a long time ago who knew less than we do about the world, not more. No, lightning isn’t caused by Zeus throwing lightning bolts, it’s caused by the interaction of oppositely-charged particles in heavy clouds. And no, ancient rocks and fossils and mountains and canyons weren’t created by a great flood 6,000 years ago, they were created by a bunch of other stuff that happened over the past five billion years—stuff that we now understand. So when it comes to the various gods described in the world’s religions—yes, I’m as atheist as can be. With those gods, the question isn’t “Why don’t I believe in God?” it’s “Why would I believe in God?”
That said, when it comes to the question, “Is there a higher force or higher being or grand creator of some kind?” I’m entirely agnostic. We don’t even know if we’re alone in the universe or not—as far as we know, there are trillions of superintelligent civilizations out there, with capabilities we couldn’t understand even if they tried to explain it to us (could you explain human capabilities to a chicken?). Could one of them have created life on Earth in some lab? Sure, why not?
Could it be that it’s common for higher civilizations to create simulations, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that they might create trillions upon trillions of them, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that there are far more simulation civilizations in existence than real ones, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that just by the percentages, it’s far more likely that we’re one of the simulated ones than one of the real ones? Uh…I guess yeah?1
 We don’t even know what the universe is. It might be one of hundreds or millions or an infinite number of universes, or it might be the only thing there is. It might be a blip of energy floating around in one of the quarks inside one of the atoms that makes up the toenail of a red and blue baby pig bathing himself in a five-dimensional jelly swamp, and it comes into and out of existence in a nanosecond of the piglet’s life since every second in his world is 1010925  years for us. That literally might be what’s happening. It’s as likely as anything else you can come up with.
So it’s outrageous to declare anything about the origin of life, the existence of one or more higher beings, or what our place is in all of this other than “I don’t know.” Agnostic.
And when any fellow human—in 2016 or in 100 A.D.—declares that he knows the deal with God, including a bunch of details, I immediately say “Nope.”
I think that answers Luis and Noli. As for Michael—the answer is yes. I know what I know because of the information I have. If new information presents itself to me, it might change what I believe. But even if some rad supernatural shit happened like some woman levitated on the sidewalk when I walked by and then suddenly went shooting upwards through the clouds, I’d be quicker to assume that it was the work of a biological or AI being from another part of the universe, or that we were in a simulation and the beings running it got bored and decided to fuck with me, than I would be to take what I saw as evidence that one of the Earthly religions was true.
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 Would you rather be attacked by 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck? – Kyle P. (Cheshire, CT) 
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.
I’d go for the 100 little horses. Here’s why:
The duck would be terrifying. Have you seen how ducks act when you throw a piece of bread in the water? They turn into ravenous psychos. They use their wings, beaks, feet, and anything else they can to violently knock the other ducks out of the way. Then they lunge at the bread with their big hard duck beak. Now imagine a huge duck and you’re the bread. You’re done. That cock will charge at you and try to bite your head off. And you can’t run away—because it can fly. And its beak is still narrow enough that if you try to hide somewhere it can probably wedge its beak in there and pull you out. You’re done. It’s over.
The horses would be bad. But not as bad as the duck. Angry horses are pretty angry. And their bite could probably take a chunk out of your leg. Or maybe they’d kick you with their hind legs, which would give you painful little ankle bruises. All of that would be painful, but not lethal. Lethal happens when you’re frantically kicking them one by one and you accidentally fall over. Falling over would be a huge disaster with the little horses. They’d be biting your neck open and kicking you in the crotch and jumping up on your stomach. Done. But unlike with the duck, you could probably escape the horses. You could just climb up on a bench and now what? They’re screwed. They can charge the bench and jump up on their hind legs all they want, but you’re a full foot above their highest jump, and they can’t climb or fly, so you can just lay down and nap on the bench while they tire themselves out. Then when you wake up, you can carefully grab them one at a time and bring it up to the bench and use its tail to tie its back legs together, neutralizing that horse. It would take a while, but eventually they’d all be neutralized, hobbling around on the ground, in the shit with their leg situation, and you could just step over them and walk away.
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 Why does the atmosphere of the earth circle around the earth? We circle with the earth because we are attached to the ground, but the atmosphere isn’t attached to the ground so why does it circle around with the planet? – Sinan A. (Baghdad, Iraq) 
You say “we circle the earth because we are attached to the ground,” but what does “attached” mean? What it really means is there’s friction between our bodies and the surface of the earth that “pulls” our bodies. The oceans are less “attached” to the ground than a solid human body, but oceans rotate with the earth too, because there’s friction between the water molecules and the ocean floor. There’s less friction between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface than there is in the case of solid or liquid matter on the surface, but there’s still friction—which affects the atmosphere enough to pull it, too, along with Earth’s rotation.
But in all of these cases, friction is only why these things initially began to rotate along with the earth. Once something is up to full Earth rotational speed, the reason the atmosphere or anything else continues to rotate with the earth is inertia—an object in motion stays in motion. If the earth suddenly and instantly reversed rotational direction, there would be utter chaos on the surface, and everything would go flying. We, the oceans, and the atmosphere would all still carry the normal rotational velocity and the earth no longer would—kind of like when a moving car slams on the breaks and everything in the car lunges forward. But once the chaos settled down, the rotational velocity of all things on Earth’s surface would eventually be slowed down and reversed to match Earth’s new spin—because of friction. You’d be dead though.
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 Which are scarier – horror movies about ghosts or serial killers? – Layla P. (Mexico City, Mexico) 
Ghosts 100%. Serial killer movies make me edgy as fuck when I leave the theater and I’m walking down the street and there are strangers all around. But ghost movies take a shit in a much deeper part of my soul, and suddenly everything in my apartment—a blank white wall, a picture in a frame, a lamp on my nightstand—is terrifying.
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 If you could pick one future event that you could witness first hand, what would it be? – Brian G. (Cambridge, UK) 
On the heels of the recent cryonics post, I might pick the first time a vitrified person is successfully and fully revived.
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 How do you be a good person? – Katerena K. (Seattle, WA) 
This warrants a 12,000-word post, but for now, I’ll start with one idea:
I think a great way to be a good person is to get in the habit of consciously thinking about the fact that almost every stranger, co-worker, friend, acquaintance, fling, customer service representative, driver, waiter, customer, client, neighbor, and person on the internet you come across:
Has a family who loves them and vice versa
Has hopes and dreams and regrets and frustrations
Has as many thoughts going through their head at all times as you do
Is dealing with random health problems, trying to make ends meet financially, and is probably tired
Might be supporting one or more other human beings
Might be just a little sad all the time about a tragedy in their past
Might be the most important person in someone else’s life
Is just trying to figure out how to be happy
i.e. They’re a full human just like you.
Remembering that will make you kinder and more empathetic.
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 What kind of thermos is your favorite thermos? Is it a Thermos-brand thermos? What color is it? How old is it? – Maxfield M. (Sacramento, CA) 
My sister had a blanket she was obsessed with as a toddler that she inexplicably called her Ninee (like “night” without the t and then “knee”). If you tried to take her Ninee away from her she flipped her shit. It was a critical part of her being.
My thermos is my Ninee. My ideal way to drink coffee is to slowly have one 16-ounce cup of black coffee over a four-hour span. Coffee in an open mug stays hot for like eight minutes. In a covered, paper take-out cup, maybe 15 minutes. Both totally unacceptable. I suffered for my whole life with this issue until I realized thermoses existed a few years ago. I got this one and it solved all my problems, with the added benefit of it being closable, so I can pop a full thermos in my bag or put it on the floor on an airplane (upright in my shoe).
Because I’m a child, I lose my thermos by leaving it somewhere about twice a year on average, but at $22, it’s only a little devastating every time it happens.
I’ve also recently gotten into the small S’well thermos, which I use when I don’t have my bag because unlike my normal one, it fits in my jeans pocket.
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 What is happiness? – Frank P. (Tokyo, Japan) 
Reality minus expectations.
I have a much longer answer, but saving it for a post.
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 What do you think about hypnotherapy?
 A relative of mine who is a very critical thinker recently became a “qualified hypnotherapist” which made me ponder how credible this field is. How does it work? Is it effective? And so on… – Matt B. (Leicester, UK) 
I’m pretty sure those absurd stage hypnosis charades with a bunch of “hypnotized” people barking like a dog or having an orgasm or forgetting the number two on stage in front of a laughing crowd have to be some combo of people enjoying attention, peer pressure, and some element of placebo effect. No way that can be real.
But serious, one-on-one hypnotherapy? Sure, why not? The brain is weird, so why wouldn’t a trance-like state be able to be induced? From what I’ve read, hypnosis is just an extension of the phenomenon of a person getting so wrapped up in a thought that when someone calls their name, they don’t even hear it. That kind of hypnosis seems to be real, though it works on some people better than others and for some not at all. The problem for the credibility of hypnosis is all the fictional, cartoony hypnosis we’ve seen in movies, where the person is a robot who will do whatever the hypnotist says—pretty sure it doesn’t work like that.
I have a friend who’s been doing a type of hypnosis called EMDR with his therapist and claims that while doing so, a memory of himself breastfeeding flashed in his consciousness for a second. Nahhh, right? Or could it be possible?
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 In what other aspects of your life do you apply the rationale you use to avoid a Vegan/Vegetarian lifestyle? (i.e. “This action/choice is indefensible but I’ll do it anyway since it’s 1. enjoyable, and 2. socially permissible.”) – Ndi S. (New York, NY) 
If I’m understanding correctly, the question is: “You’ve admitted that despite knowing how wrong it is to support the torture and brutal slaughter of helpless animals, you do it anyway because you’re kind of a dick. Where else in your life are you kind of a dick in a similar way?”
Good question. Let’s see…
I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro made in a Chinese factory of nightmares and suicide.
I buy plastic things a lot and only recycle them if it’s easy.
I’m wearing clothes most likely sewn by a melancholy 11-year-old somewhere far away in “Let’s just not think about that!” land.
I sometimes leave the water running while I’m brushing my teeth even though lack of clean water is destroying like 50% of the world’s happiness.
I hire unpaid interns sometimes.
I walk by 15 homeless people a day and give them money only when I have change in my pocket and then walk into a coffee shop and tip the barista a dollar or two even though they definitely have a bed.
If I walk by someone’s house and a mean-looking dog is in the yard behind a fence, I bark at him to get him worked up because it’s funny and he doesn’t know how to open the gate.
I leave my phone on LTE until the plane gets too high to get a signal.
I sneak down to better seats at the Red Sox game.
I sometimes sign Andrew up for the mailing lists of fortune tellers and other mystics when I have a few minutes to kill on the internet.
I cohabitate with a tortoise in a small apartment even though he belongs in the desert.
Thanks Ndi.
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 How do you choose what to work on for WBW? When you run out of ideas, how do you plan to source new ideas? – Ricky Y. (San Francisco, CA) 
One thing that will never be a problem for me is a shortage of post topics. I currently have a 116-page Word document full of topics, thoughts, questions, and random brainstorms I want to make into posts. Whenever I’m in an interesting conversation, or think of a funny observation, or find myself with an intriguing question, I write it in the doc. And if you just get in that habit, the potential-post-topic doc becomes long pretty quickly. To make it into the doc, a topic generally has to satisfy at least one of these:
It’s something I think people know about and hear about but generally don’t understand
It’s something about life we all notice subconsciously but we don’t usually think about it or put it into words
It’s something that many of us are feeling or thinking secretly but no one is saying
It’s something important that we don’t think about very intelligently because we don’t have a useful framework in our heads, or an important psychological concept that we should have a concrete label for but don’t
It’s something I come across that blows my mind and I know it’ll blow readers’ minds too
When it’s time to start a new post, I scan down the big doc and pick something that excites me at that time. I get really exhausted by a topic by the time I’m done with it, so I try to mix things up—if the last post was really researchy, the next one might be more brainstormy, or if the last topic was heavy, I might pick something lighter next.
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 What Chrome extensions do you use? – Kyle 
 Pocket – to save articles I want to read later or offline
 goo.gl URL shortener 
 The Great Suspender – freezes tabs I have open but haven’t used in a while which goes a long way to reduce Chrome’s insane memory burden.
 Tabs Outliner – So when Chrome crashes or I lose my tabs for any other reason I can easily restore them.
 Momentum – Makes my day 0.5% better every day so why not.
 Google Calendar 
 Honey – finds discount codes
Another Chrome thing I did once which was very worth the time: I put the 30 or so sites I go to most in the bookmarks bar, but I left each with a blank name, so the bookmarks bar is just a big line of logos. This makes basically every site I ever go to just a button click.
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 What do I do if I always feel stupid? 
There are so many awesome things in our world, e.g. gravitational astronomy, physics of superconducters, neuroscience, genetics, AI, space exploration, math problems, WBW posts. Well, you get it. Much more than an average person could ever learn, I guess. Therefore my question is: what do I do if I always feel stupid? Like, really, always. – Katie S. (Russia) 
Stupid is when you don’t know that much about anything and you feel like everyone else does. The good news is, everyone else doesn’t. At all. The world is full of exciting, complex things that almost no one understands. Once you realize this, all the stuff you don’t know isn’t upsetting, it’s exciting.
It’s like reading. I’ve read a bunch of good books, but there are 1,000 times as many that I haven’t read. If I believed that most people had read most books and for some reason I had not, I’d feel embarrassingly not-well-read. But because I know that most people haven’t read most books, I can take my own situation out of the thought process and just enjoy the fact that I’ll never run out of good new books to read.
So even though people sometimes present themselves as more knowledgeable about more things than they really are, remember that really, most people don’t know much about anything, and try to get excited about the fact that with every year of your life that goes by, you’ll know more and more and more.
And remember, to actually learn about a topic you don’t get, you have to build a tree trunk foundation of understanding before you can start tacking onto that foundation by adding on branches and leaves (like news articles about recent developments). The thing that makes people feel stupid is trying to absorb branches and leaves when they don’t yet have a tree trunk, so it always goes in one ear and out the other and you feel like it’s hopeless for you to ever grasp the topic—but it’s not.
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 Do you cook much? If so, what is your favorite cookbook (or chef, cooking website, etc)? – Al T. (Charlottesville, VA) 
Cooking some elaborate thing using a recipe is for me like reading fiction—when I do it, I thoroughly enjoy it, but I do it like once a year. Mostly, I keep it to things like stir frying vegetables and rice, which is an excuse to have a condiment/spices party.
As for cookbooks, I recently got J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab, which is delightful so far. Not a big chef fanboy person, although I had a phase with Bobby Flay’s  Boy Meets Grill  show at one point and I’m pretty infatuated with how cocky and rad Danny Bowien is (the Mission Chinese guy).
My greatest culinary passion is whichever 15 hot sauces I happen to have in my fridge at any given time. Currently:
   
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 How does wind work? What is the mechanism behind wind happening? Why does it happen? – Steven H. (Cape Girardeau, MO) 
I’ll need to read about how weather works for 30 hours before I can give a proper answer to this question, but I’ll take a crack.
The key to wind is air pressure. Forget the atmosphere for a second and take a breath in. What happens? Air from outside your body rushes into your body. Now exhale—and air rushes back out. What’s happening is that the air outside your body is staying at the same pressure level, but when you inhale, you’re increasing the volume in your lungs, which lowers the air molecules / volume ratio in your lungs, which lowers the air pressure in your lungs. Air always “wants” to even things out, so air rushes into your lungs to accommodate for the extra space created by your inhale and equalize the pressure inside and outside of you. When you exhale, you’re decreasing the volume in your lungs, which increases the air pressure to a level higher than the air outside your body, so air rushes out to make things equal.
When the sun heats up parts of the atmosphere, the air rises, which leaves less air down near the surface than normal—a low pressure system. Hot air rising and leaving a void underneath is kind of like the atmosphere “inhaling.” Just like what happens in your expanding lungs, air from higher pressure systems surrounding the low pressure system rushes in to equalize things—i.e. the low pressure area “sucks” in surrounding air. In the reverse situation, when there’s a higher-than-normal pressure system in the atmosphere, it’s like a human exhaling. The higher pressure system presses outward into lower pressure areas and the air rushes there to equalize things. That rushing air is what we experience as wind. Wind is just air moving from areas of higher pressure to areas of lower pressure.
Relatedly, this is cool.
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 I would be interested to know in what position two similar sized human bodies are touching the most. Surface mapping? I would like to create a mathematically correct sculpture. – Ludescher S. (Vienna, Austria) 
No idea. But I included this odd question so someone who knows can explain it to all of us in the comments.
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 What’s one of the most important life lessons you’ve learned in your years so far that you would give to a young adult/college student? – Cathy J. (Toronto, Canada) 
Making really close lifelong friends is a hard thing to do for most people, and it gets even harder once you hit the real world and everyone lives in isolated apartments and spends their days at work. Really close friendships are built by spending a ton of hours with the same person or group of people again and again, and there’s nowhere better to foster that than college or the years after college when people often live with roommates.
Given that, one piece of advice would be to first, assess your friendships and figure out who’s in Q1 (here’s a refresher on what Q1 is, from this post).
Then, invest in those friendships, and remember that lazy afternoons sitting around doing nothing with them might seem mundane, but it’s actually building a foundation of closeness and comfort that you’ll be thankful for later. It’s time well spent.
And if you don’t think many of your friends are in Q1, ask yourself why that might be. Maybe you’re not hanging out with the right kind of people for you.
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 Can you share any advice on becoming a good writer? – James M. (Dublin, Ireland) 
1) Write. I wrote 300 blog posts between the ages of 23 and 29 before starting Wait But Why. It can take a while to find your voice and your tone and your style. At the beginning, you’ll be all over the place, the same way you are when you try a new sport or video game or musical instrument. That’s good—you’re experimenting on a canvas. Don’t judge your own writing at this phase—you’re experimenting and searching and playing—you’re not doing your best writing yet. If your mammoth is freaking out too much and ruining things, start with an anonymous blog.
2) Don’t be a complete perfectionist, but don’t settle for writing you know isn’t working. Even if you’re experimenting, if something you’re trying isn’t working, try to figure out why, rewrite parts, start over and try a new approach, etc.—keep fiddling until it clicks. Each time you go through the hard, painful work of agonizing over writing that isn’t working and eventually get it to click, you become a better writer.
3) Read a lot. It’s like fertilizer.
4) On one side of the spectrum, you’re completely copying the exact style and even the wording of another writer you like—let’s call that a 1. On the other side, you’re completely unique, writing in a way the world has never seen before—let’s call it a 10. Your goal is to start somewhere in the middle and then work your way up the scale as you mature as a writer. That said, having influences is inevitable and perfectly okay, because true 10s don’t exist. This same concept applies to stand-up comedy, music, or any other type of art. It’s a badge of honor to say The Beatles are one of your influences, but no one likes a songwriter who’s blatantly copying The Beatles. Without getting to a 7 or 8 on the uniqueness spectrum, there’s likely a ceiling on how high your writing career can go.
5) While you’re experimenting with your writing, keep your mind open to all creative possibilities. The first 290 of the 300 blog posts I wrote in my 20s had no visuals. Only towards the very end did I try drawing something one night. And only then did I realize how much I liked combining hand-drawn visuals with my writing. That could have easily never happened, and if it hadn’t, Wait But Why would be an all-text blog today.
6) If you get feedback as you grow as a writer, be careful who it’s coming from. The person giving feedback should A) believe in you, B) be rooting for you, and C) be completely aware that what they’re reading isn’t your max potential but you experimenting, gaining confidence, and trying to figure out your voice. A person who satisfies all of those is great to get feedback from. Someone who fails any of those criteria is going to do you more harm than good, and will often be the person who makes you quit prematurely and never try again (even if you don’t realize they’re the reason that happened).
7) Remember that in most cases, the ideas behind the writing are more important than the quality of the writing itself. You’d rather have great ideas and pretty good writing than the other way around.
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 Do you speak any other languages?  – Ricardo K. (Vinhedo, Brazil) 
I speak 1.43 languages:
English
40% of Spanish
1% of French
0.1% of about 20 other languages because I learned how to say a few sentences when I visited a country where that was the language
My .4 Spanish capabilities are super useful when I visit Spanish-speaking countries, but mostly when I need to say something to someone. Once I finish, the party’s over. For some reason, my brain decided to not ever learn to understand what the fuck anyone is saying when they speak Spanish to me.
My problem is that I never learned Spanish well enough to do that thing where you have a Spanish part of your brain. So instead, I’ve memorized a ton of Spanish words and when I speak to someone, I’m doing what people who are bad at languages do—I’m rapid-fire translating in my head with each word that comes out of my mouth. I’m proficient enough to get around a Spanish-speaking country and even have conversations with people—as long as they don’t say anything back. When they do, it’s like someone throwing five tennis balls at me every second and expecting me to somehow catch all of them. So I go into a panic and just keep saying “lentamente” until their pace comes down so far that I can figure out what they’re saying.
___________
 If you could eat one non-edible thing, what would it be?  – Tandice O. (New York, NY) 
The sticky hand.
   
 How many people have ever lived?  
 I have a question I figured only WBW could answer properly.  It came up when I took a shower and I thought: “Wow, it’s kinda crazy that most people from the beginning of time till now haven’t felt the pressure of a hot shower,” since I guess that showers as we know it were invented only a couple of centuries ago (hot bath doesn’t count).  But then I thought… Is it true? There are approximately 7.4 billion people in the world today, and I think the numbers got that big only recently. 
 This made me ponder: how many people have lived on Earth since the beginning of humanity? What percentage of them lived in the last 200 years? – Zohar A. (Tel Aviv, Israel) 
I’ve thought about the shower thing before. It’s incredible. Imagine being stranded on an island with only basic tools and trying to create an extended hot shower for yourself. Not gonna happen. A hot shower requires a ton of technology. In the interest of not spending two hours reading enough about the history of showers to be able to piece together an estimate for the number of people who have ever had access to a hot shower, I’ll leave it at that thought for now—though I’d be delighted if a reader would like to figure this out and put it in the comments.
As for the number of people who have ever lived, Carl Haub at the Population Reference Bureau estimated in 2011 that about 107 billion people have lived:
   
I made a chart about this stat once in a post:
   
Of course, Haub’s or anyone else’s estimate for this is imprecise and up for debate, especially since people aren’t even in agreement about when humans “started”. Either way, the fact that around 1/15 of all people who have ever lived are currently alive struck me as very high, considering that the past century accounts for at most 1/500 of the time humans have been around.
In the same article, Haub estimates that about 40% of those who have ever lived died before their first birthday and estimates that “life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about ten years for most of human history.” If he’s right, it would mean that 1/10 of all humans age 1 or older who have ever lived are currently alive, and that fraction would become higher and higher as you increase the age. So maybe 1/5 of all 30+ year olds who have ever lived are currently alive and maybe a third of people who ever lived to 60 are still alive. And I’d bet that the majority of people 90 or over who have ever lived are alive right now. All guesses, but it seems logical.
___________
 What do you think about this picture? 
I’ve been having a social issue over a photo of puppies I found on the Internet. Yes, a photo of puppies. I was bored (and admittedly in the dark playground), so I decided to search “adorable dogs” on Google images. I found the picture and was immediately in love. So, I decided to save it and show my family. I was taken aback when they reacted with disgust. My sister seems to think they look like “ugly pigs” and my mother has mentioned that they are too fat to be cute. It’s become a pretty heated debate. You seem to have good judgment, so if you have time, tell me what you think. – Abigail  S. (Hartford, CT) 
   
Fuckin shit, Abigail. This is literally what would happen if a human and a dog could breed. And in trying to figure out my thoughts on what you’ve presented to me, I’ve stared at it so long—especially the dog on the right—that I now have no idea what these creatures are. Also, I can only picture them having the same texture and consistency as a Stretch Armstrong toy if you pressed into their flesh. Like I’m picturing their skin being frictiony and rubbery, not anything like a biological creature. I’ve gone through a lot in the last few minutes—too much to really answer your question. If I had to answer, I’d say affection is closer to what I’m feeling than disgust, so I guess I agree with you.
And with that, let’s call it a day.
___________
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If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
To submit a question for a future mailbag, email mailbag@waitbutwhy.com.
___________
 Check these out next: 
  Why You Secretly Hate Bars  – The world’s least fun fun activity
  How to Name a Baby  – Beware the name fad
  20 Things I Learned in North Korea  – They’re positive the 1950–1953 Korean War is still in full force
Mailbag #1 — Wait But Why
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My TED Talk — Wait But Why
2016-03-15
Tim Urban
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 My TED Talk

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How I Handle Long Email Delays — Wait But Why
2016-03-11
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><em>This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week except not that either.</em></p>
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<p>And the full Elon Musk post series is now available <strong><a href="http://amzn.to/21RPugG">as an ebook</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More about the troubles of this life via Wait But Why stick figures:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably a Part Of</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html">10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/11-awkward-things-about-email.html">11 Awkward Things About Email</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html">The Great Perils of Social Interaction</a></strong></p>
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 How I Handle Long Email Delays

 March 11, 2016 By Tim Urban


 This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week except not that either.

 Note: Click images to see them with larger font.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 And the full Elon Musk post series is now available as an ebook.

 ___________

 More about the troubles of this life via Wait But Why stick figures:

 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably a Part Of

 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys

 11 Awkward Things About Email

 The Great Perils of Social Interaction

 Tweet

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This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week except not that either. 
   
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___________
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
And the full Elon Musk post series is now available  as an ebook .
___________
 More about the troubles of this life via Wait But Why stick figures: 
  10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably a Part Of  
  10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys  
  11 Awkward Things About Email  
  The Great Perils of Social Interaction
How I Handle Long Email Delays — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/long-email-delay.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/sound.html
Everything You Should Know About Sound
2016-03-09
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><em>This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week.</em></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>I’ve always been a little confused about sound. So for “Tuesday’s” “mini” post, I decided to do something about that.</p>
<p>We think of sound as something we <em>hear</em>—something that makes <em>noise</em>. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.</p>
<p>The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:<a href="#footnote2-1-4885">1</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ezgif.com-optimize.gif"></a></p>
<p>But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation.</p>
<p>A sound wave is more like an earthworm situation:<a href="#footnote2-2-4885">2</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/earthworm.gif"></a></p>
<p>Like an earthworm, sound moves by compressing and decompressing. This is called a longitudinal wave. A slinky can do both kinds of waves:<a href="#footnote-1-4885">1</a><a href="#footnote2-3-4885">3</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/slinky.gif"></a></p>
<p>Sound starts with a vibration of some kind creating a longitudinal wave through matter. Check this out:<a href="#footnote2-4-4885">4</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/red-dot.gif"></a></p>
<p>That’s what sound looks like—except picture an expanding ripple of <em>spheres</em> doing that. In this animation, the sound wave is being generated by that vibrating grey bar on the left. The bar might be your vocal chords, a guitar string, or a waterfall continually pounding down into the river below. By looking at the red dots, you can see that even though the wave moves in one direction, each individual particle only moves back and forth, mimicking the vibration of the gray bar.</p>
<p>So instead of a curvy snake wave, sound is a <em>pressure </em>wave, which causes each piece of the air to be at either higher-than-normal pressure or lower-than-normal pressure. So when you see a snake-like illustration of a sound wave, it’s referring to the measure of pressure, <em>not </em>the literal path of movement of the particles:<a href="#footnote2-5-4885">5</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Wave.gif"></a></p>
<p>Sound waves can go through air, which is how we normally experience it. But it can also go through liquid<a href="#footnote-2-4885">2</a> or solid matter—much of the jolting that happens during an earthquake is the result of a huge sound wave whizzing through the earth (in that case, the movement of the fault is serving as the gray and red bars in the animations above).</p>
<p>How about the speed of sound? Well it depends on how quickly the pressure wave can move in a given medium. A medium that’s more fluid, like air, is highly compressible, so it takes longer for the wave to move, while water is far less compressible, so there’s less “give” to slow the wave down. It’s like two people holding an outstretched slinky between them—if one pushes their end toward the other person, the wave will take a little time to travel down the slinky before the other person feels it. But if the two people are holding a broomstick, when one pushes, the other feels it immediately, because the broomstick is much less compressible.<a href="#footnote2-6-4885">6</a>
</p><p>So it makes sense that the speed of sound in air (768 mph / 1,234 kmph under normal conditions) is about four times slower than the speed of sound in water, which itself is about four times slower than the speed of sound through a solid like iron.</p>
<p>Back to us and <em>hearing</em>. Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of <em>air pressure waves</em>. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?</p>
<p>I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in <em>just </em>the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into <em>just </em>the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a <em>miracle</em>.</p>
<p>Anyway—</p>
<p>The ear can discern many qualities of a sound it hears, but two of the most fundamental are pitch and loudness.</p>
<p><strong>Pitch</strong></p>
<p>Pitch is all about wavelength—i.e. how far apart the pressure waves are:<a href="#footnote2-7-4885">7</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Wave-2.gif"></a></p>
<p>The shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear frequencies as low as 20 Hz (which is a 56 ft /17 m long wave) and as high as 20,000 Hz (.7 in / 1.7 cm). As you age, you lose your ability to hear the highest pitches, so most of you probably hear nothing when you <a href="http://plasticity.szynalski.com/tone-generator.htm">listen to the frequencies</a> approaching 20,000 Hz (your dog will disagree). But you’ll have an easier time hearing the lowest part of the range.<a href="#footnote2-8-4885">8</a> The reason you can <em>feel </em>low sounds, like low bass notes in music, is that the wavelength is so long that it actually takes 1/20th of a second for a full wave to pass your body (hence 20 Hz).<a href="#footnote-3-4885">3</a><a href="#footnote-4-4885">4</a>
</p><p><strong>Loudness</strong></p>
<p>The loudness<a href="#footnote-5-4885">5</a> of a sound we hear is determined by the <em>amplitude</em> of the pressure waves. In the animation above, the high and low-pitched sounds depicted have the same loudness, because the pressure curves at the bottom of the animation are the same size <em>vertically</em>. Louder sounds have a larger oscillation between the low and high pressure sections of the wave—i.e. loud sounds have higher high-pressure and lower low-pressure parts than quiet sounds.</p>
<p>For sounds through the air on Earth’s surface, the average of the high-pressure and low-pressure parts of the wave is our normal atmospheric pressure—what we call 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. So a sound wave might have a high pressure component of 1.0001 atmospheres and a low pressure component of .9999 atmospheres, and a louder sound might be 1.01/.99 instead—but in both cases, the average of the two is 1 atmosphere.</p>
<p>We often measure loudness using a unit called the decibel (named after Alexander Graham Bell). If you want to be confused, read the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel">Wikipedia page on decibels</a>. It’s a super icky unit. And rather than bore us both by explaining it, let’s just talk about how we use decibels to measure sound.</p>
<p>The scale of loudness has a very tiny minimum. The faintest sounds are far softer than any human could hear—even softer than any of our finest scientific instruments could detect. But depending on where you are, sound has a hard maximum. The reason is that sound isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a pressure wave moving through a medium. And since, as we talked about, the average of the high and low pressure points of a sound wave has to be the normal pressure of the medium, loudness is limited by the fact that eventually, the low pressure point hits zero-pressure—a vacuum. Since the low pressure can’t go any lower, that point determines the max amplitude of a sound wave, and the loudest a sound can be, in any given place.</p>
<p>The convenient thing about decibels (dB) is that the absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” Scientists do their best to study sounds <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-shh-scientists-listening-smallest-possible-noise">far down into the negative decibel scale</a> and there are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI">man-made rooms</a> on Earth that register as low as -9.4 dB—where it’s so quiet you can hear the blood pumping through your own brain—but we can only hear sounds in the dB positives. The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB—which is when the amplitude of the sound wave is so intense that the low pressure part is a perfect vacuum (the wave alternates between double the normal atmospheric pressure and no air at all—not something you want to be present for). Let’s take a look at the full scale, starting with the really quiet.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that with decibels, each increase of 10 dB <em>doubles </em>the loudness. So 20 dB is twice as loud as 10 dB, 30 dB is four times as loud as 10 dB, and 80 dB is 128 times louder than 10 dB.<a href="#footnote-6-4885">6</a><a href="#footnote2-9-4885">9</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Decibels-Chart-4.png"></a></p>
<p>The scale stops at 194 because there’s no such thing as a louder sound on Earth’s surface. But we can go beyond here in two ways:</p>
<p><strong>1) Shock Waves</strong></p>
<p>When enough energy is released to pass the 194 dB mark, it’s too much to create a sustained pressure <em>wave </em>because we’ve bottomed out on low pressure—but things still <em>happen</em>. Very, very intense things.</p>
<p>At 194 dB, there’s a maxed out wave alternating between double the normal pressure and a total vacuum—but once we get to 195 dB, the energy stops moving <em>through </em>the air and starts <em>pushing </em>the air outward with an expanding vacuum. The more dBs above 194 there are, the farther reaching and higher-impact that vacuum bubble will be. It expands outward as a rapidly-growing half-sphere:<a href="#footnote2-10-4885">10</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bomb-1.gif"></a></p>
<p>On the edge of the bubble is a barrier of super-compressed gas, and when this barrier sweeps over the land, it usually flattens whatever’s in its path:<a href="#footnote2-11-4885">11</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bomb-2.gif"></a></p>
<p>As the hemisphere expands, it loses energy and eventually dissipates. But if you found yourself in the path of a shock wave before that happened, you’d have a bad time. First, the impact of the super-compressed barrier would be like hitting a brick wall (in the same way and for the same reason falling on water from a bridge is like falling on concrete). Second, compressed air is <em>hot</em>. Third, it wouldn’t just hit all parts of your body, it would go <em>through </em>your body, and if it were powerful enough it could turn your bones to powder and your organs to soup.</p>
<p>Here are some famous 194dB+ events:</p>
<p><strong>Saturn V launch: </strong>The Saturn V was a beast, and the sound waves from its launches were so intense that they could light grass on fire a mile away. Even at three miles away, an observer would experience ear-splitting 135 dB sound.<a href="#footnote2-12-4885">12</a> Rocket launches create such a powerful sound, that space agencies <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f_watertest.html">flood the launchpad</a> with water as the rocket launches to absorb the sound so the force of the pressure wave doesn’t damage the rocket.</p>
<p><strong>The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: </strong>According to sources I read, these clocked in at well over 200 dB. The shock wave was so charged that it traveled 7 mi / 11 km in 30 seconds.</p>
<p><strong>The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption:</strong><a href="#footnote2-13-4885">13</a><strong> </strong>I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://goo.gl/maps/qCPmXK7gJR12">Krakatoa</a> is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.</li>
<li>The eruption completely annihilated the island, sending an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second. It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.</li>
<li>But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.</li>
<li>It was so loud that the shock wave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.</li>
<li>100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where <em>you </em>are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100 <em>meters </em>away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 <em>miles </em>away.</li>
<li>The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.</li>
<li>The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. <em>3,000 miles away</em>. I’m currently in New York. <em>Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear</em><em> in New York. </em>I can’t even.</li>
<li>After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth <em>3.5 times</em>.</li>
<li>Finally, you know the famous painting <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/The_Scream.jpg">The Scream</a>? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.</li>
</ul>
<p>It was a big eruption.</p>
<p><strong>2) Other Mediums</strong></p>
<p>There <em>can</em> be louder sound<em> </em>than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. The gas giants in our Solar System, for example, have denser atmospheres than Earth’s, which allow for higher pressure wave amplitudes, and with incredibly fast winds and powerful storms, there’s plenty of opportunity there to make loud things.</p>
<p>What <em>isn’t </em>loud is almost everything else in space. You’ve probably heard the term, “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum,” but it makes sense now, right? Sound is pressure waves through matter. If there’s no matter, there’s no sound. There can be immense <em>heat</em>, and <em>radiation</em>, and <em>force</em>, but to a nearby observing human, it’s all dead silent.</p>
<p>If, hypothetically, there <em>were </em>air filling the universe, then suddenly things would get <em>very </em>loud. Forget the terrifying concept of the sound of a supernova—just the dumb sun sitting there hanging out would ring in at an astounding 290 dB. According to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33xuxu/if_sound_could_travel_through_space_how_loud/">one solar physicist</a>, we’d hear that on <em>Earth </em>as a 100 dB sound—<em>the volume of a motorcycle</em>—all the time, every day, everywhere. Be happy that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.</p>
<p>One last thought—</p>
<p>Researching for this post and learning about what sound is gave me a new perspective on the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it question. I now think that no, it doesn’t make a sound. It makes an air pressure wave and that’s it. The concept of sound is by definition a biological being’s perception of the pressure wave—and if there are no ears around to perceive the pressure wave, there’s no sound. It’s a little like asking, “If humans go extinct, and somewhere in the post-apocalyptic rubble, there’s a photo of a beautiful woman lying there—is she still beautiful?” I kind of don’t think she is. Because the only thing that’s beautiful about her is that humans found her beautiful, and without humans, she’s no more beautiful than the female beetle a few feet away, rummaging around the rubble. Right?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Three things I want you to read:</strong></p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="http://eepurl.com/Ffj9D">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>And the full Elon Musk post series is now available <strong><a href="http://amzn.to/21RPugG">as an ebook</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you liked this, here are a few more Wait But Why explainers:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">How Tesla Will Change the World</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">Putting Time in Perspective</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Sources</strong><br />
The awesome GIFS: <a href="http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/waves/wavemotion.html">Dan Russell</a> and <a href="http://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/centres/isvr.page">ISVR</a><br />
CDC: <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/noisemeter.html">Noise and Hearing Loss Prevention</a><br />
US Department of Labor: <a href="https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/noisehearingconservation/index.html">Occupational Noise Exposure</a><br />
Nautil.us: <a href="http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times">The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times</a><br />
UNSW: <a href="http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/dB.htm">What is a Decibel?</a><br />
Decibelcar.com: <a href="http://www.decibelcar.com/articles/40-everything-else/87-dbequivalent.html">Decibel Equivalent Table</a><br />
Make it Louder: <a href="http://www.makeitlouder.com/Decibel%20Level%20Chart.txt">Ultimate Sound Pressure Level Decibel Table</a><br />
NASA: <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f_watertest.html">Sound Suppression Test Unleashes a Flood</a><br />
Idiom Zero: <a href="http://idiomzero.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-loud-is-sun.html">How Loud is the Sun?</a><br />
Gibson.com: <a href="http://www.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/Features/en-us/10-Loudest-Rock-Bands.aspx">It Might Get Loud: The 10 Loudest Rock Bands of All Time</a><br />
GC Audio: <a href="http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/loudness.html">Decibel (Loudness) Comparison Chart</a><br />
Mathpages.com: <a href="http://mathpages.com/home/kmath109/kmath109.htm">The Speed of Sound</a><br />
Turn it to the Left: <a href="http://www.turnittotheleft.org/educational/Audio_Quiz_KEY.pdf">Noise Levels</a><br />
Extreme Tech: <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175996-can-a-loud-enough-sound-kill-you">Can a Loud Enough Sound Kill You?</a><br />
Abelard.com: <a href="http://www.abelard.org/hear/hear.php#how-loud">Loud Music and Hearing Damage</a><br />
Soundproof Cow: <a href="http://www.soundproofcow.com/Loudest-Sound-Ever-Heard.html">Loudest Sound Ever Heard</a><br />
Chalmers: <a href="https://www.chalmers.se/en/news/Pages/Quantum-microphone-captures-extremely-weak-sound.aspx">Quantum microphone captures extremely weak sound</a><br />
born.gov.au: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160318213128/http://www.bom.gov.au/tsunami/history/1883.shtml">The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883</a></p>
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 Everything You Should Know About Sound

 March 9, 2016 By Tim Urban


 This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week.

 ___________

 I’ve always been a little confused about sound. So for “Tuesday’s” “mini” post, I decided to do something about that.

 We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.

 The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:1

 But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation.

 A sound wave is more like an earthworm situation:2

 Like an earthworm, sound moves by compressing and decompressing. This is called a longitudinal wave. A slinky can do both kinds of waves:13

 Sound starts with a vibration of some kind creating a longitudinal wave through matter. Check this out:4

 That’s what sound looks like—except picture an expanding ripple of spheres doing that. In this animation, the sound wave is being generated by that vibrating grey bar on the left. The bar might be your vocal chords, a guitar string, or a waterfall continually pounding down into the river below. By looking at the red dots, you can see that even though the wave moves in one direction, each individual particle only moves back and forth, mimicking the vibration of the gray bar.

 So instead of a curvy snake wave, sound is a pressure wave, which causes each piece of the air to be at either higher-than-normal pressure or lower-than-normal pressure. So when you see a snake-like illustration of a sound wave, it’s referring to the measure of pressure, not the literal path of movement of the particles:5

 Sound waves can go through air, which is how we normally experience it. But it can also go through liquid2 or solid matter—much of the jolting that happens during an earthquake is the result of a huge sound wave whizzing through the earth (in that case, the movement of the fault is serving as the gray and red bars in the animations above).

 How about the speed of sound? Well it depends on how quickly the pressure wave can move in a given medium. A medium that’s more fluid, like air, is highly compressible, so it takes longer for the wave to move, while water is far less compressible, so there’s less “give” to slow the wave down. It’s like two people holding an outstretched slinky between them—if one pushes their end toward the other person, the wave will take a little time to travel down the slinky before the other person feels it. But if the two people are holding a broomstick, when one pushes, the other feels it immediately, because the broomstick is much less compressible.6

 So it makes sense that the speed of sound in air (768 mph / 1,234 kmph under normal conditions) is about four times slower than the speed of sound in water, which itself is about four times slower than the speed of sound through a solid like iron.

 Back to us and hearing. Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of air pressure waves. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?

 I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle.

 Anyway—

 The ear can discern many qualities of a sound it hears, but two of the most fundamental are pitch and loudness.

 Pitch

 Pitch is all about wavelength—i.e. how far apart the pressure waves are:7

 The shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear frequencies as low as 20 Hz (which is a 56 ft /17 m long wave) and as high as 20,000 Hz (.7 in / 1.7 cm). As you age, you lose your ability to hear the highest pitches, so most of you probably hear nothing when you listen to the frequencies approaching 20,000 Hz (your dog will disagree). But you’ll have an easier time hearing the lowest part of the range.8 The reason you can feel low sounds, like low bass notes in music, is that the wavelength is so long that it actually takes 1/20th of a second for a full wave to pass your body (hence 20 Hz).34

 Loudness

 The loudness5 of a sound we hear is determined by the amplitude of the pressure waves. In the animation above, the high and low-pitched sounds depicted have the same loudness, because the pressure curves at the bottom of the animation are the same size vertically. Louder sounds have a larger oscillation between the low and high pressure sections of the wave—i.e. loud sounds have higher high-pressure and lower low-pressure parts than quiet sounds.

 For sounds through the air on Earth’s surface, the average of the high-pressure and low-pressure parts of the wave is our normal atmospheric pressure—what we call 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. So a sound wave might have a high pressure component of 1.0001 atmospheres and a low pressure component of .9999 atmospheres, and a louder sound might be 1.01/.99 instead—but in both cases, the average of the two is 1 atmosphere.

 We often measure loudness using a unit called the decibel (named after Alexander Graham Bell). If you want to be confused, read the Wikipedia page on decibels. It’s a super icky unit. And rather than bore us both by explaining it, let’s just talk about how we use decibels to measure sound.

 The scale of loudness has a very tiny minimum. The faintest sounds are far softer than any human could hear—even softer than any of our finest scientific instruments could detect. But depending on where you are, sound has a hard maximum. The reason is that sound isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a pressure wave moving through a medium. And since, as we talked about, the average of the high and low pressure points of a sound wave has to be the normal pressure of the medium, loudness is limited by the fact that eventually, the low pressure point hits zero-pressure—a vacuum. Since the low pressure can’t go any lower, that point determines the max amplitude of a sound wave, and the loudest a sound can be, in any given place.

 The convenient thing about decibels (dB) is that the absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” Scientists do their best to study sounds far down into the negative decibel scale and there are man-made rooms on Earth that register as low as -9.4 dB—where it’s so quiet you can hear the blood pumping through your own brain—but we can only hear sounds in the dB positives. The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB—which is when the amplitude of the sound wave is so intense that the low pressure part is a perfect vacuum (the wave alternates between double the normal atmospheric pressure and no air at all—not something you want to be present for). Let’s take a look at the full scale, starting with the really quiet.

 One thing to keep in mind is that with decibels, each increase of 10 dB doubles the loudness. So 20 dB is twice as loud as 10 dB, 30 dB is four times as loud as 10 dB, and 80 dB is 128 times louder than 10 dB.69

 The scale stops at 194 because there’s no such thing as a louder sound on Earth’s surface. But we can go beyond here in two ways:

 1) Shock Waves

 When enough energy is released to pass the 194 dB mark, it’s too much to create a sustained pressure wave because we’ve bottomed out on low pressure—but things still happen. Very, very intense things.

 At 194 dB, there’s a maxed out wave alternating between double the normal pressure and a total vacuum—but once we get to 195 dB, the energy stops moving through the air and starts pushing the air outward with an expanding vacuum. The more dBs above 194 there are, the farther reaching and higher-impact that vacuum bubble will be. It expands outward as a rapidly-growing half-sphere:10

 On the edge of the bubble is a barrier of super-compressed gas, and when this barrier sweeps over the land, it usually flattens whatever’s in its path:11

 As the hemisphere expands, it loses energy and eventually dissipates. But if you found yourself in the path of a shock wave before that happened, you’d have a bad time. First, the impact of the super-compressed barrier would be like hitting a brick wall (in the same way and for the same reason falling on water from a bridge is like falling on concrete). Second, compressed air is hot. Third, it wouldn’t just hit all parts of your body, it would go through your body, and if it were powerful enough it could turn your bones to powder and your organs to soup.

 Here are some famous 194dB+ events:

 Saturn V launch: The Saturn V was a beast, and the sound waves from its launches were so intense that they could light grass on fire a mile away. Even at three miles away, an observer would experience ear-splitting 135 dB sound.12 Rocket launches create such a powerful sound, that space agencies flood the launchpad with water as the rocket launches to absorb the sound so the force of the pressure wave doesn’t damage the rocket.

 The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: According to sources I read, these clocked in at well over 200 dB. The shock wave was so charged that it traveled 7 mi / 11 km in 30 seconds.

 The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption:13 I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.

 * Krakatoa is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.
 * The eruption completely annihilated the island, sending an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second. It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.
 * But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.
 * It was so loud that the shock wave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.
 * 100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where you are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100 meters away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 miles away.
 * The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.
 * The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. 3,000 miles away. I’m currently in New York. Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear in New York. I can’t even.
 * After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth 3.5 times.
 * Finally, you know the famous painting The Scream? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.

 It was a big eruption.

 2) Other Mediums

 There can be louder sound than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. The gas giants in our Solar System, for example, have denser atmospheres than Earth’s, which allow for higher pressure wave amplitudes, and with incredibly fast winds and powerful storms, there’s plenty of opportunity there to make loud things.

 What isn’t loud is almost everything else in space. You’ve probably heard the term, “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum,” but it makes sense now, right? Sound is pressure waves through matter. If there’s no matter, there’s no sound. There can be immense heat, and radiation, and force, but to a nearby observing human, it’s all dead silent.

 If, hypothetically, there were air filling the universe, then suddenly things would get very loud. Forget the terrifying concept of the sound of a supernova—just the dumb sun sitting there hanging out would ring in at an astounding 290 dB. According to one solar physicist, we’d hear that on Earth as a 100 dB sound—the volume of a motorcycle—all the time, every day, everywhere. Be happy that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.

 One last thought—

 Researching for this post and learning about what sound is gave me a new perspective on the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it question. I now think that no, it doesn’t make a sound. It makes an air pressure wave and that’s it. The concept of sound is by definition a biological being’s perception of the pressure wave—and if there are no ears around to perceive the pressure wave, there’s no sound. It’s a little like asking, “If humans go extinct, and somewhere in the post-apocalyptic rubble, there’s a photo of a beautiful woman lying there—is she still beautiful?” I kind of don’t think she is. Because the only thing that’s beautiful about her is that humans found her beautiful, and without humans, she’s no more beautiful than the female beetle a few feet away, rummaging around the rubble. Right?

 ___________

 Three things I want you to read:

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 And the full Elon Musk post series is now available as an ebook.

 ___________

 If you liked this, here are a few more Wait But Why explainers:

 How Tesla Will Change the World

 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

 Putting Time in Perspective

 Sources
 The awesome GIFS: Dan Russell and ISVR
 CDC: Noise and Hearing Loss Prevention
 US Department of Labor: Occupational Noise Exposure
 Nautil.us: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
 UNSW: What is a Decibel?
 Decibelcar.com: Decibel Equivalent Table
 Make it Louder: Ultimate Sound Pressure Level Decibel Table
 NASA: Sound Suppression Test Unleashes a Flood
 Idiom Zero: How Loud is the Sun?
 Gibson.com: It Might Get Loud: The 10 Loudest Rock Bands of All Time
 GC Audio: Decibel (Loudness) Comparison Chart
 Mathpages.com: The Speed of Sound
 Turn it to the Left: Noise Levels
 Extreme Tech: Can a Loud Enough Sound Kill You?
 Abelard.com: Loud Music and Hearing Damage
 Soundproof Cow: Loudest Sound Ever Heard
 Chalmers: Quantum microphone captures extremely weak sound
 born.gov.au: The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883

 1. Here’s a real slinky doing a longitudinal wave.↩

 2. Fun fact: The loudest animal on Earth is a blue whale, whose calls can reach an outrageous 188 decibels, far louder than a jet engine.↩

 3. If you want to see this in action, watch these two guys sit in a car while playing unthinkably loud bass music—at 2:11 you can see the guy’s shirt flapping about 20 times/second as the low and high pressure air passes through it (only watch the 10 seconds where I cued it up—I watched the whole video and it’s time I can’t get back now).↩

 4. Also—dog whistles sound silent to us but work on dogs because dogs can hear pitches as high as 44,000 Hz. Cats can go even higher—up to 79,000 Hz. But neither animal can hear pitches as low as we can. In fact, neither animal can hear the lowest seven keys on the piano—who knew.↩

 5. At first, I was using “volume” here but it seemed weird to use volume when talking about the natural world—like, you wouldn’t say, “What’s the volume of that waterfall?” So is volume just for man made things like stereos? In any case, we’ll be going with loudness.↩

 6. Going up by 10 dB multiplies the sound intensity, or the power, of the wave by ten—not two. But a 10x increase in power only sounds about 2x as loud to our ears, so for our purposes, the 2x increase is more relevant.↩

 1. GIF: ISVR↩

 2. GIF: GIF Soup↩

 3. GIF: GIF Soup↩

 4. GIF: Dan Russell↩

 5. GIF: ISVR↩

 6. Thanks to Christopher Reiss for that analogy.↩

 7. GIF: ISVR↩

 8. Thanks to commenter rebel28 for suggesting the pitch link.↩

 9. Sources for the info on this chart is down below. For each of these, I tried to find several sources that all agreed on the same number. It’s surprising, in general, how much disagreement there is online regarding dB figures.↩

 10. I couldn’t find the original source.↩

 11. http://s73.photobucket.com/user/rocket9244/media/Hiroshima-the-shockwave.gif.html↩

 12. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2h9y9g#ckr6mev↩

 13. Most of my info on this came from this excellent article on Nautilus↩

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This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week. 
___________
I’ve always been a little confused about sound. So for “Tuesday’s” “mini” post, I decided to do something about that.
We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.
The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:1
    
But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation.
A sound wave is more like an earthworm situation:2
    
Like an earthworm, sound moves by compressing and decompressing. This is called a longitudinal wave. A slinky can do both kinds of waves:1 3
    
Sound starts with a vibration of some kind creating a longitudinal wave through matter. Check this out:4
    
That’s what sound looks like—except picture an expanding ripple of spheres doing that. In this animation, the sound wave is being generated by that vibrating grey bar on the left. The bar might be your vocal chords, a guitar string, or a waterfall continually pounding down into the river below. By looking at the red dots, you can see that even though the wave moves in one direction, each individual particle only moves back and forth, mimicking the vibration of the gray bar.
So instead of a curvy snake wave, sound is a pressure wave, which causes each piece of the air to be at either higher-than-normal pressure or lower-than-normal pressure. So when you see a snake-like illustration of a sound wave, it’s referring to the measure of pressure, not the literal path of movement of the particles:5
    
Sound waves can go through air, which is how we normally experience it. But it can also go through liquid2 or solid matter—much of the jolting that happens during an earthquake is the result of a huge sound wave whizzing through the earth (in that case, the movement of the fault is serving as the gray and red bars in the animations above).
How about the speed of sound? Well it depends on how quickly the pressure wave can move in a given medium. A medium that’s more fluid, like air, is highly compressible, so it takes longer for the wave to move, while water is far less compressible, so there’s less “give” to slow the wave down. It’s like two people holding an outstretched slinky between them—if one pushes their end toward the other person, the wave will take a little time to travel down the slinky before the other person feels it. But if the two people are holding a broomstick, when one pushes, the other feels it immediately, because the broomstick is much less compressible.6
 So it makes sense that the speed of sound in air (768 mph / 1,234 kmph under normal conditions) is about four times slower than the speed of sound in water, which itself is about four times slower than the speed of sound through a solid like iron.
Back to us and hearing. Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of air pressure waves. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?
I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle.
Anyway—
The ear can discern many qualities of a sound it hears, but two of the most fundamental are pitch and loudness.
 Pitch 
Pitch is all about wavelength—i.e. how far apart the pressure waves are:7
    
The shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear frequencies as low as 20 Hz (which is a 56 ft /17 m long wave) and as high as 20,000 Hz (.7 in / 1.7 cm). As you age, you lose your ability to hear the highest pitches, so most of you probably hear nothing when you listen to the frequencies approaching 20,000 Hz (your dog will disagree). But you’ll have an easier time hearing the lowest part of the range.8 The reason you can feel low sounds, like low bass notes in music, is that the wavelength is so long that it actually takes 1/20th of a second for a full wave to pass your body (hence 20 Hz).3 4
  Loudness 
The loudness5 of a sound we hear is determined by the amplitude of the pressure waves. In the animation above, the high and low-pitched sounds depicted have the same loudness, because the pressure curves at the bottom of the animation are the same size vertically. Louder sounds have a larger oscillation between the low and high pressure sections of the wave—i.e. loud sounds have higher high-pressure and lower low-pressure parts than quiet sounds.
For sounds through the air on Earth’s surface, the average of the high-pressure and low-pressure parts of the wave is our normal atmospheric pressure—what we call 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. So a sound wave might have a high pressure component of 1.0001 atmospheres and a low pressure component of .9999 atmospheres, and a louder sound might be 1.01/.99 instead—but in both cases, the average of the two is 1 atmosphere.
We often measure loudness using a unit called the decibel (named after Alexander Graham Bell). If you want to be confused, read the Wikipedia page on decibels. It’s a super icky unit. And rather than bore us both by explaining it, let’s just talk about how we use decibels to measure sound.
The scale of loudness has a very tiny minimum. The faintest sounds are far softer than any human could hear—even softer than any of our finest scientific instruments could detect. But depending on where you are, sound has a hard maximum. The reason is that sound isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a pressure wave moving through a medium. And since, as we talked about, the average of the high and low pressure points of a sound wave has to be the normal pressure of the medium, loudness is limited by the fact that eventually, the low pressure point hits zero-pressure—a vacuum. Since the low pressure can’t go any lower, that point determines the max amplitude of a sound wave, and the loudest a sound can be, in any given place.
The convenient thing about decibels (dB) is that the absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” Scientists do their best to study sounds far down into the negative decibel scale and there are man-made rooms on Earth that register as low as -9.4 dB—where it’s so quiet you can hear the blood pumping through your own brain—but we can only hear sounds in the dB positives. The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB—which is when the amplitude of the sound wave is so intense that the low pressure part is a perfect vacuum (the wave alternates between double the normal atmospheric pressure and no air at all—not something you want to be present for). Let’s take a look at the full scale, starting with the really quiet.
One thing to keep in mind is that with decibels, each increase of 10 dB doubles the loudness. So 20 dB is twice as loud as 10 dB, 30 dB is four times as loud as 10 dB, and 80 dB is 128 times louder than 10 dB.6 9
    
The scale stops at 194 because there’s no such thing as a louder sound on Earth’s surface. But we can go beyond here in two ways:
 1) Shock Waves 
When enough energy is released to pass the 194 dB mark, it’s too much to create a sustained pressure wave because we’ve bottomed out on low pressure—but things still happen. Very, very intense things.
At 194 dB, there’s a maxed out wave alternating between double the normal pressure and a total vacuum—but once we get to 195 dB, the energy stops moving through the air and starts pushing the air outward with an expanding vacuum. The more dBs above 194 there are, the farther reaching and higher-impact that vacuum bubble will be. It expands outward as a rapidly-growing half-sphere:10
    
On the edge of the bubble is a barrier of super-compressed gas, and when this barrier sweeps over the land, it usually flattens whatever’s in its path:11
    
As the hemisphere expands, it loses energy and eventually dissipates. But if you found yourself in the path of a shock wave before that happened, you’d have a bad time. First, the impact of the super-compressed barrier would be like hitting a brick wall (in the same way and for the same reason falling on water from a bridge is like falling on concrete). Second, compressed air is hot. Third, it wouldn’t just hit all parts of your body, it would go through your body, and if it were powerful enough it could turn your bones to powder and your organs to soup.
Here are some famous 194dB+ events:
 Saturn V launch: The Saturn V was a beast, and the sound waves from its launches were so intense that they could light grass on fire a mile away. Even at three miles away, an observer would experience ear-splitting 135 dB sound.12 Rocket launches create such a powerful sound, that space agencies flood the launchpad with water as the rocket launches to absorb the sound so the force of the pressure wave doesn’t damage the rocket.
 The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: According to sources I read, these clocked in at well over 200 dB. The shock wave was so charged that it traveled 7 mi / 11 km in 30 seconds.
 The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption: 13  I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.
 Krakatoa is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.
The eruption completely annihilated the island, sending an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second. It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.
But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.
It was so loud that the shock wave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.
100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where you are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100 meters away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 miles away.
The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.
The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. 3,000 miles away. I’m currently in New York. Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear  in New York. I can’t even.
After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth 3.5 times.
Finally, you know the famous painting The Scream? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.
It was a big eruption.
 2) Other Mediums 
There can be louder sound than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. The gas giants in our Solar System, for example, have denser atmospheres than Earth’s, which allow for higher pressure wave amplitudes, and with incredibly fast winds and powerful storms, there’s plenty of opportunity there to make loud things.
What isn’t loud is almost everything else in space. You’ve probably heard the term, “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum,” but it makes sense now, right? Sound is pressure waves through matter. If there’s no matter, there’s no sound. There can be immense heat, and radiation, and force, but to a nearby observing human, it’s all dead silent.
If, hypothetically, there were air filling the universe, then suddenly things would get very loud. Forget the terrifying concept of the sound of a supernova—just the dumb sun sitting there hanging out would ring in at an astounding 290 dB. According to one solar physicist, we’d hear that on Earth as a 100 dB sound—the volume of a motorcycle—all the time, every day, everywhere. Be happy that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.
One last thought—
Researching for this post and learning about what sound is gave me a new perspective on the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it question. I now think that no, it doesn’t make a sound. It makes an air pressure wave and that’s it. The concept of sound is by definition a biological being’s perception of the pressure wave—and if there are no ears around to perceive the pressure wave, there’s no sound. It’s a little like asking, “If humans go extinct, and somewhere in the post-apocalyptic rubble, there’s a photo of a beautiful woman lying there—is she still beautiful?” I kind of don’t think she is. Because the only thing that’s beautiful about her is that humans found her beautiful, and without humans, she’s no more beautiful than the female beetle a few feet away, rummaging around the rubble. Right?
___________
 Three things I want you to read: 
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
And the full Elon Musk post series is now available  as an ebook .
___________
 If you liked this, here are a few more Wait But Why explainers: 
  How Tesla Will Change the World  
  The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence  
  Putting Time in Perspective  
 Sources 
The awesome GIFS: Dan Russell and ISVR 
CDC: Noise and Hearing Loss Prevention 
US Department of Labor: Occupational Noise Exposure 
Nautil.us: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times 
UNSW: What is a Decibel? 
Decibelcar.com: Decibel Equivalent Table 
Make it Louder: Ultimate Sound Pressure Level Decibel Table 
NASA: Sound Suppression Test Unleashes a Flood 
Idiom Zero: How Loud is the Sun? 
Gibson.com: It Might Get Loud: The 10 Loudest Rock Bands of All Time 
GC Audio: Decibel (Loudness) Comparison Chart 
Mathpages.com: The Speed of Sound 
Turn it to the Left: Noise Levels 
Extreme Tech: Can a Loud Enough Sound Kill You? 
Abelard.com: Loud Music and Hearing Damage 
Soundproof Cow: Loudest Sound Ever Heard 
Chalmers: Quantum microphone captures extremely weak sound 
born.gov.au: The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883
Everything You Should Know About Sound
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/sound.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-story.html
Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story — Wait But Why
2016-03-02
Tim Urban
<div><div><p>You’ve probably heard this Seinfeld joke:</p>
<p><em>According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.</em></p>
<p>Knowing humans, this shouldn’t be that surprising. I’ve mentioned <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">before</a> that we all have this problem where we’re weirdly obsessed with what other people think of us, so it makes sense that public speaking should be our collective phobia.</p>
<p>But then we also live in a world where public speaking can happen to any of us at any time. Even if you never give an official “talk,” there’ll be some other time when you have to give a big toast at a wedding or present in front of a big group at work or speak at a funeral or some other ceremony. Very few of us are safe.</p>
<p>Over the last couple years, as I’ve done a small amount of Wait But Why-related public speaking, I’ve been able to slowly get over the fear. I’ve learned that if you just be yourself and talk like you normally do, it’s usually received well by the audience, even if you’re clearly nervous.</p>
<p>And that was all fine until August of 2015, when I was invited to do a TED Talk.</p>
<p>The issue is, a TED Talk is not a speaking gig. In a speaking gig, I stand in front of a group of people and say stuff. That’s not what a TED Talk is. A TED Talk is a widely-distributed short film, except the only actor is my face and the only plot is me saying words out of my face and the only choreographer is my nervous pacing and awkward arm-flailing, and instead of a bunch of cuts and different shots and a long editing process, there’s just one do-or-die take, with no second chances.</p>
<p>No, what? No. Obviously not. Who would <em>ever </em>agree to do something like that.</p>
<p>But here’s the problem: Who turns down TED? Not really an option, right? Let’s pause to go through some background:</p>
<p>TED actually started way back in 1984, founded by <a href="https://www.nantucketproject.com/idea-films/rsw">Richard Saul Wurman</a>, as a small, Silicon Valley annual gathering. The name is an acronym for Wurman’s intention for the focus of the conference: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Through the 1990s, the conference grew both in attendance and in the scope of its topics.</p>
<p>In 2002, media entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED from Wurman (through a non-profit he owns) and has run it ever since. He broadened TED’s content focus to “ideas worth spreading,” and in 2006, TED began doing something that would launch the brand into the stratosphere—they put the talks online.</p>
<p>I first heard of TED in 2008, when someone sent me Jill Bolte Taylor’s <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight?language=en">amazing talk</a> about what she learned from the experience of having a stroke. You probably first heard of TED around the same time. And a few years later, almost everyone knew what a TED Talk was. Anderson describes TED’s rise to global prominence like this:</p>
<p><em>It used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it’s about a million people a day watching TED Talks online. When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as “ideas worth spreading,” building a big website around it. The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.</em><a href="#footnote2-1-4737">1</a>
</p><p>The TED brand has expanded in a lot of ways, but maybe most notably through TEDx conferences. This can be a little confusing, so here’s the deal: There’s still one annual TED conference, a week-long event in Vancouver, and it’s run by the TED staff. A TEDx conference is independently run, but it has to follow a set of guidelines laid out by TED so that it fits with the overall brand. There are now over 1,500 annual TEDx events that happen in over 130 countries, some of them major, high-profile conferences;<a href="#footnote-1-4737">1</a> others tiny and little-known. The best TEDx talks are posted on TED.com, alongside the talks that happen at the main conference in Vancouver.</p>
<p>The thing I was asked to speak at was the big Vancouver one. I say this not only to brag, but also to explain why this whole thing had me freaking out so much. The same thing that made it extra extra scary also made it extra extra not turn-downable.</p>
<p>So I accepted.</p>
<p>As I thought through what I had just committed myself to, I identified a number of concerns, like me not having a topic, or the fact that TED Talks are short and narrow and I tend to be the opposite. But perhaps most worrying was the prospect of this being an Exact Script situation. Let me explain (if you’d rather just read the rest of my TED story, skip down to the comic)—</p>
<p>When you speak in public, you have three main options about how to go about it, and they fall along a spectrum:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Prep-Spectrum-1-3.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>1) Wing it</strong></p>
<p>At the cockiest end of the spectrum, you have the option of completely winging it. This involves no planning—you just get up there and figure out what you want to say once you’re talking. You be yourself and let the moment carry you.</p>
<p>This takes some hardcore self-confidence, and it only works if you’re <em>really </em>good, and if you’re in the right mood and in front of the right crowd. It’s a really great way to do a really bad talk, and should probably be kept to super-casual things like impromptu dinner toasts.</p>
<p><strong>2) Talk through a set structure</strong></p>
<p>Here, you have a clear structure in your head or a list of bullet points on a notecard, and then you simply talk through it. But importantly, you haven’t scripted sentences exactly—if you did the talk five times, it would come out differently each time, but the general content would be the same. To do this, you have to be super comfortable with the content of what you want to say.</p>
<p>When you use this method, you come off like a human, because you’re actually coming up with real sentences as you go, which is how a normal person talks. Your brain is focused on the content of what you’re saying, and your words are emerging directly from your current thoughts.</p>
<p>This isn’t an exact point on the spectrum but a range. On the left side of the range, closer to the winging it end, you have a few general bullets or slides, but you’ve planned almost nothing beyond that. Toward the right side, you’ve planned out almost exactly what you want to say, including the placement and wording of certain jokes or other key sentences, but it still comes out a little differently each time you do it.</p>
<p><strong>3) Follow an exact script</strong></p>
<p>Here, on the other extreme end of the spectrum, you write the exact script of the talk ahead of time and deliver the talk on script, word for word. Some people might immediately assume this method will make a talk impersonal and robotic, but it’s more complicated than that—the exact script method has its own spectrum:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Prep-Spectrum-2.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>3A) Read off a script</strong></p>
<p>This is simple: You write a script, and the talk is you reading it out loud. During the talk, you’re just acting as the messenger—you’re a functional medium connecting the thoughts of your past self to the present audience.</p>
<p>This is the safest and least stressful way to give a talk and it usually puts the audience to sleep, regardless of how good the content is. Audiences have a fine-tuned radar for when they’re listening to a person say something versus when they’re listening to a person <em>recite</em> something—in the latter case, the speaker isn’t really <em>there </em>in the room with the audience, which has a way of making everyone <em>really</em> want to start playing with their phone.</p>
<p><strong>3B) <strong>Just barely memorized</strong></strong></p>
<p>As you move along the scripted spectrum from 3A to 3B, you go from entirely reading, to reading mostly but with some looks up at the audience, to mostly looking up at the audience with some glances down to the paper, to totally memorized with no paper in hand.</p>
<p>A paperless 3B speaker won’t come off much different than a 3A speaker. The 3B speaker isn’t technically reading off of a script, but he might as well be. Because his memorization of the script is fragile, his mind isn’t focused on the content of what he’s saying—it’s focused on reciting the words he memorized. He’ll struggle to make eye contact, and his sentences will come off just robotic enough to make the audience clear that he’s a mostly-unthinking messenger of a written script. Phones will be reached for.</p>
<p>The main difference is that while 3A is the safest method of all, 3B is the riskiest. Going for it without the paper when you only barely have the talk memorized is a great way to disastrously go blank mid-talk.</p>
<p><strong>3C) Happy-Birthday-level memorized</strong></p>
<p>When you get to 3C, you don’t just have the script memorized, you have it memorized <em>cold</em>. And that’s a <em>key </em>distinction. If you’re in a restaurant and your table starts singing Happy Birthday to someone you’re with, you can join in with them even if you’re simultaneously taking a picture of the birthday girl, moving some stuff out of the way so the waiter has a place on the table to put the cake, observing the other people in the restaurant looking over and wishing this wasn’t happening, and four other things. It’s no problem—you can still sing the lyrics. You can do that because the lyrics to Happy Birthday aren’t coming out of your conscious mind—they’re coming out of your subconscious. They’re coming out automatically, and your conscious mind can focus entirely on other things while you’re singing.</p>
<p>That’s how well-memorized 3C is.</p>
<p>The people at TED refer to two tests you need to pass to qualify as Happy-Birthday-level memorized:</p>
<ol>
<li>If you record yourself saying the talk and play it back at 2x speed, can you say it out loud while it’s playing and stay <em>ahead </em>of the recording?</li>
<li>Can you recite the talk with no problem while simultaneously doing an unrelated task that requires attention, like following a recipe and measuring out the ingredients into a bowl?</li>
</ol>
<p>Memorizing something to this degree might seem like a daunting task, but everyone who’s ever acted in a play has done it. It’s not as impossible as it sounds, because the human brain is able to engrave things to that level if you just rehearse enough and sleep on it enough times.</p>
<p>When a speaker has memorized their talk to this extent, they <em>can </em>be in the room with the audience, even though they’re reciting a previously-written script, because their conscious mind is freed up to <em>think</em> about what they’re saying instead of tied up with the task of remembering which line comes next. This allows the speaker to make eye contact and to bring their live personality into the picture to reflect the words being said in real time.</p>
<p>I’d sum up the pros and cons of the five options like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Method-graph-2.png"></a></p>
<p>On this chart, all three items in the key are bad. Those are the three things that can suck about public speaking. So high-up dots are bad. Looking at this chart, here are some conclusions:</p>
<ul>
<li>If and only if the talk is super low-stakes—like an impromptu toast at a group dinner—winging it is a good option. It’s the only method that takes no prep, and it’s also the least robotic, which is perfect in casual situations where seeming like you prepped is awkward. But unless you’re very rad, winging a big talk is a bad idea.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Method 2 is the best overall choice much of the time, scoring well on all three criteria. It’s not that hard to prep for, you sound like a human, and it isn’t that stressful because with nothing to memorize, there’s nothing to forget, so if you know your material well and you’re feeling confident, things will go fine. The worst case scenario is that you lose your confidence during the talk and flounder through it. That’s a bad outcome, but it’s not a disaster. But Method 2 does require you to be calm and collected, so if you’re really scared of public speaking, it’s probably not the way to go. It also leaves you open to variability—depending on how the words come out, you might deliver a better or worse talk—so if the stakes are <em>super </em>high, it’s not a great option unless you’re a seasoned pro.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Method 3A—reading off a script—is a pretty bad option, with one huge plus: It’s the least scary by far. For people who are <em>terrified </em>of public speaking, they may just want to cling to Method 3A’s leg and call it a day. But the safety comes at a high cost, in that you’re leaving yourself with almost no chance of delivering a great talk and a high chance of having the audience tune out. It should be noted that in certain high-gravitas situations, when it’s more of an official <em>speech </em>than a talk, the clearly-recited tone of a read speech can be appropriate, and even desired—like a graduation speech. In other cases, someone can be skilled enough at reading a script that they can do so in a human-seeming way. Obama is a good example—you often forget that he’s reading from a teleprompter most of the time you see him talk. But very few of us find ourselves involved with graduation speeches or teleprompters.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Method 3B—being memorized but just barely—is the worst of all worlds and should never happen. Never ever. If you’re at 3A and you decide to venture into memorization land and ditch the paper, you better be prepared to put in the time to get all the way to 3C, because here’s the deal: Even if you feel like you have things memorized when you’re alone in your house, once you’re in front of the audience, all of these new factors come into play. Your adrenaline is pumping and super-charging your muscles, your nerves take a shit, and a million new things enter your consciousness—the faces of the audience, the clock ticking down with your time limit, your self-awareness of how you’re standing and what you’re doing with your hands, your regret over messing up a sentence 30 seconds ago. And that well-memorized talk is suddenly not coming to you so easily. 3B is all of the robotic-ness of 3A with none of the safety. Avoid.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>When the stakes are high and you want to deliver your best talk—but you’re not a seasoned pro who can pull off Method 2—you’re left with only one option: 3C. You have to write a great script and memorize it <em>cold</em>. 3C gives everyone an option of basically <em>ensuring</em> that you give a great talk, with relatively low risk. You only have to do one thing: spend eternity prepping. 3C takes <em>forever</em>. Writing a great script means working on it a ton and carefully honing every sentence, and memorizing it to Happy Birthday level takes a huge amount more time. You’re essentially writing a play, casting yourself, and then learning the part well enough to act it on a stage with no fear of forgetting your lines. Preparing to this level is a nightmare—but if the stakes are high enough, it’s worth the time.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A quick note on wedding speeches. The best wedding speeches are usually Method 2 speeches, but most people are too scared to do that. But because they also don’t want to put <em>that </em>much effort into a wedding speech, most wedding speeches end up in 3A and 3B territory—which is why they’re usually pretty lame and boring and come along with a buzz of people quietly talking at the tables in the back. If you’re asked to give a wedding speech, don’t be a dick—it’s someone’s wedding. Either gather the guts to speak from the heart and go with Method 2, or put in the time it takes to get to 3C.</li>
</ul>
<p>Back to my situation. Over the past couple years, I had begun to find a groove doing not-that-high-stakes 30-to-60-minute talks using the off-the-cuff Method 2, but TED is both <em>far </em>higher stakes than normal and has a strict 14-minute time limit<a href="#footnote-2-4737">2</a>—meaning you need to be ultra concise and make every word count—so no way I was risking it with Method 2. I was scripting it and going to Happy Birthday land. I found that 90% of other TED speakers do the same thing.</p>
<p>This was gonna be a huge project.</p>
<p>Luckily for August Tim, none of this was his problem. He had an all-star team of employees to carry everything out.</p>
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<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Jan-1.jpg"></a><br />
This wasn’t good. With only about a month to go till the talk and a scary rehearsal in front of the TED staff only days away, I was way behind. When it came time for the rehearsal, I had gotten a loose script together, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it.</p>
<p>The rehearsal took place in the TED office in New York, in front of a friendly but intimidating semi-circle of TED senior staff.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Rehearsal-1.png"></a></p>
<p>I went through what I had, and it went okay until the last five minutes of the talk. I really didn’t like that part of the script, and during the rehearsal, I made the impromptu decision to go rogue and improvise, since I hated what was coming out of my mouth. This was a bad idea. What I ended up doing was a rambling and nonsensical ending that wasn’t that different from me picking words out of the dictionary at random and saying them.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Rehearsal-2.png"></a></p>
<p>There was a lot of work to do.</p>
<p>That night, the head of TED, Chris Anderson, hosted a dinner at his New York apartment for the speakers who were in town for rehearsals. If I already felt in over my head in this whole situation, meeting the other speakers didn’t help.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Dinner-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Dinner-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Luckily, I sat down at dinner next to a normal-seeming guy.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Table-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Table-2.png"></a></p>
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<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Table-5.png"></a></p>
<p>It was a rough start. But the dinner ended up making me feel better. It turns out that even rad people are terrified to do a TED Talk. And by the end, most people had admitted that they felt totally unqualified to be involved in this. Everyone else was going through the same thing I was.</p>
<p>January Tim felt better. So much better that he didn’t do that much for the rest of the month.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Feb-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>February Tim entered the world furious at every one of his co-workers. But he had no time to be angry—he had to work, every day, all day, immediately. And he did work, a lot, on the first 10 minutes of the talk—the part that was already in pretty good shape. That’s what procrastinators do.</p>
<p>On February 12th, four days before my talk, I flew to Vancouver, still not fully scripted. I got to my hotel and looked out the window, and there it was:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/confrence.jpg"></a></p>
<p>All TED speakers do a fully mic’ed dress rehearsal on the real stage the weekend before the conference starts. Mine was three days before my talk—and it was pretty rough, confirming to me and everyone present that I was officially not a fraud when it came to my topic. The irony of a guy rehearsing his TED Talk about how he’s a bad procrastinator, and being clearly underprepared while doing so, was not lost on anyone.</p>
<p>At that point, the first 10 minutes of the talk was here:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Memorization-risk-graph-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Not ideal, but with a lot of reps over the next three days, it was manageable. The bigger problem is that I still didn’t like the last third of the talk and kept rewriting it. So I’d practice a new ending for a while and get it here—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Memorization-risk-graph-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>—only to then rewrite the last section, putting me back here with a whole new thing to memorize:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Memorization-risk-graph-3.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I fell into a routine of meeting up with fellow speaker and professor/author Adam Grant each night to show him my latest conclusion I hated. He was speaking the same day I was, right after me, but as the author of the book <em><a href="http://amzn.to/1Qrf1CA">Give and Take</a></em>, we both knew he had no choice but to be helpful anyway.</p>
<p>On Monday, the day before my talk, the conference began. There were whispers about who was in attendance for the week. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. Goldie Hawn and Cher. Tony Hsieh and Travis Kalanick and Chris Sacca and Steve Case and Al Gore. Even Jaden Smith.</p>
<p><em>Not helpful information.</em></p>
<p>I spent most of the day in my hotel room, alternating between rewriting the last part of the talk and trying to better memorize the first part. Finally, late that night, I settled on my final script. I liked it. Finally. Only one problem.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Memorization-risk-graph-4.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Back at 3A with the last part <em>again, </em>this time with only about 16 hours until the talk.</p>
<p>I woke up the morning of my talk, did some jumping jacks in my hotel room like a psycho, and then spent four hours saying the last part over and over, eventually getting things here:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Memorization-risk-graph-5.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That would have to be good enough—I was out of time. I showed up at the theater the required 90 minutes before my talk for “hair and makeup,” i.e. an upsettingly-friendly lady painting my face with stuff while I engaged in a 10-minute discussion with her about her two cats back at home. Finally free of that, I spent the final hour pacing back and forth and running through the talk in my head, and then, suddenly, I was doing this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/FullSizeRender-3.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I will say this: The TED stage is a weirdly comforting place. It doesn’t feel like you’re in some huge theater—it feels like you’re on some little red circle surrounded by a bunch of friendly, supportive people who want you to succeed. They designed it that way on purpose, and it works. I was less nervous doing the actual talk than I had been in any of the rehearsals.</p>
<p>And as I made my way through the talk, disaster never struck. I made it through to the end without any major problems.</p>
<p><em>VICTORY.</em></p>
<p>When I was done, I sat in a seat they had reserved for me, blacked out, and watched the next series of talks. Immense relief.</p>
<p>The week then turned from what I had openly declared to be the worst week of my life into the best possible shit ever. I never knew much about the TED conference before, but it’s <em>very, very fun</em>. It’s like a little luxury playland where super fancy people come to relax and watch 70 <em>intensely </em>stressed-out, less fancy people get on stage, one by one, and say something interesting. And you know when you’re in a store and there’s some incredibly expensive package of high-end beef jerky or some $9 peanut butter cups by some weeping Brooklyn brand or some pixie bottle of juice that amounts to $6/sip and you don’t buy those things cause who has the nerve to actually live like that? Well all that shit is <em>everywhere </em>on these <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/FullSizeRender-6.jpg">racks</a> as you walk around TED, and it’s all <em>free</em>. I was chewing for 93% of my waking time the rest of the week.</p>
<p>I’d head into the theater in the morning, some ultra-organic, hyper-cleansing coconut chips in one hand, some wheatgrass extract thing in the other, a thermos full of coffee that took nine minutes for some guy to make using a bunch of test tubes resting in the pocket of the hoodie I wore all week because once your talk is done, literally nothing in the world matters anymore—and I’d plant myself in a seat in the theater and think, “I’m ready, speakers, for you to <em>entertain and educate me</em>. Let’s begin!”</p>
<p>There’s only one stage and only one talk going on at a time, and that talk, in addition to happening live in the theater, is beamed through the entire conference center, which is full of screens and speakers. So sometimes, instead of watching talks in the theater, I’d watch in one of the many cozy simulcast viewing areas—maybe while lying on one of the hundreds of beanbags. Maybe while stretched out on grass under a tree.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/FullSizeRender-4.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Or maybe in a <em>plastic ball pit</em>.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/FullSizeRender-5.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Glorious.</p>
<p>Then it ended and I went home and everything costs money again and I have to do stuff again. Upsetting.</p>
<p>Anyway, that was my TED experience. To all those scared public speakers out there, I’d just say: the fear and dread of public speaking is almost always much worse than the actual experience of doing it. Everyone is just as uncomfortable with it as you are, and if you just put in a good amount of preparation, it almost always ends up going just fine. And then you’ll be really happy you went through all the hell leading up to it. So go for it.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/my-ted-talk.html">Here’s the talk</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>______</strong></p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="#">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy?ty=h"><strong>here’s our Patreon</strong>.</a></p>
<p><strong>______</strong></p>
<p>Public speaking is only one of life’s great perils. Three others to watch out for:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html">The Great Perils of Social Interaction</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/11-awkward-things-about-email.html">11 Awkward Things About Email</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/secretly-hate-bars.html">Why You Secretly Hate Bars</a></strong></p>
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 Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story

 March 2, 2016 By Tim Urban


 You’ve probably heard this Seinfeld joke:

 According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.

 Knowing humans, this shouldn’t be that surprising. I’ve mentioned before that we all have this problem where we’re weirdly obsessed with what other people think of us, so it makes sense that public speaking should be our collective phobia.

 But then we also live in a world where public speaking can happen to any of us at any time. Even if you never give an official “talk,” there’ll be some other time when you have to give a big toast at a wedding or present in front of a big group at work or speak at a funeral or some other ceremony. Very few of us are safe.

 Over the last couple years, as I’ve done a small amount of Wait But Why-related public speaking, I’ve been able to slowly get over the fear. I’ve learned that if you just be yourself and talk like you normally do, it’s usually received well by the audience, even if you’re clearly nervous.

 And that was all fine until August of 2015, when I was invited to do a TED Talk.

 The issue is, a TED Talk is not a speaking gig. In a speaking gig, I stand in front of a group of people and say stuff. That’s not what a TED Talk is. A TED Talk is a widely-distributed short film, except the only actor is my face and the only plot is me saying words out of my face and the only choreographer is my nervous pacing and awkward arm-flailing, and instead of a bunch of cuts and different shots and a long editing process, there’s just one do-or-die take, with no second chances.

 No, what? No. Obviously not. Who would ever agree to do something like that.

 But here’s the problem: Who turns down TED? Not really an option, right? Let’s pause to go through some background:

 TED actually started way back in 1984, founded by Richard Saul Wurman, as a small, Silicon Valley annual gathering. The name is an acronym for Wurman’s intention for the focus of the conference: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Through the 1990s, the conference grew both in attendance and in the scope of its topics.

 In 2002, media entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED from Wurman (through a non-profit he owns) and has run it ever since. He broadened TED’s content focus to “ideas worth spreading,” and in 2006, TED began doing something that would launch the brand into the stratosphere—they put the talks online.

 I first heard of TED in 2008, when someone sent me Jill Bolte Taylor’s amazing talk about what she learned from the experience of having a stroke. You probably first heard of TED around the same time. And a few years later, almost everyone knew what a TED Talk was. Anderson describes TED’s rise to global prominence like this:

 It used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it’s about a million people a day watching TED Talks online. When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as “ideas worth spreading,” building a big website around it. The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.1

 The TED brand has expanded in a lot of ways, but maybe most notably through TEDx conferences. This can be a little confusing, so here’s the deal: There’s still one annual TED conference, a week-long event in Vancouver, and it’s run by the TED staff. A TEDx conference is independently run, but it has to follow a set of guidelines laid out by TED so that it fits with the overall brand. There are now over 1,500 annual TEDx events that happen in over 130 countries, some of them major, high-profile conferences;1 others tiny and little-known. The best TEDx talks are posted on TED.com, alongside the talks that happen at the main conference in Vancouver.

 The thing I was asked to speak at was the big Vancouver one. I say this not only to brag, but also to explain why this whole thing had me freaking out so much. The same thing that made it extra extra scary also made it extra extra not turn-downable.

 So I accepted.

 As I thought through what I had just committed myself to, I identified a number of concerns, like me not having a topic, or the fact that TED Talks are short and narrow and I tend to be the opposite. But perhaps most worrying was the prospect of this being an Exact Script situation. Let me explain (if you’d rather just read the rest of my TED story, skip down to the comic)—

 When you speak in public, you have three main options about how to go about it, and they fall along a spectrum:

 1) Wing it

 At the cockiest end of the spectrum, you have the option of completely winging it. This involves no planning—you just get up there and figure out what you want to say once you’re talking. You be yourself and let the moment carry you.

 This takes some hardcore self-confidence, and it only works if you’re really good, and if you’re in the right mood and in front of the right crowd. It’s a really great way to do a really bad talk, and should probably be kept to super-casual things like impromptu dinner toasts.

 2) Talk through a set structure

 Here, you have a clear structure in your head or a list of bullet points on a notecard, and then you simply talk through it. But importantly, you haven’t scripted sentences exactly—if you did the talk five times, it would come out differently each time, but the general content would be the same. To do this, you have to be super comfortable with the content of what you want to say.

 When you use this method, you come off like a human, because you’re actually coming up with real sentences as you go, which is how a normal person talks. Your brain is focused on the content of what you’re saying, and your words are emerging directly from your current thoughts.

 This isn’t an exact point on the spectrum but a range. On the left side of the range, closer to the winging it end, you have a few general bullets or slides, but you’ve planned almost nothing beyond that. Toward the right side, you’ve planned out almost exactly what you want to say, including the placement and wording of certain jokes or other key sentences, but it still comes out a little differently each time you do it.

 3) Follow an exact script

 Here, on the other extreme end of the spectrum, you write the exact script of the talk ahead of time and deliver the talk on script, word for word. Some people might immediately assume this method will make a talk impersonal and robotic, but it’s more complicated than that—the exact script method has its own spectrum:

 3A) Read off a script

 This is simple: You write a script, and the talk is you reading it out loud. During the talk, you’re just acting as the messenger—you’re a functional medium connecting the thoughts of your past self to the present audience.

 This is the safest and least stressful way to give a talk and it usually puts the audience to sleep, regardless of how good the content is. Audiences have a fine-tuned radar for when they’re listening to a person say something versus when they’re listening to a person recite something—in the latter case, the speaker isn’t really there in the room with the audience, which has a way of making everyone really want to start playing with their phone.

 3B) Just barely memorized

 As you move along the scripted spectrum from 3A to 3B, you go from entirely reading, to reading mostly but with some looks up at the audience, to mostly looking up at the audience with some glances down to the paper, to totally memorized with no paper in hand.

 A paperless 3B speaker won’t come off much different than a 3A speaker. The 3B speaker isn’t technically reading off of a script, but he might as well be. Because his memorization of the script is fragile, his mind isn’t focused on the content of what he’s saying—it’s focused on reciting the words he memorized. He’ll struggle to make eye contact, and his sentences will come off just robotic enough to make the audience clear that he’s a mostly-unthinking messenger of a written script. Phones will be reached for.

 The main difference is that while 3A is the safest method of all, 3B is the riskiest. Going for it without the paper when you only barely have the talk memorized is a great way to disastrously go blank mid-talk.

 3C) Happy-Birthday-level memorized

 When you get to 3C, you don’t just have the script memorized, you have it memorized cold. And that’s a key distinction. If you’re in a restaurant and your table starts singing Happy Birthday to someone you’re with, you can join in with them even if you’re simultaneously taking a picture of the birthday girl, moving some stuff out of the way so the waiter has a place on the table to put the cake, observing the other people in the restaurant looking over and wishing this wasn’t happening, and four other things. It’s no problem—you can still sing the lyrics. You can do that because the lyrics to Happy Birthday aren’t coming out of your conscious mind—they’re coming out of your subconscious. They’re coming out automatically, and your conscious mind can focus entirely on other things while you’re singing.

 That’s how well-memorized 3C is.

 The people at TED refer to two tests you need to pass to qualify as Happy-Birthday-level memorized:

 1. If you record yourself saying the talk and play it back at 2x speed, can you say it out loud while it’s playing and stay ahead of the recording?
 2. Can you recite the talk with no problem while simultaneously doing an unrelated task that requires attention, like following a recipe and measuring out the ingredients into a bowl?

 Memorizing something to this degree might seem like a daunting task, but everyone who’s ever acted in a play has done it. It’s not as impossible as it sounds, because the human brain is able to engrave things to that level if you just rehearse enough and sleep on it enough times.

 When a speaker has memorized their talk to this extent, they can be in the room with the audience, even though they’re reciting a previously-written script, because their conscious mind is freed up to think about what they’re saying instead of tied up with the task of remembering which line comes next. This allows the speaker to make eye contact and to bring their live personality into the picture to reflect the words being said in real time.

 I’d sum up the pros and cons of the five options like this:

 On this chart, all three items in the key are bad. Those are the three things that can suck about public speaking. So high-up dots are bad. Looking at this chart, here are some conclusions:

 * If and only if the talk is super low-stakes—like an impromptu toast at a group dinner—winging it is a good option. It’s the only method that takes no prep, and it’s also the least robotic, which is perfect in casual situations where seeming like you prepped is awkward. But unless you’re very rad, winging a big talk is a bad idea.
 * Method 2 is the best overall choice much of the time, scoring well on all three criteria. It’s not that hard to prep for, you sound like a human, and it isn’t that stressful because with nothing to memorize, there’s nothing to forget, so if you know your material well and you’re feeling confident, things will go fine. The worst case scenario is that you lose your confidence during the talk and flounder through it. That’s a bad outcome, but it’s not a disaster. But Method 2 does require you to be calm and collected, so if you’re really scared of public speaking, it’s probably not the way to go. It also leaves you open to variability—depending on how the words come out, you might deliver a better or worse talk—so if the stakes are super high, it’s not a great option unless you’re a seasoned pro.
 * Method 3A—reading off a script—is a pretty bad option, with one huge plus: It’s the least scary by far. For people who are terrified of public speaking, they may just want to cling to Method 3A’s leg and call it a day. But the safety comes at a high cost, in that you’re leaving yourself with almost no chance of delivering a great talk and a high chance of having the audience tune out. It should be noted that in certain high-gravitas situations, when it’s more of an official speech than a talk, the clearly-recited tone of a read speech can be appropriate, and even desired—like a graduation speech. In other cases, someone can be skilled enough at reading a script that they can do so in a human-seeming way. Obama is a good example—you often forget that he’s reading from a teleprompter most of the time you see him talk. But very few of us find ourselves involved with graduation speeches or teleprompters.
 * Method 3B—being memorized but just barely—is the worst of all worlds and should never happen. Never ever. If you’re at 3A and you decide to venture into memorization land and ditch the paper, you better be prepared to put in the time to get all the way to 3C, because here’s the deal: Even if you feel like you have things memorized when you’re alone in your house, once you’re in front of the audience, all of these new factors come into play. Your adrenaline is pumping and super-charging your muscles, your nerves take a shit, and a million new things enter your consciousness—the faces of the audience, the clock ticking down with your time limit, your self-awareness of how you’re standing and what you’re doing with your hands, your regret over messing up a sentence 30 seconds ago. And that well-memorized talk is suddenly not coming to you so easily. 3B is all of the robotic-ness of 3A with none of the safety. Avoid.
 * When the stakes are high and you want to deliver your best talk—but you’re not a seasoned pro who can pull off Method 2—you’re left with only one option: 3C. You have to write a great script and memorize it cold. 3C gives everyone an option of basically ensuring that you give a great talk, with relatively low risk. You only have to do one thing: spend eternity prepping. 3C takes forever. Writing a great script means working on it a ton and carefully honing every sentence, and memorizing it to Happy Birthday level takes a huge amount more time. You’re essentially writing a play, casting yourself, and then learning the part well enough to act it on a stage with no fear of forgetting your lines. Preparing to this level is a nightmare—but if the stakes are high enough, it’s worth the time.
 * A quick note on wedding speeches. The best wedding speeches are usually Method 2 speeches, but most people are too scared to do that. But because they also don’t want to put that much effort into a wedding speech, most wedding speeches end up in 3A and 3B territory—which is why they’re usually pretty lame and boring and come along with a buzz of people quietly talking at the tables in the back. If you’re asked to give a wedding speech, don’t be a dick—it’s someone’s wedding. Either gather the guts to speak from the heart and go with Method 2, or put in the time it takes to get to 3C.

 Back to my situation. Over the past couple years, I had begun to find a groove doing not-that-high-stakes 30-to-60-minute talks using the off-the-cuff Method 2, but TED is both far higher stakes than normal and has a strict 14-minute time limit2—meaning you need to be ultra concise and make every word count—so no way I was risking it with Method 2. I was scripting it and going to Happy Birthday land. I found that 90% of other TED speakers do the same thing.

 This was gonna be a huge project.

 Luckily for August Tim, none of this was his problem. He had an all-star team of employees to carry everything out.


 This wasn’t good. With only about a month to go till the talk and a scary rehearsal in front of the TED staff only days away, I was way behind. When it came time for the rehearsal, I had gotten a loose script together, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

 The rehearsal took place in the TED office in New York, in front of a friendly but intimidating semi-circle of TED senior staff.

 I went through what I had, and it went okay until the last five minutes of the talk. I really didn’t like that part of the script, and during the rehearsal, I made the impromptu decision to go rogue and improvise, since I hated what was coming out of my mouth. This was a bad idea. What I ended up doing was a rambling and nonsensical ending that wasn’t that different from me picking words out of the dictionary at random and saying them.

 There was a lot of work to do.

 That night, the head of TED, Chris Anderson, hosted a dinner at his New York apartment for the speakers who were in town for rehearsals. If I already felt in over my head in this whole situation, meeting the other speakers didn’t help.

 Luckily, I sat down at dinner next to a normal-seeming guy.

 It was a rough start. But the dinner ended up making me feel better. It turns out that even rad people are terrified to do a TED Talk. And by the end, most people had admitted that they felt totally unqualified to be involved in this. Everyone else was going through the same thing I was.

 January Tim felt better. So much better that he didn’t do that much for the rest of the month.

 February Tim entered the world furious at every one of his co-workers. But he had no time to be angry—he had to work, every day, all day, immediately. And he did work, a lot, on the first 10 minutes of the talk—the part that was already in pretty good shape. That’s what procrastinators do.

 On February 12th, four days before my talk, I flew to Vancouver, still not fully scripted. I got to my hotel and looked out the window, and there it was:

 All TED speakers do a fully mic’ed dress rehearsal on the real stage the weekend before the conference starts. Mine was three days before my talk—and it was pretty rough, confirming to me and everyone present that I was officially not a fraud when it came to my topic. The irony of a guy rehearsing his TED Talk about how he’s a bad procrastinator, and being clearly underprepared while doing so, was not lost on anyone.

 At that point, the first 10 minutes of the talk was here:

 Not ideal, but with a lot of reps over the next three days, it was manageable. The bigger problem is that I still didn’t like the last third of the talk and kept rewriting it. So I’d practice a new ending for a while and get it here—

 —only to then rewrite the last section, putting me back here with a whole new thing to memorize:

 I fell into a routine of meeting up with fellow speaker and professor/author Adam Grant each night to show him my latest conclusion I hated. He was speaking the same day I was, right after me, but as the author of the book Give and Take, we both knew he had no choice but to be helpful anyway.

 On Monday, the day before my talk, the conference began. There were whispers about who was in attendance for the week. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. Goldie Hawn and Cher. Tony Hsieh and Travis Kalanick and Chris Sacca and Steve Case and Al Gore. Even Jaden Smith.

 Not helpful information.

 I spent most of the day in my hotel room, alternating between rewriting the last part of the talk and trying to better memorize the first part. Finally, late that night, I settled on my final script. I liked it. Finally. Only one problem.

 Back at 3A with the last part again, this time with only about 16 hours until the talk.

 I woke up the morning of my talk, did some jumping jacks in my hotel room like a psycho, and then spent four hours saying the last part over and over, eventually getting things here:

 That would have to be good enough—I was out of time. I showed up at the theater the required 90 minutes before my talk for “hair and makeup,” i.e. an upsettingly-friendly lady painting my face with stuff while I engaged in a 10-minute discussion with her about her two cats back at home. Finally free of that, I spent the final hour pacing back and forth and running through the talk in my head, and then, suddenly, I was doing this:

 I will say this: The TED stage is a weirdly comforting place. It doesn’t feel like you’re in some huge theater—it feels like you’re on some little red circle surrounded by a bunch of friendly, supportive people who want you to succeed. They designed it that way on purpose, and it works. I was less nervous doing the actual talk than I had been in any of the rehearsals.

 And as I made my way through the talk, disaster never struck. I made it through to the end without any major problems.

 VICTORY.

 When I was done, I sat in a seat they had reserved for me, blacked out, and watched the next series of talks. Immense relief.

 The week then turned from what I had openly declared to be the worst week of my life into the best possible shit ever. I never knew much about the TED conference before, but it’s very, very fun. It’s like a little luxury playland where super fancy people come to relax and watch 70 intensely stressed-out, less fancy people get on stage, one by one, and say something interesting. And you know when you’re in a store and there’s some incredibly expensive package of high-end beef jerky or some $9 peanut butter cups by some weeping Brooklyn brand or some pixie bottle of juice that amounts to $6/sip and you don’t buy those things cause who has the nerve to actually live like that? Well all that shit is everywhere on these racks as you walk around TED, and it’s all free. I was chewing for 93% of my waking time the rest of the week.

 I’d head into the theater in the morning, some ultra-organic, hyper-cleansing coconut chips in one hand, some wheatgrass extract thing in the other, a thermos full of coffee that took nine minutes for some guy to make using a bunch of test tubes resting in the pocket of the hoodie I wore all week because once your talk is done, literally nothing in the world matters anymore—and I’d plant myself in a seat in the theater and think, “I’m ready, speakers, for you to entertain and educate me. Let’s begin!”

 There’s only one stage and only one talk going on at a time, and that talk, in addition to happening live in the theater, is beamed through the entire conference center, which is full of screens and speakers. So sometimes, instead of watching talks in the theater, I’d watch in one of the many cozy simulcast viewing areas—maybe while lying on one of the hundreds of beanbags. Maybe while stretched out on grass under a tree.

 Or maybe in a plastic ball pit.

 Glorious.

 Then it ended and I went home and everything costs money again and I have to do stuff again. Upsetting.

 Anyway, that was my TED experience. To all those scared public speakers out there, I’d just say: the fear and dread of public speaking is almost always much worse than the actual experience of doing it. Everyone is just as uncomfortable with it as you are, and if you just put in a good amount of preparation, it almost always ends up going just fine. And then you’ll be really happy you went through all the hell leading up to it. So go for it.

 ___________

 UPDATE: Here’s the talk

 ______

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ______

 Public speaking is only one of life’s great perils. Three others to watch out for:

 The Great Perils of Social Interaction

 11 Awkward Things About Email

 Why You Secretly Hate Bars

 1. 85% chance that this isn’t a proper usage of a semicolon. But that means there’s a 15% chance that it’s correct! FYI—given my eternal lack of understanding about semicolons, anytime you see me use a semicolon, it means I’m in Wild West mode in that moment and generally feeling very bold.↩

 2. All TED speakers are assigned a time limit by TED, based on what the TED staff thinks is an appropriate time for you and your particular topic. Times range from five or six minutes to 18 minutes. 18 minutes used to be TED’s standard talk length, but in recent years they’ve cut that down to 14 minutes, and now only a few speakers are allowed more than 14. They’re super strict about speakers not going over their assigned time, and there’s a big intimidating countdown screen in the back of the theater that the speaker can see the whole time.↩

 1. “TED’s Chris Anderson” (Departures)↩

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You’ve probably heard this Seinfeld joke:
 According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. 
Knowing humans, this shouldn’t be that surprising. I’ve mentioned before that we all have this problem where we’re weirdly obsessed with what other people think of us, so it makes sense that public speaking should be our collective phobia.
But then we also live in a world where public speaking can happen to any of us at any time. Even if you never give an official “talk,” there’ll be some other time when you have to give a big toast at a wedding or present in front of a big group at work or speak at a funeral or some other ceremony. Very few of us are safe.
Over the last couple years, as I’ve done a small amount of Wait But Why-related public speaking, I’ve been able to slowly get over the fear. I’ve learned that if you just be yourself and talk like you normally do, it’s usually received well by the audience, even if you’re clearly nervous.
And that was all fine until August of 2015, when I was invited to do a TED Talk.
The issue is, a TED Talk is not a speaking gig. In a speaking gig, I stand in front of a group of people and say stuff. That’s not what a TED Talk is. A TED Talk is a widely-distributed short film, except the only actor is my face and the only plot is me saying words out of my face and the only choreographer is my nervous pacing and awkward arm-flailing, and instead of a bunch of cuts and different shots and a long editing process, there’s just one do-or-die take, with no second chances.
No, what? No. Obviously not. Who would ever agree to do something like that.
But here’s the problem: Who turns down TED? Not really an option, right? Let’s pause to go through some background:
TED actually started way back in 1984, founded by Richard Saul Wurman, as a small, Silicon Valley annual gathering. The name is an acronym for Wurman’s intention for the focus of the conference: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Through the 1990s, the conference grew both in attendance and in the scope of its topics.
In 2002, media entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED from Wurman (through a non-profit he owns) and has run it ever since. He broadened TED’s content focus to “ideas worth spreading,” and in 2006, TED began doing something that would launch the brand into the stratosphere—they put the talks online.
I first heard of TED in 2008, when someone sent me Jill Bolte Taylor’s amazing talk about what she learned from the experience of having a stroke. You probably first heard of TED around the same time. And a few years later, almost everyone knew what a TED Talk was. Anderson describes TED’s rise to global prominence like this:
 It used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it’s about a million people a day watching TED Talks online. When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as “ideas worth spreading,” building a big website around it. The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world. 1
 The TED brand has expanded in a lot of ways, but maybe most notably through TEDx conferences. This can be a little confusing, so here’s the deal: There’s still one annual TED conference, a week-long event in Vancouver, and it’s run by the TED staff. A TEDx conference is independently run, but it has to follow a set of guidelines laid out by TED so that it fits with the overall brand. There are now over 1,500 annual TEDx events that happen in over 130 countries, some of them major, high-profile conferences;1 others tiny and little-known. The best TEDx talks are posted on TED.com, alongside the talks that happen at the main conference in Vancouver.
The thing I was asked to speak at was the big Vancouver one. I say this not only to brag, but also to explain why this whole thing had me freaking out so much. The same thing that made it extra extra scary also made it extra extra not turn-downable.
So I accepted.
As I thought through what I had just committed myself to, I identified a number of concerns, like me not having a topic, or the fact that TED Talks are short and narrow and I tend to be the opposite. But perhaps most worrying was the prospect of this being an Exact Script situation. Let me explain (if you’d rather just read the rest of my TED story, skip down to the comic)—
When you speak in public, you have three main options about how to go about it, and they fall along a spectrum:
   
 1) Wing it 
At the cockiest end of the spectrum, you have the option of completely winging it. This involves no planning—you just get up there and figure out what you want to say once you’re talking. You be yourself and let the moment carry you.
This takes some hardcore self-confidence, and it only works if you’re really good, and if you’re in the right mood and in front of the right crowd. It’s a really great way to do a really bad talk, and should probably be kept to super-casual things like impromptu dinner toasts.
 2) Talk through a set structure 
Here, you have a clear structure in your head or a list of bullet points on a notecard, and then you simply talk through it. But importantly, you haven’t scripted sentences exactly—if you did the talk five times, it would come out differently each time, but the general content would be the same. To do this, you have to be super comfortable with the content of what you want to say.
When you use this method, you come off like a human, because you’re actually coming up with real sentences as you go, which is how a normal person talks. Your brain is focused on the content of what you’re saying, and your words are emerging directly from your current thoughts.
This isn’t an exact point on the spectrum but a range. On the left side of the range, closer to the winging it end, you have a few general bullets or slides, but you’ve planned almost nothing beyond that. Toward the right side, you’ve planned out almost exactly what you want to say, including the placement and wording of certain jokes or other key sentences, but it still comes out a little differently each time you do it.
 3) Follow an exact script 
Here, on the other extreme end of the spectrum, you write the exact script of the talk ahead of time and deliver the talk on script, word for word. Some people might immediately assume this method will make a talk impersonal and robotic, but it’s more complicated than that—the exact script method has its own spectrum:
   
 3A) Read off a script 
This is simple: You write a script, and the talk is you reading it out loud. During the talk, you’re just acting as the messenger—you’re a functional medium connecting the thoughts of your past self to the present audience.
This is the safest and least stressful way to give a talk and it usually puts the audience to sleep, regardless of how good the content is. Audiences have a fine-tuned radar for when they’re listening to a person say something versus when they’re listening to a person recite something—in the latter case, the speaker isn’t really there in the room with the audience, which has a way of making everyone really want to start playing with their phone.
 3B) Just barely memorized  
As you move along the scripted spectrum from 3A to 3B, you go from entirely reading, to reading mostly but with some looks up at the audience, to mostly looking up at the audience with some glances down to the paper, to totally memorized with no paper in hand.
A paperless 3B speaker won’t come off much different than a 3A speaker. The 3B speaker isn’t technically reading off of a script, but he might as well be. Because his memorization of the script is fragile, his mind isn’t focused on the content of what he’s saying—it’s focused on reciting the words he memorized. He’ll struggle to make eye contact, and his sentences will come off just robotic enough to make the audience clear that he’s a mostly-unthinking messenger of a written script. Phones will be reached for.
The main difference is that while 3A is the safest method of all, 3B is the riskiest. Going for it without the paper when you only barely have the talk memorized is a great way to disastrously go blank mid-talk.
 3C) Happy-Birthday-level memorized 
When you get to 3C, you don’t just have the script memorized, you have it memorized cold. And that’s a key distinction. If you’re in a restaurant and your table starts singing Happy Birthday to someone you’re with, you can join in with them even if you’re simultaneously taking a picture of the birthday girl, moving some stuff out of the way so the waiter has a place on the table to put the cake, observing the other people in the restaurant looking over and wishing this wasn’t happening, and four other things. It’s no problem—you can still sing the lyrics. You can do that because the lyrics to Happy Birthday aren’t coming out of your conscious mind—they’re coming out of your subconscious. They’re coming out automatically, and your conscious mind can focus entirely on other things while you’re singing.
That’s how well-memorized 3C is.
The people at TED refer to two tests you need to pass to qualify as Happy-Birthday-level memorized:
If you record yourself saying the talk and play it back at 2x speed, can you say it out loud while it’s playing and stay ahead of the recording?
Can you recite the talk with no problem while simultaneously doing an unrelated task that requires attention, like following a recipe and measuring out the ingredients into a bowl?
Memorizing something to this degree might seem like a daunting task, but everyone who’s ever acted in a play has done it. It’s not as impossible as it sounds, because the human brain is able to engrave things to that level if you just rehearse enough and sleep on it enough times.
When a speaker has memorized their talk to this extent, they can be in the room with the audience, even though they’re reciting a previously-written script, because their conscious mind is freed up to think about what they’re saying instead of tied up with the task of remembering which line comes next. This allows the speaker to make eye contact and to bring their live personality into the picture to reflect the words being said in real time.
I’d sum up the pros and cons of the five options like this:
   
On this chart, all three items in the key are bad. Those are the three things that can suck about public speaking. So high-up dots are bad. Looking at this chart, here are some conclusions:
If and only if the talk is super low-stakes—like an impromptu toast at a group dinner—winging it is a good option. It’s the only method that takes no prep, and it’s also the least robotic, which is perfect in casual situations where seeming like you prepped is awkward. But unless you’re very rad, winging a big talk is a bad idea.
Method 2 is the best overall choice much of the time, scoring well on all three criteria. It’s not that hard to prep for, you sound like a human, and it isn’t that stressful because with nothing to memorize, there’s nothing to forget, so if you know your material well and you’re feeling confident, things will go fine. The worst case scenario is that you lose your confidence during the talk and flounder through it. That’s a bad outcome, but it’s not a disaster. But Method 2 does require you to be calm and collected, so if you’re really scared of public speaking, it’s probably not the way to go. It also leaves you open to variability—depending on how the words come out, you might deliver a better or worse talk—so if the stakes are super high, it’s not a great option unless you’re a seasoned pro.
Method 3A—reading off a script—is a pretty bad option, with one huge plus: It’s the least scary by far. For people who are terrified of public speaking, they may just want to cling to Method 3A’s leg and call it a day. But the safety comes at a high cost, in that you’re leaving yourself with almost no chance of delivering a great talk and a high chance of having the audience tune out. It should be noted that in certain high-gravitas situations, when it’s more of an official speech than a talk, the clearly-recited tone of a read speech can be appropriate, and even desired—like a graduation speech. In other cases, someone can be skilled enough at reading a script that they can do so in a human-seeming way. Obama is a good example—you often forget that he’s reading from a teleprompter most of the time you see him talk. But very few of us find ourselves involved with graduation speeches or teleprompters.
Method 3B—being memorized but just barely—is the worst of all worlds and should never happen. Never ever. If you’re at 3A and you decide to venture into memorization land and ditch the paper, you better be prepared to put in the time to get all the way to 3C, because here’s the deal: Even if you feel like you have things memorized when you’re alone in your house, once you’re in front of the audience, all of these new factors come into play. Your adrenaline is pumping and super-charging your muscles, your nerves take a shit, and a million new things enter your consciousness—the faces of the audience, the clock ticking down with your time limit, your self-awareness of how you’re standing and what you’re doing with your hands, your regret over messing up a sentence 30 seconds ago. And that well-memorized talk is suddenly not coming to you so easily. 3B is all of the robotic-ness of 3A with none of the safety. Avoid.
When the stakes are high and you want to deliver your best talk—but you’re not a seasoned pro who can pull off Method 2—you’re left with only one option: 3C. You have to write a great script and memorize it cold. 3C gives everyone an option of basically ensuring that you give a great talk, with relatively low risk. You only have to do one thing: spend eternity prepping. 3C takes forever. Writing a great script means working on it a ton and carefully honing every sentence, and memorizing it to Happy Birthday level takes a huge amount more time. You’re essentially writing a play, casting yourself, and then learning the part well enough to act it on a stage with no fear of forgetting your lines. Preparing to this level is a nightmare—but if the stakes are high enough, it’s worth the time.
A quick note on wedding speeches. The best wedding speeches are usually Method 2 speeches, but most people are too scared to do that. But because they also don’t want to put that much effort into a wedding speech, most wedding speeches end up in 3A and 3B territory—which is why they’re usually pretty lame and boring and come along with a buzz of people quietly talking at the tables in the back. If you’re asked to give a wedding speech, don’t be a dick—it’s someone’s wedding. Either gather the guts to speak from the heart and go with Method 2, or put in the time it takes to get to 3C.
Back to my situation. Over the past couple years, I had begun to find a groove doing not-that-high-stakes 30-to-60-minute talks using the off-the-cuff Method 2, but TED is both far higher stakes than normal and has a strict 14-minute time limit2—meaning you need to be ultra concise and make every word count—so no way I was risking it with Method 2. I was scripting it and going to Happy Birthday land. I found that 90% of other TED speakers do the same thing.
This was gonna be a huge project.
Luckily for August Tim, none of this was his problem. He had an all-star team of employees to carry everything out.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
This wasn’t good. With only about a month to go till the talk and a scary rehearsal in front of the TED staff only days away, I was way behind. When it came time for the rehearsal, I had gotten a loose script together, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it.
The rehearsal took place in the TED office in New York, in front of a friendly but intimidating semi-circle of TED senior staff.
   
I went through what I had, and it went okay until the last five minutes of the talk. I really didn’t like that part of the script, and during the rehearsal, I made the impromptu decision to go rogue and improvise, since I hated what was coming out of my mouth. This was a bad idea. What I ended up doing was a rambling and nonsensical ending that wasn’t that different from me picking words out of the dictionary at random and saying them.
   
There was a lot of work to do.
That night, the head of TED, Chris Anderson, hosted a dinner at his New York apartment for the speakers who were in town for rehearsals. If I already felt in over my head in this whole situation, meeting the other speakers didn’t help.
   
   
Luckily, I sat down at dinner next to a normal-seeming guy.
   
   
   
   
   
It was a rough start. But the dinner ended up making me feel better. It turns out that even rad people are terrified to do a TED Talk. And by the end, most people had admitted that they felt totally unqualified to be involved in this. Everyone else was going through the same thing I was.
January Tim felt better. So much better that he didn’t do that much for the rest of the month.
   
February Tim entered the world furious at every one of his co-workers. But he had no time to be angry—he had to work, every day, all day, immediately. And he did work, a lot, on the first 10 minutes of the talk—the part that was already in pretty good shape. That’s what procrastinators do.
On February 12th, four days before my talk, I flew to Vancouver, still not fully scripted. I got to my hotel and looked out the window, and there it was:
   
All TED speakers do a fully mic’ed dress rehearsal on the real stage the weekend before the conference starts. Mine was three days before my talk—and it was pretty rough, confirming to me and everyone present that I was officially not a fraud when it came to my topic. The irony of a guy rehearsing his TED Talk about how he’s a bad procrastinator, and being clearly underprepared while doing so, was not lost on anyone.
At that point, the first 10 minutes of the talk was here:
   
Not ideal, but with a lot of reps over the next three days, it was manageable. The bigger problem is that I still didn’t like the last third of the talk and kept rewriting it. So I’d practice a new ending for a while and get it here—
   
—only to then rewrite the last section, putting me back here with a whole new thing to memorize:
   
I fell into a routine of meeting up with fellow speaker and professor/author Adam Grant each night to show him my latest conclusion I hated. He was speaking the same day I was, right after me, but as the author of the book  Give and Take , we both knew he had no choice but to be helpful anyway.
On Monday, the day before my talk, the conference began. There were whispers about who was in attendance for the week. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. Goldie Hawn and Cher. Tony Hsieh and Travis Kalanick and Chris Sacca and Steve Case and Al Gore. Even Jaden Smith.
 Not helpful information. 
I spent most of the day in my hotel room, alternating between rewriting the last part of the talk and trying to better memorize the first part. Finally, late that night, I settled on my final script. I liked it. Finally. Only one problem.
   
Back at 3A with the last part again, this time with only about 16 hours until the talk.
I woke up the morning of my talk, did some jumping jacks in my hotel room like a psycho, and then spent four hours saying the last part over and over, eventually getting things here:
   
That would have to be good enough—I was out of time. I showed up at the theater the required 90 minutes before my talk for “hair and makeup,” i.e. an upsettingly-friendly lady painting my face with stuff while I engaged in a 10-minute discussion with her about her two cats back at home. Finally free of that, I spent the final hour pacing back and forth and running through the talk in my head, and then, suddenly, I was doing this:
   
I will say this: The TED stage is a weirdly comforting place. It doesn’t feel like you’re in some huge theater—it feels like you’re on some little red circle surrounded by a bunch of friendly, supportive people who want you to succeed. They designed it that way on purpose, and it works. I was less nervous doing the actual talk than I had been in any of the rehearsals.
And as I made my way through the talk, disaster never struck. I made it through to the end without any major problems.
 VICTORY. 
When I was done, I sat in a seat they had reserved for me, blacked out, and watched the next series of talks. Immense relief.
The week then turned from what I had openly declared to be the worst week of my life into the best possible shit ever. I never knew much about the TED conference before, but it’s very, very fun. It’s like a little luxury playland where super fancy people come to relax and watch 70 intensely stressed-out, less fancy people get on stage, one by one, and say something interesting. And you know when you’re in a store and there’s some incredibly expensive package of high-end beef jerky or some $9 peanut butter cups by some weeping Brooklyn brand or some pixie bottle of juice that amounts to $6/sip and you don’t buy those things cause who has the nerve to actually live like that? Well all that shit is everywhere on these racks as you walk around TED, and it’s all free. I was chewing for 93% of my waking time the rest of the week.
I’d head into the theater in the morning, some ultra-organic, hyper-cleansing coconut chips in one hand, some wheatgrass extract thing in the other, a thermos full of coffee that took nine minutes for some guy to make using a bunch of test tubes resting in the pocket of the hoodie I wore all week because once your talk is done, literally nothing in the world matters anymore—and I’d plant myself in a seat in the theater and think, “I’m ready, speakers, for you to entertain and educate me. Let’s begin!”
There’s only one stage and only one talk going on at a time, and that talk, in addition to happening live in the theater, is beamed through the entire conference center, which is full of screens and speakers. So sometimes, instead of watching talks in the theater, I’d watch in one of the many cozy simulcast viewing areas—maybe while lying on one of the hundreds of beanbags. Maybe while stretched out on grass under a tree.
   
Or maybe in a plastic ball pit.
   
Glorious.
Then it ended and I went home and everything costs money again and I have to do stuff again. Upsetting.
Anyway, that was my TED experience. To all those scared public speakers out there, I’d just say: the fear and dread of public speaking is almost always much worse than the actual experience of doing it. Everyone is just as uncomfortable with it as you are, and if you just put in a good amount of preparation, it almost always ends up going just fine. And then you’ll be really happy you went through all the hell leading up to it. So go for it.
___________
 UPDATE: Here’s the talk  
 ______ 
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Public speaking is only one of life’s great perils. Three others to watch out for:
  The Great Perils of Social Interaction  
  11 Awkward Things About Email  
  Why You Secretly Hate Bars
Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-story.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html
Horizontal History — Wait But Why
2016-01-13
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.</p>
<p>The reason history is so hard is that it’s so <em>soft</em>. To truly, fully understand a time period, an event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.</p>
<p>That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the key people involved <em>at the time</em> can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators.</p>
<p>And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to <em>simplify </em>things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too complicated and mysterious for us to understand.</p>
<p>Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—the <em>us </em>guys—and they detest the bad guys—the <em>them</em> guys<em>—</em>and everyone’s happy. Stories written for adults aren’t that different—you loved <em>Shawshank </em>and <em>Braveheart</em> and <em>Star Wars</em>, right?</p>
<p>So when it comes to the story we’re all a <em>part </em>of, we most certainly want to feel the same way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.</p>
<p>The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. <em>Someone </em>has to be Jafar, right? Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything close to the full, real, <em>complete </em>story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one even <em>knows </em>the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.</p>
<p>This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.</p>
<p>The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the US while Aladdinizing the other side.)</p>
<p>This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine. Hordes of people on both sides of what is an <em>insanely</em> complicated story are red in the face with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or bad.</p>
<p>So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my head.</p>
<p>Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who believe <em>both</em> of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like history. I’ve learned this <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">from</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/absurdly-famous-people-probably-dont-know-enough.html">experience</a>.</p>
<p>This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and don’t know.</p>
<p>So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history that’s indisputably black-and-white—<em>who </em>happened when.</p>
<p>Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars, we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.</p>
<p>But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.</p>
<p>Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each <em>other</em>. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a <em>vertical </em>sense.</p>
<p>And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an especially <em>complete</em> picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern times are all <em>about. </em></p>
<p>Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work <i>On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres </i>in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better picture of the <em>times</em>. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take on a distinct <em>personality</em>. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s <em>horizontally</em>, like cutting out a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.</p>
<p>A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view of different times. Both involve a lot of names.</p>
<p>Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about <em>who </em>I chose to include. I tried to remove my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like <em>Time</em>. I searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an exhaustive list.</p>
<p><strong>Horizontal History—First Crack:</strong></p>
<p>For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people lived, especially <em>in relation to each other</em>.</p>
<p>Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/My-generations.png"></a></p>
<p>If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the 70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and 40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/My-generations-decades.png"></a></p>
<p>But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get oriented:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Older-decades.png"></a></p>
<p>Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes, and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age. So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.</p>
<p>Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.</p>
<p>Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Generations-4.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.</p>
<p><strong>Horizontal History—Second Crack:</strong></p>
<p>For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I Think It Might Be Fun.</p>
<p>This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth year <em>and </em>the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.</p>
<p>As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down L with <em>way </em>more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out about half of the recent names. <em>But</em>, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016 names into two groups by category and here they are below:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-Recent-1-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-Recent-2-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016 names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-4.jpg"></a></p><p>
[<strong>Note: </strong>A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-Sideways.jpg">Here it is.</a>]
</p><p>Some overall thoughts:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Lifespans are unfair.</strong> Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years before the other.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Murder is dickish.</strong> Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut someone <em>else’s </em>bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when this other guy just took a scissors and <em>snipped </em>his bar.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><b>On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this diagram. </b>This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not 2.5 inches of diagram cool.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Some people aren’t easily categorized<em>. </em></strong>I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin into a category.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder” thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks.<em> </em></strong>I know. But it was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?</li>
</ul>
<p>Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:</p>
<p>I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his <em>Requiem</em> the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1780.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all happened right around the year 1610.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1610.png"></a></p>
<p>And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1510.png"></a></p>
<p>But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a bigger story:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Renaissance-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism (today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.</p>
<p>Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing <em>On the Origin of Species </em>(1859), Dickens published <em>A Tale of Two Cities </em>(1859) and <em>Great Expectations </em>(1861), Lewis Carroll published <em>Alice in Wonderland </em>(1865), Dostoyevsky published <em>Crime and Punishment</em> (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with <em>War and Peace</em> (1869). These guys were all in their primes <em>at the same time</em>. So was Lincoln, before some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1860s-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="http://eepurl.com/Ffj9D">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More Wait But Why history posts:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story</a></strong> – written after my visit to Kurdish Iraq</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html"><strong>Putting Time in Perspective</strong></a> – a diagram to help visualize everything that happened between the Big Bang and now</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/the-death-toll-comparison-breakdown.html"><strong>The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown</strong></a> – a diagram to put famous death tolls in perspective</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">The American Presidents series</a></strong></p>
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 Horizontal History

 January 13, 2016 By Tim Urban


 Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.

 The reason history is so hard is that it’s so soft. To truly, fully understand a time period, an event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.

 That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the key people involved at the time can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators.

 And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to simplify things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too complicated and mysterious for us to understand.

 Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—the us guys—and they detest the bad guys—the them guys—and everyone’s happy. Stories written for adults aren’t that different—you loved Shawshank and Braveheart and Star Wars, right?

 So when it comes to the story we’re all a part of, we most certainly want to feel the same way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.

 The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. Someone has to be Jafar, right? Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything close to the full, real, complete story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one even knows the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.

 This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.

 The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the US while Aladdinizing the other side.)

 This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine. Hordes of people on both sides of what is an insanely complicated story are red in the face with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.

 Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or bad.

 So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my head.

 Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who believe both of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like history. I’ve learned this from experience.

 This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and don’t know.

 So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history that’s indisputably black-and-white—who happened when.

 Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars, we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.

 But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.

 Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each other. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a vertical sense.

 And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an especially complete picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern times are all about.

 Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better picture of the times. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take on a distinct personality. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s horizontally, like cutting out a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.

 A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view of different times. Both involve a lot of names.

 Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about who I chose to include. I tried to remove my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like Time. I searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an exhaustive list.

 Horizontal History—First Crack:

 For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people lived, especially in relation to each other.

 Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:

 If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the 70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and 40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:

 But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get oriented:

 Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes, and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age. So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.

 Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.

 Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.

 Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.

 Horizontal History—Second Crack:

 For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I Think It Might Be Fun.

 This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth year and the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.

 As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down L with way more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out about half of the recent names. But, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016 names into two groups by category and here they are below:

 Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016 names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.

 [Note: A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. Here it is.]

 Some overall thoughts:

 * Lifespans are unfair. Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years before the other.
 * Murder is dickish. Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut someone else’s bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when this other guy just took a scissors and snipped his bar.
 * On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this diagram. This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not 2.5 inches of diagram cool.
 * Some people aren’t easily categorized. I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin into a category.
 * Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder” thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks. I know. But it was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?

 Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:

 I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.

 I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all happened right around the year 1610.

 And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.

 But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a bigger story:

 While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism (today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.

 Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing On the Origin of Species (1859), Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland (1865), Dostoyevsky published Crime and Punishment (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with War and Peace (1869). These guys were all in their primes at the same time. So was Lincoln, before some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.

 So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ___________

 More Wait But Why history posts:

 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story – written after my visit to Kurdish Iraq

 Putting Time in Perspective – a diagram to help visualize everything that happened between the Big Bang and now

 The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown – a diagram to put famous death tolls in perspective

 The American Presidents series

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Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.
The reason history is so hard is that it’s so soft. To truly, fully understand a time period, an event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.
That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the key people involved at the time can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators.
And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to simplify things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too complicated and mysterious for us to understand.
Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—the us guys—and they detest the bad guys—the them guys—and everyone’s happy. Stories written for adults aren’t that different—you loved Shawshank and Braveheart and Star Wars, right?
So when it comes to the story we’re all a part of, we most certainly want to feel the same way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.
The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. Someone has to be Jafar, right? Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything close to the full, real, complete story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one even knows the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.
This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.
The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the US while Aladdinizing the other side.)
This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine. Hordes of people on both sides of what is an insanely complicated story are red in the face with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.
Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or bad.
So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my head.
Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who believe both of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like history. I’ve learned this from experience.
This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and don’t know.
So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history that’s indisputably black-and-white—who happened when.
Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars, we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.
But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.
Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each other. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a vertical sense.
And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an especially complete picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern times are all about.  
Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better picture of the times. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take on a distinct personality. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s horizontally, like cutting out a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.
A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view of different times. Both involve a lot of names.
Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about who I chose to include. I tried to remove my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like Time. I searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an exhaustive list.
 Horizontal History—First Crack: 
For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people lived, especially in relation to each other.
Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:
   
If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the 70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and 40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:
   
But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get oriented:
   
Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes, and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age. So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.
Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.
Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.
   
Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.
 Horizontal History—Second Crack: 
For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I Think It Might Be Fun.
This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth year and the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.
As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down L with way more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out about half of the recent names. But, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016 names into two groups by category and here they are below:
   
   
Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016 names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.
    
[Note: A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. Here it is.]
 Some overall thoughts:
 Lifespans are unfair. Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years before the other.
 Murder is dickish. Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut someone else’s bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when this other guy just took a scissors and snipped his bar.
 On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this diagram. This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not 2.5 inches of diagram cool.
 Some people aren’t easily categorized.  I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin into a category.
 Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder” thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks.  I know. But it was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?
Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:
I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.
   
I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all happened right around the year 1610.
   
And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.
   
But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a bigger story:
   
While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism (today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.
Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing On the Origin of Species (1859), Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland (1865), Dostoyevsky published Crime and Punishment (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with War and Peace (1869). These guys were all in their primes at the same time. So was Lincoln, before some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.
   
So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.
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If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!
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___________
 More Wait But Why history posts: 
  From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story  – written after my visit to Kurdish Iraq
  Putting Time in Perspective  – a diagram to help visualize everything that happened between the Big Bang and now
  The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown  – a diagram to put famous death tolls in perspective
  The American Presidents series
Horizontal History — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars — Wait But Why
2015-08-16
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><i>This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, </i><i><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">start with Part 1</a>.</i></p>
<p><strong>Pre-Post Note: </strong>I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal. But like the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">Tesla post</a>, I decided as I researched that this was A) a supremely important topic that will only become more important in the years to come, and B) something most people don’t know nearly enough about. My weeks of research and discussions with Musk and others built me an in-depth, tree-trunk understanding of what’s happening in what I’m calling The Story of Humans and Space—one that has totally reframed my mental picture of the future (yet again). And as I planned out what to include in the post, I wanted to make sure every Wait But Why reader ended up with the same foundation moving forward—because with everything that’s coming, we’re gonna need it. So like the Tesla post, this post became a full situation. Even the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/the-spacex-post-progress-meter.html">progress updates</a> leading up to its publication became a full situation.</p>
<p>Thanks for your patience. I know you’d prefer this not to be a site that updates every two months, and I would too. The Tesla and SpaceX posts were special cases, and you can expect a return to more normal-length WBW posts now that they’re done.</p>
<p>About the post itself: There are three main parts. Part 1 provides the context and background, Part 2 explores the “Why” part of colonizing Mars, and Part 3 digs into the “How.” To make reading this post as accessible as possible, it’s broken into five pages, each about the length of a normal WBW post, and you can jump to any part of the post easily by clicking the links in the Table of Contents below. We’re also trying two new things, both coming in the next couple days:</p>
<p><strong>1) PDF and ebook options: </strong>We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview <a href="https://www.waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-and-Why-SpaceX-Will-Colonize-Mars-preview.pdf">here</a>), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-musk"></a><a href="http://amzn.to/1RkVeEm"></a></p>
<p><strong>2) <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/09/spacex-audio-stuff.html">An audio version</a></strong><strong>. </strong>You can find an unabridged audio version of the post, read by me, as well as a discussion about the post between Andrew and me <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/09/spacex-audio-stuff.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Contents </p>
<p><strong><a href="#part1">Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/2#part2">Part 2: Musk’s Mission</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/3#part3">Part 3: How to Colonize Mars</a></strong><strong><br />
</strong>→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/3#phase1">Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space</a><br />
<strong>→ </strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/4#phase2">Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel</a><br />
<strong>→ </strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/5#phase3">Phase 3: Colonize Mars</a></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/5#future">A SpaceX Future</a></strong></p>
<hr />
<p><strong><br />
2365 AD, Ganymede</strong></p>
<p><em>One more day until departure.</em> It was so surreal to picture actually <em>being </em>there that she still didn’t really believe it would happen. All those things she had always heard about—buildings that were constructed hundreds of years before the first human set foot on Ganymede; animals the size of a house; oceans the size of her whole world; tropical beaches; the famous blue sky; the giant sun that’s so close it can burn your skin; and the weirdest part—<em>no Jupiter hovering overhead</em>. Having seen it all in so many movies, she felt like she was going to visit a legendary movie set. It was too much to think about all at once. For now, she just had to focus on making sure she had everything she needed and saying goodbye to everyone—it would be a long time before she would see them again…</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong><a></a>Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space</strong></p>
<p>About six million years ago, a very important female great ape had two children. One of her children would go on to become the common ancestor of all chimpanzees. The other would give birth to a line that would one day include the entire human race. While the descendants of her first child would end up being pretty normal and monkey-ish, as time passed, strange things began to happen with the lineage of the other.<a href="#footnote-1-3902">1</a><a href="#footnote2-1-3902">1</a> <strong><sup>← click these</sup></strong></p>
<p>We’re not quite sure why, but over the next six million years, our ancestral line started to do something no creatures on Earth had ever done before—they woke up.</p>
<p>It happened slowly and gradually through the thousands of generations the same way your brain slowly comes to in the first few seconds after you rouse from sleep. But as the clarity increased, our ancestors started to look around and, for the very first time, <em>wonder</em>.</p>
<p>Emerging from a 3.6-billion-year dream, life on Earth had its first questions.</p>
<p><em>What is this big room we’re in, and who put us here? What is that bright yellow circle on the ceiling and where does it go every night? Where does the ocean end and what happens when you get there? Where are all the dead people now that they’re not here anymore? </em></p>
<p>We had discovered our species’ great mystery novel—<em>Where Are We?</em>—and we wanted to learn how to read it.</p>
<p>As the light of human consciousness grew brighter and brighter, we began to arrive at answers that seemed to make sense. Maybe we were on top of a floating disk, and maybe that disk was on top of a huge turtle. Maybe the pinpricks of light above us at night are a glimpse into what lies beyond this big room—and maybe that’s where we go when we die. Maybe if we can find the place where the ceiling meets the floor, we can poke our heads through and see all the super fun stuff on the other side.<a href="#footnote2-2-3902">2</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Flammarion1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Around 10,000 years ago, isolated tribes of humans began to merge together and form the first cities. In larger communities, people were able to talk to each other about this mystery novel we had found, comparing notes across tribes and through the generations. As the techniques for learning became more sophisticated and the clues piled up, new discoveries surfaced.</p>
<p>The world was apparently a ball, not a disk. Which meant that the ceiling was actually a larger sphere surrounding us. The sizes of the other objects floating out there in the sphere with us, and the distances between them, were vaster than we had ever imagined. And then, something upsetting:</p>
<p>The sun wasn’t revolving around us. We were revolving around the sun.</p>
<p>This was a <em>super </em>unwarm, unfuzzy discovery. Why the <em>hell</em> weren’t we in the center of things? What did that mean?</p>
<p><em>Where are we?</em></p>
<p>The sphere was already unpleasantly big—if we weren’t in the center of it, were we just on a random ball inside of it, kind of for no apparent reason? Could this really be what was happening?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Tiny-Earth.png"></a></p>
<p>Scary.</p>
<p>Then things got worse.</p>
<p>It seemed that the pinpricks of light on the edge of the sphere weren’t what we thought they were—they were other suns like ours. And they were out there floating just like our sun—which means <em>we weren’t inside of a sphere at all</em>. Not only was our planet not the center of things, even our <em>sun </em>was just a random dude out there, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothingness.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Tiny-Sun.png"></a></p>
<p><em>Scary.</em></p>
<p>Our sun turned out to be a little piece of something much bigger. A beautiful, vast cloud of billions of suns. The everything of everything.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Milky-Way.jpg"></a></p>
<p>At least we had that. Until we realized that it wasn’t everything, it was this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Milky-Way-small.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Darkness.</p>
<p>The better our tools and understanding became, the more we could zoom out, and the more we zoomed out, the more things sucked. We were deciphering the pages of <em>Where Are We?</em> at our own peril, and we had deciphered our way right into the knowledge that we’re unbelievably alone, living on a lonely island inside a lonely island inside a lonely island, buried in layers of isolation, with no one to talk to.</p>
<p>That’s our situation.</p>
<p>In the most recent 1% of our species’ short existence, we have become the first life on Earth to know about the Situation—and we’ve been having a collective existential crisis ever since.</p>
<p>You really can’t blame us. Imagine not realizing that the universe is a thing and <em>then realizing the universe is a thing</em>. It’s a <em>lot </em>to take in.</p>
<p>Most of us handle it by living in a pleasant delusion, pretending that the only place we live is in an endless land of colors and warmth. We’re like this guy, who’s doing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bWyhj7siEY&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=13s">everything he possibly can</a> to ignore the Situation:<a href="#footnote2-3-3902">3</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/zipgif1.gif"></a></p>
<p>And our best friend for this activity? The clear blue sky. The blue sky seems like it was <em>invented </em>to help humans pretend the Situation doesn’t exist, serving as the perfect whimsical backdrop to shield us from reality.</p>
<p>Then nighttime happens, and there’s the Situation, staring us right in the face.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Stars.jpg"></a></p>
<p><i>Oh yeah…</i></p>
<p>This la-di-da → oh yeah… → la-di-da → oh yeah… merry-go-round of psychosis was, for most of recent history, the extent of our relationship with the Situation.</p>
<p>But in the last 60 years, that relationship has vaulted to a whole new level. During World War II, missile technology leapt forward,<a href="#footnote-2-3902">2</a> and for the first time, a new, mind-blowing concept was possible—</p>
<p><em>Space travel.</em></p>
<p>For thousands of years, The Story of Humans and Space had been the story of staring out and wondering. The possibility of people leaving our Earth island and <em>venturing out</em> <em>into space</em> burst open the human spirit of adventure.</p>
<p>I imagine a similar feeling in the people of the 15th century, during the Age of Discovery, when we were working our way through the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cantino_planisphere_1502@0.5x-scaled.jpg">world map chapter</a> of <em>Where Are We?</em> and the notion of cross-ocean voyages dazzled people’s imaginations. If you asked a child in 1495 what they wanted to be when they grew up, “an ocean explorer” would probably have been a common response.</p>
<p>In 1970, if you asked a child the same question, the answer would be, “an astronaut”—i.e. <em>a Situation explorer</em>.</p>
<p>WWII advanced the possibility of human space travel, but it was in late 1957, when the Soviets launched the first man-made object into orbit, the adorable <a href="http://www.bisbos.com/images_spacecraft/sputnik_1_800.jpg">Sputnik 1</a>, that space travel became <em>the </em>defining quest of the world’s great powers.</p>
<p>At the time, the Cold War was in full throttle, and the US and Soviets had their measuring sticks out for an internationally-televised penis-measuring contest. With the successful launch of Sputnik, the Soviet penis bolted out by a few centimeters, horrifying the Americans.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Contest1.png"></a></p>
<p>To the Soviets, putting a satellite into space before the US was proof that Soviet technology was superior to American technology, which in turn was put forward as proof, for all the world to see, that communism was a system superior to capitalism.</p>
<p>Eight months later, NASA was born.</p>
<p>The Space Race had begun, and NASA’s first order of business would be to get a man into space, and then a man into full orbit, preferably both before the Soviets. The US was not to be shown up again.</p>
<p>In 1959, NASA launched Project Mercury to carry out the mission. They were on the verge of success when in April of 1961, the Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into a full orbit around the Earth, making the first human in space <em>and</em> in orbit a Soviet.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Contest2.png"></a></p>
<p>It was time for drastic measures. John F. Kennedy’s advisors <a href="http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollomon/apollo2.pdf">told him</a> that the Soviets had too big a lead for the US to beat them at any near-term achievements—but that the prospect of a manned <em>moon</em> landing was far enough in the future that the US had a fighting chance to get <em>there</em> first. So Kennedy gave his famous “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hahhd” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25G1M4EXrQ&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=1m32s">speech</a>, and directed an outrageous amount of funding at the mission ($20 billion, or $205 billion in today’s dollars).</p>
<p>The result was Project Apollo. Apollo’s mission was to land an American on the moon—and to do it <em>first</em>. The Soviets answered with Soyuz, their own moon program, and the race was on.</p>
<p>As the early phases of Apollo started coming together, Project Mercury finally hit its stride. Just a month after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, American astronaut Alan Shepard became the second man in space, completing a <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Freedom_7_Diagram.jpg">little arc</a> that didn’t put him in full orbit but allowed him to give space a high-five at the top of the arc. A few months later, in February of 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.</p>
<p>The next seven years saw 22 US and Soviet manned launches as the superpowers honed their skills and technology. By late 1968, the furiously-sprinting US had more total launches under their belt (17) than the Soviets (10), and together, the two nations had mastered what we call Low Earth Orbit (LEO).</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/LEO.jpg"></a></p>
<p>But LEO hadn’t really excited anyone since the early ’60s. Both powers had their sights firmly set on the moon. The Apollo program was making quick leaps, and in December of 1968, the US became the first nation to soar outside of LEO. Apollo 8 made it all the way to the moon’s orbit and circled around 10 times before returning home safely. The crew, which included James Lovell (who a few months later played the role of Tom Hanks on the Apollo 13 mission), shattered the human altitude record and became the first people to see the moon up close, the first to see the “dark” side of the moon, and the first to see the Earth as a whole planet, snapping this iconic photo:<a href="#footnote2-4-3902">4</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/1280px-NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Upon return, the crew became America’s most celebrated heroes—which I hope they enjoyed for eight months. Three Apollo missions later, in July of 1969, Apollo 11 made Americans Neil Armstrong<a href="#footnote-3-3902">3</a> and Buzz Aldrin the first humans on the moon, and Armstrong took this famous photo of Aldrin looking all puffy:<a href="#footnote2-5-3902">5</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Aldrin_Apollo_11.jpg"></a></p>
<p>It’s hard to fully emphasize what a big deal this was. Ever since life on Earth began 3.6 billion years ago, no earthly creature had set foot on any celestial body other than the Earth. Suddenly, there are Armstrong and Aldrin, bouncing around <em>another </em>sphere, looking up in the sky where the moon is supposed to be and seeing the Earth instead. Insane.</p>
<p>Project Apollo proved to be a smashing success. Not only did Apollo get a man on the moon before the Soviets, the program sent 10 more men to the moon over the next 3.5 years on five other Apollo missions. There were six successful moon trips in seven tries, with the famous exception being Apollo 13, which was safely aborted after an explosion in the oxygen tank.<a href="#footnote-4-3902">4</a>
</p><p>The Soviet Soyuz program kept running into technical problems, and it never ended up putting someone on the moon.</p>
<p>The final Apollo moonwalk took place in late 1972. In only one decade, we had conquered nearby space, and progress was accelerating. If at that time you had asked any American, or any other human, what the coming decades of space travel would bring, they’d have made big, bold predictions. Many more people on the moon, a permanent moon base, people on Mars, and beyond.</p>
<p>So you can only imagine how surprised they’d be if you told them in 1972, after just watching 12 humans walk on the moon, that 43 years later, in the impossibly futuristic-sounding year 2015, the number of people to set foot on the moon <em>would still be 12</em>. Or that after leaving Low Earth Orbit in the dust years earlier and using it now as our pre-moon trip parking lot, 2015 would roll around and LEO would be the farthest out humans would ever go.</p>
<p>1972 people would be blown away by our smart phones and our internet, but they’d be just as shocked that we gave up on pushing our boundaries in space.</p>
<p>So what happened? After such a wildly exciting decade of human space adventure, why did we just <em>stop?</em></p>
<p>Well, like we found in the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">Tesla post</a>, “Why did we stop?” is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask:</p>
<p><em>Why were we ever adventurous about sending humans into space in the first place?</em></p>
<p>Space travel is unbelievably expensive. National budgets are incredibly tight. The fact is, it’s kind of surprising that a nation <em>ever</em> ponied up a sizable chunk of its budget for the sake of adventure and inspiration and pushing our boundaries.</p>
<p>And that’s actually because no nation <em>did </em>blow their budget for the sake of adventure and inspiration and pushing our boundaries—two nations blew their budgets because of a <em>penis</em>–<em>length</em> contest. In the face of international embarrassment at a time when everyone was trying to figure out whose economic system was better, the US government agreed to drop the usual rules for a few years to pour whatever resources were necessary on the problem to make sure they won that argument—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Early-budget.png"></a></p>
<p>And once they won it, the contest was over and so were the special rules. And the US went back to spending money like a normal person.<a href="#footnote2-6-3902">6</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Full-budget.png"></a></p>
<p>Instead of continuing to push the limits at all costs, the US and the Soviets got a grip, put their pants back on, shook hands, and started working together like adults on far more practical projects, like setting up a joint space station in LEO.</p>
<p>In the four decades since then, the Story of Humans and Space has again become confined to Earth, where we find ourselves with two primary reasons to interact with space (Note: the next whole chunk of the post is a slight diversion for an overview on satellites, space probes, and space telescopes. If that doesn’t excite you, I won’t be hurt if you skip down to the International Space Station section):</p>
<p><strong>1) Support for Earth Industries</strong></p>
<p>The first and primary reason humans have interacted with space since the Apollo program isn’t about human interest in space. It’s about using space for practical purposes in support of industries on Earth—mostly in the form of satellites. The bulk of today’s rocket launches into space are simply putting things into LEO whose purpose is to look back down at Earth, not to the great expanses in the other direction.</p>
<p>Here’s a little satellite overview:</p>
<div>
<p><strong>Satellites Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>We don’t think about them that often, but above us are hundreds of flying robots that play a large part in our lives on Earth. In 1957, lonely Sputnik circled the Earth by itself, but today, the worlds of communication, weather forecasting, television, navigation, and aerial photography all rely heavily on satellites, as do many national militaries and government intelligence agencies.</p>
<p>The total market for satellite manufacturing, the launches that carry them to space, and related equipment and services has ballooned from $60 billion in 2004 to over $200 billion in 2015. Satellite industry revenue today makes up only 4% of the global telecommunications industry but accounts for over 60% of space industry revenue.<a href="#footnote2-7-3902">7</a>
</p><p>Here’s how the world’s satellites break down by role (in 2013):<a href="#footnote2-8-3902">8</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SatFunction1.png"></a></p>
<p>Of the 1,265 active satellites in orbit at the beginning of 2015, the US owns by far <a href="http://www.statista.com/statistics/264472/number-of-satellites-in-orbit-by-operating-country/">the largest number</a> at 528—over 40% of the total—but over 50 countries own at least one orbiting satellite.</p>
<p>As for <em>where </em>all of these satellites are, most of them fall into two distinct “layers” of space:</p>
<p>About two-thirds of active satellites are in Low Earth Orbit. LEO starts up at 99 miles (160 km) above the Earth, the lowest altitude at which an object can orbit without atmospheric drag messing things up. The top of LEO is 1,240 miles (2,000 km) up. Typically, the lowest satellites are at around 220 miles (350 km) up or higher.</p>
<p>Most of the rest (about one-third) of the satellites are much farther out, in a place called geostationary orbit (GEO). It’s right at 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth, and it’s called geostationary because something orbiting in it rotates at the exact speed that the Earth turns, making its position in the sky stationary relative to a point on the Earth. It’ll seem to be motionless to an observer on the ground.<a href="#footnote2-9-3902">9</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Geostationaryjava3D.gif"></a></p>
<p>GEO is ideal for something like a TV satellite because a dish on the Earth can aim at the same fixed spot all the time.</p>
<p>A small percentage of other satellites are in medium Earth orbit (MEO), which is everything in between LEO and GEO. One notable resident of MEO is the GPS system that most Americans, and people from many other countries, use every day. I never realized that the entire GPS system, a US Department of Defense project that went live in 1995, only uses 32 satellites total. And until 2012, the number was only 24—six orbits, each with four satellites. But you can see in the GIF below that even with 24, a given point on the Earth can be seen by at least six of the satellites at any given time, and usually it’s nine or higher (in the GIF, the blue dot on the Earth is a hypothetical person on the ground, and whichever satellites can see him at a given time are blue, with the green lines showing their line of sight to the person):<a href="#footnote2-10-3902">10</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ConstellationGPS.gif"></a></p>
<p>This is why your phone’s map can still show your location even when you’re somewhere with no cellular service—because it has nothing to do with cellular service. The system is also set up to be redundant—only four satellites need to simultaneously see you in order for the system to pinpoint your location. GPS satellites have an orbital period of about 12 hours, making two full rotations of the Earth each day.<a href="#footnote-5-3902">5</a>
</p><p>You can see satellite locations using <a href="http://www.gearthblog.com/satellites">Google Earth</a> (here’s a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydbbd-4oEds">cool video</a> of Google Earth showing the satellites).</p>
<div>
<p><b>Space Debris Bluer Box</b></p>
<p>There’s a big problem happening in the world of satellites. In addition to the 1,265 active satellites up in orbit, there are thousands more inactive satellites, as well as a bunch of spent rockets from previous missions. And once in a while, one of them explodes, or two of them collide, creating a ton of tiny fragments called space debris. The number of objects in space has risen quickly over recent decades, as a GIF<a href="#footnote-6-3902">6</a> made by the ESA shows (with exaggerated-sized objects relative to the Earth’s size):<a href="#footnote2-11-3902">11</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2599e0ad79e09729f1ef751b422dccfb.gif"></a></p>
<p>The majority of satellites and debris are bunched around the Earth in LEO, and the outer ring of objects is what’s located in GEO.</p>
<p>Earth space agencies track about 17,000 objects in space, only 7% of which are active satellites. Here’s a map showing every known object in space today.<a href="#footnote2-12-3902">12</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/boZhtHC-11.jpg"></a></p>
<p>But the crazy thing is they only track the large objects, and that’s what we’re seeing in that image. Estimates for the number of smaller debris objects (1 – 10 cm) range from 150,000 to 500,000, and there are over a million total pieces of debris larger than 2 mm.<a href="#footnote2-13-3902">13</a>
</p><p>The issue is that at the incredible speeds at which space objects move (most LEO objects zip along at over 17,000 mph), a collision with even a tiny object can cause devastating damage to an active satellite or spacecraft. An object of only 1 cm at those speeds will cause the same damage in a collision as a small <em>hand grenade</em>.<a href="#footnote-7-3902">7</a><a href="#footnote2-14-3902">14</a>
</p><p>Over a third of all space debris originated from just two events: China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, when China shat on the world’s face by intentionally blowing up one of its own satellites, creating <em>3,000</em> new pieces of debris large enough to be trackable, and a 2009 collision between two satellites that exploded into 2,000 debris chunks.<a href="#footnote2-15-3902">15</a> Each collision increases the amount of debris, which in turn increases the likelihood of more collisions, and there’s danger of a domino effect situation, which scientists call the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGm5odlIh4">Kessler Syndrome</a>. A bunch of parties are proposing ways to mitigate the amount of debris in LEO—everything from <a href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-04/scientists-are-building-space-harpoon-take-out-orbiting-junk">harpooning</a> the debris to <a href="http://www.space.com/29271-space-station-laser-cannon-orbital-debris.html">laser blasting</a> it to <a href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-10/boeings-new-space-junk-scheme-clears-debris-cloud-ballistic-gas">intercepting</a> it with a cloud of gas.</p>
</div>
<p>Here’s a chart that sums up each nation’s “space footprint,” showing the quantity of active satellites, inactive satellites, and space debris caused by each country:<a href="#footnote2-16-3902">16</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/18moky6ntooezjpg-2.jpg"></a></p>
</div>
<p>There are a few other space activities in the “Support for Earth Industries” category of human/space interaction—like <a href="http://www.planetaryresources.com/">space mining</a>, <a href="http://www.celestis.com/">space burial</a>, and <a href="http://www.virgingalactic.com/">space tourism</a>—but at least for now, satellites account for almost the entire category.</p>
<p><strong>2) Looking and Learning</strong></p>
<p>The second reason humans have interacted with space in the last four decades proves that while we may have stopped sending people into The Situation, we never lost our hunger to learn about what’s out there. As society moved on from space and turned its attention elsewhere, astronomers have kept busy at work deciphering their way through page after page of the old mystery novel, <em>Where Are We?</em> <em> </em></p>
<p>Astronomers learn best with their eyes, and a side effect of the Space Race was the development of far better technology for seeing<em> </em>what’s out there. There are two high-tech ways modern astronomers see things:</p>
<p><strong>Looking and Learning Tool #1: Sending probes around the Solar System</strong></p>
<p>Basically, scientists fire a fancy robot toward some distant planet, moon, or asteroid, and the robot spends months or years flying through space, bored, until it finally arrives. Then, depending on the plan, it either just flies by the object, taking some pictures on the way, orbits the object to get more detailed information, or lands on the object for a full inspection. Everything it learns, it sends back to us, and one day, when its job is done, we either kill the probe by crashing it into the object or let it just fly out into deep space to be depressed.</p>
<p>I often use myself as a litmus test for what the public probably knows about or doesn’t know about. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been seriously dating astronomy ever since I was three years old—so if I don’t know something going on in the world of space, I assume that most people don’t. And when it comes to space probes, I’ve felt pretty disoriented. Are there 200 of them flying around out there? 50? 9? Why are they out there, who sent them, and what are they doing? All I’d know is that sometimes there would be a random story about some probe sending back stunning pictures—I’d open the cnn.com gallery, click through them, be thrilled for a second, send the link to the three friends of mine who are also dating astronomy, and then try to close the page but instead see some trashy CNN clickbait headline on the side of the page, click that, and ruin my life for the next three hateful hours. That’s my relationship with humanity’s space probes.</p>
<p>But in researching this post, I quickly realized there’s not that much to know, and it doesn’t take too big an effort to get fully oriented. Here are what I consider the eight key space robots to know about right now:<a href="#footnote2-17-3902">17</a>
</p><p><strong>1) <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html">New Horizons</a> </strong>(Pluto, NASA)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.henrywurst.com/higher-resolutions-images-work-best-for-print-hello-pluto/"></a></p>
<p>New Horizons goes first because its big moment just happened. Launched in 2006 on a decade-long trip to Pluto (sped up on its way by a Jupiter fly-by in 2007 that gravity-zinged it to a much faster speed), New Horizons <em>finally</em> reached Pluto on July 14th, 2015. It didn’t land on Pluto, but it flew very near to it and showed us Pluto for the first time:<a href="#footnote-8-3902">8</a><a href="#footnote2-18-3902">18</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Nh-pluto-in-true-color_2x_JPEG.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Next, New Horizons will be on its way further outwards into the Kuiper belt to send back images of comets and dwarf planets. You can track New Horizons’ location <a href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php">here</a>.</p>
<p>Awkwardly, Pluto was still a planet when New Horizons launched, and everyone spent the years following Pluto’s demotion avoiding making eye contact with the New Horizons team. While I agree with the common sentiment that it’s sad that Pluto’s sad about its demotion,<a href="#footnote-9-3902">9</a> the truth is, Pluto should probably appreciate that it got away with 76 illegitimate years as a planet celebrity, pulling in a ton of Kuiper belt ass in the process, given that fellow Kuiper belt dwarf planet Eris spent that whole time living its life in total obscurity, only discovered in 2005.</p>
<p><strong>2) <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html">Curiosity</a></strong> (Mars, NASA)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gizmag.com/curiosity-2nd-year/33248/"></a></p>
<p>Curiosity is a now-famous rover. A car-sized lovable lander robot dropped down on Mars’s surface in 2012, Curiosity is studying a bunch of things inside a large crater, with its primary objective being to figure out if there’s ever been life on Mars. The last two Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 days. Both lasted way past their expiry date, and <a href="http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Opportunity-590x330.jpg">Opportunity</a> is <em>still </em>active. Such a good boy.</p>
<p>There are a bunch of other probes orbiting around Mars as well, but Curiosity is the main event there.</p>
<p>In my research, I came across <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRCIzZHpFtY">this video</a> from an IMAX movie about getting the rover Spirit from Earth to the surface of Mars and thought it was the coolest video ever. Until I found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudlaGh1A0o">this video</a> about getting Curiosity on Mars, which was even cooler.</p>
<p><strong>3) <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html">Juno</a> </strong>(Jupiter, NASA)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=3501"></a></p>
<p>Juno left Earth in 2011, made a big loop and came back to Earth in 2013 to get a gravity zing (during which it captured a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CzBlSXgzqI">cool video</a> of the moon circling the Earth), and is now on its way to Jupiter, where it’ll arrive in July of 2016.<a href="#footnote2-19-3902">19</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Junos_interplanetary_trajectory.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Once it arrives, Juno will orbit Jupiter, taking pictures and using sensors to try to figure out what’s going on in there underneath all the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/j4mWuqcBmfDJukZUciLgUk-1024-80.jpg">succulent-looking</a> cloud tops. It’ll die by falling into Jupiter, hopefully snapping and relaying some quick photos of what it looks like inside Jupiter’s atmosphere before burning up so that someone can make a virtual reality video that lets you descend into Jupiter’s surface.</p>
<p><b>4) <a href="http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/overview/">Cassini</a> </b>(Saturn, NASA / European Space Agency / Italian Space Agency collaboration)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens/Cassini_spacecraft"></a></p>
<p>Launched in 1997, Cassini set off towards Saturn, the only planet in the Solar System who decided it was okay to wear a tutu. Reaching Saturn in 2004, Cassini became the first probe in history to orbit the planet, sending back some jaw-dropping pictures, like this one:<a href="#footnote2-20-3902">20</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/saturn-2-1240x600.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And this one:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/21NASA2_SPAN-superJumbo.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And this close-up of the rings:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/saturn-fly-ring-1-1066x600.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And this absurdly cool picture of Saturn with the sun behind it:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Saturn1-1371x600.jpg"></a></p>
<p>In 2005, Cassini dropped its attached lander, the upsettingly-named Huygens, down onto the largest of Saturn’s moons, Titan. Here’s a real image of the surface of Titan, taken by Huygens (it’s creepily fascinating seeing the actual surface of something as far away and mysterious as a Saturn moon):<a href="#footnote2-21-3902">21</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Huygens_surface_color_sr.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>5 and 6) <a href="http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/">Voyager 1 and 2</a> </strong>(Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; NASA)</p>
<p><a href="http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/"></a></p>
<p>Launched in 1977, the two Voyager probes were the first probes to collect images of the four outer giants of the Solar System. Voyager 2 is still the only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune, taking these eerie photos of the two, respectively:<a href="#footnote2-22-3902">22</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TheIceGiants.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The cool thing about the Voyagers is that even though their original missions are now long over, they’re still zooming outward. They’re both ridiculously far away now and going super fast. Voyager 1 is the faster of the two, going 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h)—so fast that it would cross the Atlantic Ocean in five minutes—and it’s the farthest man-made object from Earth, <a href="http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/">currently</a> 131 AU<a href="#footnote-10-3902">10</a> away from Earth. It was also the first man-made object to leave the Solar System. At this rate, Voyager 1 will reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, in about 73,000 years.</p>
<p>Another cool thing about the Voyagers is that before they launched, a NASA committee, led by Carl Sagan, loaded them each up with a <a href="http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html">time capsule</a>, full of symbols, sounds, and images of Earth (and symbol instructions about how to play and view the media), so the probes can one day tell aliens what our deal is. Probably a waste of everyone’s time, but who knows.</p>
<p><strong>7) <a href="http://rosetta.esa.int/">Rosetta</a> </strong>(comet, ESA)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.space.com/24292-rosetta-spacecraft.html"></a></p>
<p>Launched in 2004, Rosetta got a lot of attention last year when it reached comet 67P in August 2014 and successfully dropped its little lander, Philae, onto the comet a couple months later. Comet 67P turned out to kind of just be a big rock (2.7 mi/4.3 km long), but the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/20/science/space/rosetta-comet-photos.html?_r=0">images</a> taken by Rosetta were cool:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/150131-rosetta.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>8) <a href="http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/">Dawn</a></strong> (Vesta and Ceres, NASA)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thisweekintomorrow.com/vol-2-no-10-dawn-approaches-two-balloons-and-a-cool-million-on-arxiv/"></a></p>
<p>Dawn can’t believe it made the cut on this list. The reason I included it is that I’m not sure people realize that there are huge, almost planet-size objects in the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt, a huge ring of millions of asteroids, including over 750,000 that are at least 1 km in diameter,<a href="#footnote2-23-3902">23</a> lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (not to be confused with the much larger Kuiper belt that surrounds the outer Solar System). Among the many asteroids in the asteroid belt is <a href="http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/large_1x_/public/images/2015/03/ceres-craters.jpg?itok=p_-m1zJ2">Ceres</a>, a dwarf planet 27% the diameter of the moon that makes up one-third of the asteroid belt’s total mass, and <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/685735main_pia15678-43_full.jpg">Vesta</a>, the second largest object in the belt after Ceres and the brightest belt object in our night sky.<a href="#footnote-11-3902">11</a> I didn’t really know Ceres and Vesta were things. Anyway, Dawn, which was launched in 2007, spent nine months orbiting Vesta in 2011 before heading off to Ceres, where it arrived in March 2015 (making it the first probe to orbit two different bodies).</p>
<p>There’s another handful of probes out there as well. Like <a href="http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/">Messenger</a>, which orbited Mercury for seven years until intentionally crashing into it in April 2015; <a href="http://www.space.com/18945-akatsuki-venus-probe-second-chance-2015.html">Akatsuki</a>, a Japanese probe that was supposed to start orbiting Venus in 2010 but botched it, and will try again this year; a bunch of probes uneventfully circling the moon, including China’s Chang’e 3, which dropped the first <a href="http://www.spaceflight101.com/change-3-mission-updates.html">lander</a> on the moon since 1976; and a group of others taking measurements from the sun. Here’s an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes">exhaustive list</a> of all past and present probes, and an awesome National Geographic visualization that sums it all up (click the graphic for a larger view):<a href="#footnote2-24-3902">24</a>
</p><p><a href="http://cosmicdiary.org/fmarchis/files/2014/05/50-years-of-exploration.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong><br />
Looking and Learning Tool #2: Telescopes</strong></p>
<p>Telescopes have been around since the early 17th century, and as they got more and more powerful over the next 400 years, they became humanity’s primary tool for turning the pages of <i>Where Are We?</i></p>
<p>But there came a point when ground telescopes ran into a limit on what they’d be able to see, no matter how advanced they became. You know when you look at a light through a glass of water and the light is all bendy and silly? That’s what’s happening when stars twinkle, except instead of water, we’re looking at them through the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere doesn’t distort light as much as water does, but stars and galaxies are <em>tiny </em>pinpricks of light in our sky, so any level of blur is a big problem—it’s like being underwater in a swimming pool and looking upwards, trying to examine a bunch of birds flying in the sky above.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, humans gained the ability to put telescopes in <em>space, </em>where they’d show us the first crystal-clear view of the stars in history. In 1990, NASA launched the first truly badass space telescope, the Hubble.<a href="#footnote-12-3902">12</a><a href="#footnote2-25-3902">25</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Hubble_01.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The 13-ton, school bus-length Hubble Space Telescope’s 7.9 foot (2.4 m) lens is accurate enough to shine a laser beam on a dime 200 miles away and powerful enough to see a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Boston (if the Earth were flat). And in its position in orbit 340 miles above Earth, where there’s no atmosphere or light pollution in the way, the Hubble is on what NASA calls “the ultimate mountaintop.”<a href="#footnote2-26-3902">26</a> All of this gives the Hubble an unprecedented view of the universe, allowing it to spend the last 25 years sending us the most astounding photographs of things I can’t really believe are real. Like this epic galaxy:<a href="#footnote2-27-3902">27</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/03-hats-off-890.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Or these two galaxies, which are in the slow process of merging:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/54916fb9-02f7-4b8c-98df-def86bad895d-2016x2040.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>Or the inconceivably huge Pillars of Creation (the left finger is so big, at four light years from top to bottom, that if you started at the knuckle and flew in an airplane upwards, it would take 4.5 <em>million</em> years to get to the fingertip):</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/c47a074d-e53f-4856-83da-b7b8a928c156-1489x2040.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>Or the time Hubble aimed its lens at a tiny, seemingly empty square of the sky (seen here next to the moon to show the size of the square):</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/HDF.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And found thousands of galaxies:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/690958main_p1237a1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>What Hubble and other space telescopes<a href="#footnote-13-3902">13</a> have shown us has revealed worlds of new information about where we are and how we got here, expanding our knowledge about everything from dark energy to the origin and age and size of the universe to the number of planets out there like ours that might have life on them.</p>
<p>For over 40 years now, those two objectives—supporting Earth industries and continuing to learn and discover—have been the extent of our relationship with space.</p>
<p>And because those two goals are both best accomplished by <em>machine </em>space travelers, the most recent chapter of The Story of Humans and Space has been all about space faring machines, with the human role taking place on or very near Earth, controlling things with joysticks.</p>
<p>The only reason any humans have gone to space since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in 1972 is that sometimes, the machines aren’t yet advanced enough to do a certain task, so we need to send a human up to do it instead. Of the roughly 550 people who have ever been in space, over 400 of them have gone there in the post-Space Race era. But since Apollo, the reasons have been practical—scientists and technicians going to space to do a job. That’s why each and every manned mission of the past four decades has kept within the thin blanket of space surrounding the Earth—Low Earth Orbit.</p>
<p><strong>The International Space Station</strong></p>
<p>Today, the purpose of almost every manned space mission is to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). <a href="#footnote2-28-3902">28</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/AaHfbHo.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The ISS is an international collaboration among 16 countries, started in 1998 and constructed over the span of a decade. The space station orbits the Earth in the lowest strip of LEO at an altitude of between 205 and 255 miles (330–410 km<a href="#footnote-14-3902">14</a>), about the distance across Iceland—close enough to the ground that you can easily see it at night with your <a href="http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/">naked eye</a>.<a href="#footnote-15-3902">15</a> And it’s bigger than people realize, weighing as much as 320 cars and spanning the full length of an American football field:<a href="#footnote2-29-3902">29</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/693259main_jsc2012e219094_big-1.jpg"></a></p>
<div>
<p><strong>What the Hell Does Anyone Do in the ISS? Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>As I began working on this post, I realized I didn’t really know what the ISS was for or what anyone did while they were there. Every time I see a video of what goes on inside the space station, it’s just some adult floating around having playtime.</p>
<p>Conveniently, there’s such a thing as an ISS <em>conference</em>, and it happened to take place last month, in Boston. So I went. The conference was run by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (<a href="http://www.iss-casis.org/">CASIS</a>), which manages the US portion of the ISS. Here’s what I learned at the conference:</p>
<ul>
<li>The ISS is a science laboratory. It’s kind of like other labs, except with the party trick that it’s soaring through space, so it’s the one lab where you can test things in zero gravity (it’s not actually zero gravity—it’s <em>micro</em>gravity<em>—</em>something I’ll explain later in the post).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>What most <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/casis_spacex4">ISS experiments</a> have in common is that they’re there for the gravity situation, but beyond that, they span a wide range of purposes—everything from learning about osteoporosis as astronauts’ bones atrophy (because they don’t have to fight against gravity), to testing how equipment holds up in space, to analyzing how fluids behave and interact without the influence of any other forces, to using the change in gravity to trick bacteria into revealing which genes make them immune to certain medicines.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Astronauts in the ISS have a tight and controlled schedule during the week. At all times, they’re either sleeping (8.5 hours), eating (1.5 hours for breakfast/dinner, 1 hour for lunch) exercising (mandatory 2.5 hours a day), or working on experiments (9 hours a day)—I took <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_7334s.jpg">this photo</a> of the current schedule of the three astronauts on the ISS.<a href="#footnote-16-3902">16</a> Weekends are off, which could not possibly sound more fun—you get to spend the whole time floating around and looking out the window.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>I’m not the only one who badly wants to play on the ISS—there’s a furiously competitive process to be selected by NASA to go. Thousands apply, 100 are picked for a final round interview and physical examination, and only one or two end up getting the nod. On rare occasion, a private company or individual can buy a spot on the station for a few days, but it costs around $60 million.</li>
</ul>
<p>If you want to get a better feel for what it’s like to live on the ISS, here’s a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doN4t5NKW-k">video tour</a> of the space station by a floaty astronaut.</p>
</div>
<p>So far, 216 people have gotten to play on the ISS, from 15 countries:<a href="#footnote2-30-3902">30</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/iss_visitors_country.png"></a></p>
<p><strong><br />
How Stuff Gets to Space<br />
</strong></p>
<p>We’ve gone over what’s in space, but how does all that stuff <em>get </em>to space? Have you ever asked yourself how something like the GPS satellite gets up there in the first place? The answer is that there are nine countries that have the ability to launch something into orbit: Russia, the US, France, Japan, China, India, Israel, Iran and, um, North Korea—along with one non-national entity, the European Space Agency (ESA). If a satellite goes up into space, it’s because someone paid one of those ten entities to bring it there atop a massive, expensive rocket (or because a country is putting one up there for its own uses).</p>
<p>As for launching <em>humans </em>into space, only three countries in history have done it—Russia, the US, and China (who is a fast-growing newcomer to the space industry). Since the 60s, Russia has used its Soyuz rockets to launch people into space, and the US, after wrapping up the Apollo program in 1972, regained the ability to put people in orbit in 1981 with the Space Shuttle program.<a href="#footnote2-31-3902">31</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/6938210-space-shuttle-photos.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Over the next 30 years, the US launched 135 Space Shuttles into LEO, with 133 successes. The two exceptions are fairly traumatizing parts of American history—<em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSTrmJtHLFU">Challenger</a> </em>in 1986 and <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIJiW8d_c68">Columbia</a> </i>in 2003.</p>
<p>The Space Shuttle Program retired in 2011. Today, only two countries can launch a human into orbit—Russia and China. With no capability themselves, the US—the country that once triumphantly put a man on the moon while the world watched—now has to launch their astronauts on Russian rockets, at Russia’s whim.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>So what are we to make of The Story of Humans and Space? It’s a bit of an odd tale. In 1970, the story looked like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/graph1.png"></a></p>
<p>So the assumption about where the story was headed was this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/graph2.png"></a></p>
<p>But now it’s 2015, and it turns out that this is what was happening:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/graph3.png"></a></p>
<p>When I look at what’s going on with humans and space today, I should think it’s incredible. Just 58 years after the Soviets put the first man-made object into orbit, we now have a swarm of high-tech equipment soaring around our planet, giving humans magical capabilities in vision and communication. There’s a team of flying robot messengers spread out through the Solar System, reporting back to us with their findings. There’s a <em>huge flying telescope </em>high above Earth, showing us exactly what the observable universe looks like. There’s a football field-sized <i>science lab </i>250 miles above our heads with <em>people </em>in it.</p>
<p>Everything I just said is <em>amazing</em>.</p>
<p>And if only The Story of Humans and Space looked like this—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/graph4.png"></a></p>
<p>—I would be <em>marveling </em>at the things we’re currently doing out in The Situation.</p>
<p>But unfortunately, the 60s happened. So instead, it’s like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic1.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic2.jpg"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic3.jpg"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic4.jpg"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic5.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic6.jpg"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic7.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic8.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic8.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic9.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/magic10.png"></a></p>
<p>A good magic show follows a simple rule—make the act get better as it goes along. If you can’t continue to stay a step ahead of the increasingly-jaded crowd, they’ll quickly tune you out.</p>
<p>In some areas, the Humans and Space magic show has continued steadily upward. In our quest for knowledge and understanding, for example, we continue to outdo ourselves, learning significantly more about the universe every decade. The human spirit of <em>discovery </em>is alive and well, having thrived in space in the years since Apollo.</p>
<p>But as fascinated as we are by discovery—as much as we yearn to know all the secrets hidden in the pages of <em>Where Are We?—</em>when it comes to filling us with true excitement and inspiration and getting our <em>adrenaline </em>pumping, discovery doesn’t hold a candle to <em>adventure. </em>Probes and telescopes may fill us with wonder and light up our curiosity, but nothing gets us in our <em>animal core</em> like watching our species go <em>where no man has gone before. </em>And in that arena, the last four decades have left us feeling empty. After watching people land on the moon, following manned missions to and from the ISS is, as Ross Andersen <a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars/">said</a>, “about as thrilling as watching Columbus sail to Ibiza.”</p>
<p>And that’s why, in today’s world, The Story of Humans and Space has drifted off the front page of our consciousness. The topic that should drop all of us to our knees has become a geeky sideshow. Ask 10 well-educated people you know about what’s going on with Solar System probes or the ISS or NASA or SpaceX and most won’t be able to tell you very much. Some won’t even know that people ever go to space anymore. People don’t know because people don’t care. Because of the way it played out, The Story of Humans and Space feels like a disappointment. And looking at the world around us today, it’s intuitive to predict that future chapters of the space story will continue to putter along as they do today:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/graph52.png"></a></p>
<p>Many people don’t think this is a bad thing. “Why spend exorbitant amounts of money sending people to the far reaches of space when we have so many problems right here on Earth?” they ask. Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who spent three decades playing a key role in US budget decision-making, calls ambitious manned space travel “at best a luxury that the country ought not to be indulging in” and “a complete and total waste of money” and “pure boondoggle.”<a href="#footnote2-32-3902">32</a> And the dramatic slashes to NASA’s budget since the Space Race ended suggest that Frank isn’t the only US politician to hold this view.</p>
<p>Upon first assessment, Frank is being perfectly rational—after all, in the face of concerns like healthcare, national security, education, and poverty, should we really make room for an “adventure budget”? And in that light, the graph projection above for The Future of Humans and Space seems all the more likely to continue on its current course.</p>
<p>I’ve spent the last couple months reading, talking, and thinking almost non-stop about what the coming chapters of this story will look like—and my assumptions about the future have now changed dramatically.</p>
<p>I think we’re all in for a big surprise.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/2">Part 2: Musk’s Mission →</a></p>
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 How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

 August 16, 2015 By Tim Urban


 This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1.

 Pre-Post Note: I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal. But like the Tesla post, I decided as I researched that this was A) a supremely important topic that will only become more important in the years to come, and B) something most people don’t know nearly enough about. My weeks of research and discussions with Musk and others built me an in-depth, tree-trunk understanding of what’s happening in what I’m calling The Story of Humans and Space—one that has totally reframed my mental picture of the future (yet again). And as I planned out what to include in the post, I wanted to make sure every Wait But Why reader ended up with the same foundation moving forward—because with everything that’s coming, we’re gonna need it. So like the Tesla post, this post became a full situation. Even the progress updates leading up to its publication became a full situation.

 Thanks for your patience. I know you’d prefer this not to be a site that updates every two months, and I would too. The Tesla and SpaceX posts were special cases, and you can expect a return to more normal-length WBW posts now that they’re done.

 About the post itself: There are three main parts. Part 1 provides the context and background, Part 2 explores the “Why” part of colonizing Mars, and Part 3 digs into the “How.” To make reading this post as accessible as possible, it’s broken into five pages, each about the length of a normal WBW post, and you can jump to any part of the post easily by clicking the links in the Table of Contents below. We’re also trying two new things, both coming in the next couple days:

 1) PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

 2) An audio version. You can find an unabridged audio version of the post, read by me, as well as a discussion about the post between Andrew and me here.

 ___________

 Contents

 Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space

 Part 2: Musk’s Mission

 Part 3: How to Colonize Mars
 → Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space
 → Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel
 → Phase 3: Colonize Mars

 A SpaceX Future


 2365 AD, Ganymede

 One more day until departure. It was so surreal to picture actually being there that she still didn’t really believe it would happen. All those things she had always heard about—buildings that were constructed hundreds of years before the first human set foot on Ganymede; animals the size of a house; oceans the size of her whole world; tropical beaches; the famous blue sky; the giant sun that’s so close it can burn your skin; and the weirdest part— no Jupiter hovering overhead . Having seen it all in so many movies, she felt like she was going to visit a legendary movie set. It was too much to think about all at once. For now, she just had to focus on making sure she had everything she needed and saying goodbye to everyone—it would be a long time before she would see them again…

 ___________

 Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space

 About six million years ago, a very important female great ape had two children. One of her children would go on to become the common ancestor of all chimpanzees. The other would give birth to a line that would one day include the entire human race. While the descendants of her first child would end up being pretty normal and monkey-ish, as time passed, strange things began to happen with the lineage of the other.11 ← click these

 We’re not quite sure why, but over the next six million years, our ancestral line started to do something no creatures on Earth had ever done before—they woke up.

 It happened slowly and gradually through the thousands of generations the same way your brain slowly comes to in the first few seconds after you rouse from sleep. But as the clarity increased, our ancestors started to look around and, for the very first time, wonder.

 Emerging from a 3.6-billion-year dream, life on Earth had its first questions.

 What is this big room we’re in, and who put us here? What is that bright yellow circle on the ceiling and where does it go every night? Where does the ocean end and what happens when you get there? Where are all the dead people now that they’re not here anymore?

 We had discovered our species’ great mystery novel—Where Are We?—and we wanted to learn how to read it.

 As the light of human consciousness grew brighter and brighter, we began to arrive at answers that seemed to make sense. Maybe we were on top of a floating disk, and maybe that disk was on top of a huge turtle. Maybe the pinpricks of light above us at night are a glimpse into what lies beyond this big room—and maybe that’s where we go when we die. Maybe if we can find the place where the ceiling meets the floor, we can poke our heads through and see all the super fun stuff on the other side.2

 Around 10,000 years ago, isolated tribes of humans began to merge together and form the first cities. In larger communities, people were able to talk to each other about this mystery novel we had found, comparing notes across tribes and through the generations. As the techniques for learning became more sophisticated and the clues piled up, new discoveries surfaced.

 The world was apparently a ball, not a disk. Which meant that the ceiling was actually a larger sphere surrounding us. The sizes of the other objects floating out there in the sphere with us, and the distances between them, were vaster than we had ever imagined. And then, something upsetting:

 The sun wasn’t revolving around us. We were revolving around the sun.

 This was a super unwarm, unfuzzy discovery. Why the hell weren’t we in the center of things? What did that mean?

 Where are we?

 The sphere was already unpleasantly big—if we weren’t in the center of it, were we just on a random ball inside of it, kind of for no apparent reason? Could this really be what was happening?

 Scary.

 Then things got worse.

 It seemed that the pinpricks of light on the edge of the sphere weren’t what we thought they were—they were other suns like ours. And they were out there floating just like our sun—which means we weren’t inside of a sphere at all. Not only was our planet not the center of things, even our sun was just a random dude out there, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothingness.

 Scary.

 Our sun turned out to be a little piece of something much bigger. A beautiful, vast cloud of billions of suns. The everything of everything.

 At least we had that. Until we realized that it wasn’t everything, it was this:

 Darkness.

 The better our tools and understanding became, the more we could zoom out, and the more we zoomed out, the more things sucked. We were deciphering the pages of Where Are We? at our own peril, and we had deciphered our way right into the knowledge that we’re unbelievably alone, living on a lonely island inside a lonely island inside a lonely island, buried in layers of isolation, with no one to talk to.

 That’s our situation.

 In the most recent 1% of our species’ short existence, we have become the first life on Earth to know about the Situation—and we’ve been having a collective existential crisis ever since.

 You really can’t blame us. Imagine not realizing that the universe is a thing and then realizing the universe is a thing. It’s a lot to take in.

 Most of us handle it by living in a pleasant delusion, pretending that the only place we live is in an endless land of colors and warmth. We’re like this guy, who’s doing everything he possibly can to ignore the Situation:3

 And our best friend for this activity? The clear blue sky. The blue sky seems like it was invented to help humans pretend the Situation doesn’t exist, serving as the perfect whimsical backdrop to shield us from reality.

 Then nighttime happens, and there’s the Situation, staring us right in the face.

 Oh yeah…

 This la-di-da → oh yeah… → la-di-da → oh yeah… merry-go-round of psychosis was, for most of recent history, the extent of our relationship with the Situation.

 But in the last 60 years, that relationship has vaulted to a whole new level. During World War II, missile technology leapt forward,2 and for the first time, a new, mind-blowing concept was possible—

 Space travel.

 For thousands of years, The Story of Humans and Space had been the story of staring out and wondering. The possibility of people leaving our Earth island and venturing out into space burst open the human spirit of adventure.

 I imagine a similar feeling in the people of the 15th century, during the Age of Discovery, when we were working our way through the world map chapter of Where Are We? and the notion of cross-ocean voyages dazzled people’s imaginations. If you asked a child in 1495 what they wanted to be when they grew up, “an ocean explorer” would probably have been a common response.

 In 1970, if you asked a child the same question, the answer would be, “an astronaut”—i.e. a Situation explorer.

 WWII advanced the possibility of human space travel, but it was in late 1957, when the Soviets launched the first man-made object into orbit, the adorable Sputnik 1, that space travel became the defining quest of the world’s great powers.

 At the time, the Cold War was in full throttle, and the US and Soviets had their measuring sticks out for an internationally-televised penis-measuring contest. With the successful launch of Sputnik, the Soviet penis bolted out by a few centimeters, horrifying the Americans.

 To the Soviets, putting a satellite into space before the US was proof that Soviet technology was superior to American technology, which in turn was put forward as proof, for all the world to see, that communism was a system superior to capitalism.

 Eight months later, NASA was born.

 The Space Race had begun, and NASA’s first order of business would be to get a man into space, and then a man into full orbit, preferably both before the Soviets. The US was not to be shown up again.

 In 1959, NASA launched Project Mercury to carry out the mission. They were on the verge of success when in April of 1961, the Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into a full orbit around the Earth, making the first human in space and in orbit a Soviet.

 It was time for drastic measures. John F. Kennedy’s advisors told him that the Soviets had too big a lead for the US to beat them at any near-term achievements—but that the prospect of a manned moon landing was far enough in the future that the US had a fighting chance to get there first. So Kennedy gave his famous “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hahhd” speech, and directed an outrageous amount of funding at the mission ($20 billion, or $205 billion in today’s dollars).

 The result was Project Apollo. Apollo’s mission was to land an American on the moon—and to do it first. The Soviets answered with Soyuz, their own moon program, and the race was on.

 As the early phases of Apollo started coming together, Project Mercury finally hit its stride. Just a month after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, American astronaut Alan Shepard became the second man in space, completing a little arc that didn’t put him in full orbit but allowed him to give space a high-five at the top of the arc. A few months later, in February of 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.

 The next seven years saw 22 US and Soviet manned launches as the superpowers honed their skills and technology. By late 1968, the furiously-sprinting US had more total launches under their belt (17) than the Soviets (10), and together, the two nations had mastered what we call Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

 But LEO hadn’t really excited anyone since the early ’60s. Both powers had their sights firmly set on the moon. The Apollo program was making quick leaps, and in December of 1968, the US became the first nation to soar outside of LEO. Apollo 8 made it all the way to the moon’s orbit and circled around 10 times before returning home safely. The crew, which included James Lovell (who a few months later played the role of Tom Hanks on the Apollo 13 mission), shattered the human altitude record and became the first people to see the moon up close, the first to see the “dark” side of the moon, and the first to see the Earth as a whole planet, snapping this iconic photo:4

 Upon return, the crew became America’s most celebrated heroes—which I hope they enjoyed for eight months. Three Apollo missions later, in July of 1969, Apollo 11 made Americans Neil Armstrong3 and Buzz Aldrin the first humans on the moon, and Armstrong took this famous photo of Aldrin looking all puffy:5

 It’s hard to fully emphasize what a big deal this was. Ever since life on Earth began 3.6 billion years ago, no earthly creature had set foot on any celestial body other than the Earth. Suddenly, there are Armstrong and Aldrin, bouncing around another sphere, looking up in the sky where the moon is supposed to be and seeing the Earth instead. Insane.

 Project Apollo proved to be a smashing success. Not only did Apollo get a man on the moon before the Soviets, the program sent 10 more men to the moon over the next 3.5 years on five other Apollo missions. There were six successful moon trips in seven tries, with the famous exception being Apollo 13, which was safely aborted after an explosion in the oxygen tank.4

 The Soviet Soyuz program kept running into technical problems, and it never ended up putting someone on the moon.

 The final Apollo moonwalk took place in late 1972. In only one decade, we had conquered nearby space, and progress was accelerating. If at that time you had asked any American, or any other human, what the coming decades of space travel would bring, they’d have made big, bold predictions. Many more people on the moon, a permanent moon base, people on Mars, and beyond.

 So you can only imagine how surprised they’d be if you told them in 1972, after just watching 12 humans walk on the moon, that 43 years later, in the impossibly futuristic-sounding year 2015, the number of people to set foot on the moon would still be 12. Or that after leaving Low Earth Orbit in the dust years earlier and using it now as our pre-moon trip parking lot, 2015 would roll around and LEO would be the farthest out humans would ever go.

 1972 people would be blown away by our smart phones and our internet, but they’d be just as shocked that we gave up on pushing our boundaries in space.

 So what happened? After such a wildly exciting decade of human space adventure, why did we just stop?

 Well, like we found in the Tesla post, “Why did we stop?” is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask:

 Why were we ever adventurous about sending humans into space in the first place?

 Space travel is unbelievably expensive. National budgets are incredibly tight. The fact is, it’s kind of surprising that a nation ever ponied up a sizable chunk of its budget for the sake of adventure and inspiration and pushing our boundaries.

 And that’s actually because no nation did blow their budget for the sake of adventure and inspiration and pushing our boundaries—two nations blew their budgets because of a penis–length contest. In the face of international embarrassment at a time when everyone was trying to figure out whose economic system was better, the US government agreed to drop the usual rules for a few years to pour whatever resources were necessary on the problem to make sure they won that argument—

 And once they won it, the contest was over and so were the special rules. And the US went back to spending money like a normal person.6

 Instead of continuing to push the limits at all costs, the US and the Soviets got a grip, put their pants back on, shook hands, and started working together like adults on far more practical projects, like setting up a joint space station in LEO.

 In the four decades since then, the Story of Humans and Space has again become confined to Earth, where we find ourselves with two primary reasons to interact with space (Note: the next whole chunk of the post is a slight diversion for an overview on satellites, space probes, and space telescopes. If that doesn’t excite you, I won’t be hurt if you skip down to the International Space Station section):

 1) Support for Earth Industries

 The first and primary reason humans have interacted with space since the Apollo program isn’t about human interest in space. It’s about using space for practical purposes in support of industries on Earth—mostly in the form of satellites. The bulk of today’s rocket launches into space are simply putting things into LEO whose purpose is to look back down at Earth, not to the great expanses in the other direction.

 Here’s a little satellite overview:

 Satellites Blue Box

 We don’t think about them that often, but above us are hundreds of flying robots that play a large part in our lives on Earth. In 1957, lonely Sputnik circled the Earth by itself, but today, the worlds of communication, weather forecasting, television, navigation, and aerial photography all rely heavily on satellites, as do many national militaries and government intelligence agencies.

 The total market for satellite manufacturing, the launches that carry them to space, and related equipment and services has ballooned from $60 billion in 2004 to over $200 billion in 2015. Satellite industry revenue today makes up only 4% of the global telecommunications industry but accounts for over 60% of space industry revenue.7

 Here’s how the world’s satellites break down by role (in 2013): 8

 Of the 1,265 active satellites in orbit at the beginning of 2015, the US owns by far the largest number at 528—over 40% of the total—but over 50 countries own at least one orbiting satellite.

 As for where all of these satellites are, most of them fall into two distinct “layers” of space:

 About two-thirds of active satellites are in Low Earth Orbit. LEO starts up at 99 miles (160 km) above the Earth, the lowest altitude at which an object can orbit without atmospheric drag messing things up. The top of LEO is 1,240 miles (2,000 km) up. Typically, the lowest satellites are at around 220 miles (350 km) up or higher.

 Most of the rest (about one-third) of the satellites are much farther out, in a place called geostationary orbit (GEO). It’s right at 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth, and it’s called geostationary because something orbiting in it rotates at the exact speed that the Earth turns, making its position in the sky stationary relative to a point on the Earth. It’ll seem to be motionless to an observer on the ground.9

 GEO is ideal for something like a TV satellite because a dish on the Earth can aim at the same fixed spot all the time.

 A small percentage of other satellites are in medium Earth orbit (MEO), which is everything in between LEO and GEO. One notable resident of MEO is the GPS system that most Americans, and people from many other countries, use every day. I never realized that the entire GPS system, a US Department of Defense project that went live in 1995, only uses 32 satellites total. And until 2012, the number was only 24—six orbits, each with four satellites. But you can see in the GIF below that even with 24, a given point on the Earth can be seen by at least six of the satellites at any given time, and usually it’s nine or higher (in the GIF, the blue dot on the Earth is a hypothetical person on the ground, and whichever satellites can see him at a given time are blue, with the green lines showing their line of sight to the person):10

 This is why your phone’s map can still show your location even when you’re somewhere with no cellular service—because it has nothing to do with cellular service. The system is also set up to be redundant—only four satellites need to simultaneously see you in order for the system to pinpoint your location. GPS satellites have an orbital period of about 12 hours, making two full rotations of the Earth each day.5

 You can see satellite locations using Google Earth (here’s a cool video of Google Earth showing the satellites).

 Space Debris Bluer Box

 There’s a big problem happening in the world of satellites. In addition to the 1,265 active satellites up in orbit, there are thousands more inactive satellites, as well as a bunch of spent rockets from previous missions. And once in a while, one of them explodes, or two of them collide, creating a ton of tiny fragments called space debris. The number of objects in space has risen quickly over recent decades, as a GIF6 made by the ESA shows (with exaggerated-sized objects relative to the Earth’s size):11

 The majority of satellites and debris are bunched around the Earth in LEO, and the outer ring of objects is what’s located in GEO.

 Earth space agencies track about 17,000 objects in space, only 7% of which are active satellites. Here’s a map showing every known object in space today.12

 But the crazy thing is they only track the large objects, and that’s what we’re seeing in that image. Estimates for the number of smaller debris objects (1 – 10 cm) range from 150,000 to 500,000, and there are over a million total pieces of debris larger than 2 mm.13

 The issue is that at the incredible speeds at which space objects move (most LEO objects zip along at over 17,000 mph), a collision with even a tiny object can cause devastating damage to an active satellite or spacecraft. An object of only 1 cm at those speeds will cause the same damage in a collision as a small hand grenade.714

 Over a third of all space debris originated from just two events: China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, when China shat on the world’s face by intentionally blowing up one of its own satellites, creating 3,000 new pieces of debris large enough to be trackable, and a 2009 collision between two satellites that exploded into 2,000 debris chunks.15 Each collision increases the amount of debris, which in turn increases the likelihood of more collisions, and there’s danger of a domino effect situation, which scientists call the Kessler Syndrome. A bunch of parties are proposing ways to mitigate the amount of debris in LEO—everything from harpooning the debris to laser blasting it to intercepting it with a cloud of gas.

 Here’s a chart that sums up each nation’s “space footprint,” showing the quantity of active satellites, inactive satellites, and space debris caused by each country:16

 There are a few other space activities in the “Support for Earth Industries” category of human/space interaction—like space mining, space burial, and space tourism—but at least for now, satellites account for almost the entire category.

 2) Looking and Learning

 The second reason humans have interacted with space in the last four decades proves that while we may have stopped sending people into The Situation, we never lost our hunger to learn about what’s out there. As society moved on from space and turned its attention elsewhere, astronomers have kept busy at work deciphering their way through page after page of the old mystery novel, Where Are We?

 Astronomers learn best with their eyes, and a side effect of the Space Race was the development of far better technology for seeing what’s out there. There are two high-tech ways modern astronomers see things:

 Looking and Learning Tool #1: Sending probes around the Solar System

 Basically, scientists fire a fancy robot toward some distant planet, moon, or asteroid, and the robot spends months or years flying through space, bored, until it finally arrives. Then, depending on the plan, it either just flies by the object, taking some pictures on the way, orbits the object to get more detailed information, or lands on the object for a full inspection. Everything it learns, it sends back to us, and one day, when its job is done, we either kill the probe by crashing it into the object or let it just fly out into deep space to be depressed.

 I often use myself as a litmus test for what the public probably knows about or doesn’t know about. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been seriously dating astronomy ever since I was three years old—so if I don’t know something going on in the world of space, I assume that most people don’t. And when it comes to space probes, I’ve felt pretty disoriented. Are there 200 of them flying around out there? 50? 9? Why are they out there, who sent them, and what are they doing? All I’d know is that sometimes there would be a random story about some probe sending back stunning pictures—I’d open the cnn.com gallery, click through them, be thrilled for a second, send the link to the three friends of mine who are also dating astronomy, and then try to close the page but instead see some trashy CNN clickbait headline on the side of the page, click that, and ruin my life for the next three hateful hours. That’s my relationship with humanity’s space probes.

 But in researching this post, I quickly realized there’s not that much to know, and it doesn’t take too big an effort to get fully oriented. Here are what I consider the eight key space robots to know about right now:17

 1) New Horizons (Pluto, NASA)

 New Horizons goes first because its big moment just happened. Launched in 2006 on a decade-long trip to Pluto (sped up on its way by a Jupiter fly-by in 2007 that gravity-zinged it to a much faster speed), New Horizons finally reached Pluto on July 14th, 2015. It didn’t land on Pluto, but it flew very near to it and showed us Pluto for the first time:818

 Next, New Horizons will be on its way further outwards into the Kuiper belt to send back images of comets and dwarf planets. You can track New Horizons’ location here.

 Awkwardly, Pluto was still a planet when New Horizons launched, and everyone spent the years following Pluto’s demotion avoiding making eye contact with the New Horizons team. While I agree with the common sentiment that it’s sad that Pluto’s sad about its demotion,9 the truth is, Pluto should probably appreciate that it got away with 76 illegitimate years as a planet celebrity, pulling in a ton of Kuiper belt ass in the process, given that fellow Kuiper belt dwarf planet Eris spent that whole time living its life in total obscurity, only discovered in 2005.

 2) Curiosity (Mars, NASA)

 Curiosity is a now-famous rover. A car-sized lovable lander robot dropped down on Mars’s surface in 2012, Curiosity is studying a bunch of things inside a large crater, with its primary objective being to figure out if there’s ever been life on Mars. The last two Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 days. Both lasted way past their expiry date, and Opportunity is still active. Such a good boy.

 There are a bunch of other probes orbiting around Mars as well, but Curiosity is the main event there.

 In my research, I came across this video from an IMAX movie about getting the rover Spirit from Earth to the surface of Mars and thought it was the coolest video ever. Until I found this video about getting Curiosity on Mars, which was even cooler.

 3) Juno (Jupiter, NASA)

 Juno left Earth in 2011, made a big loop and came back to Earth in 2013 to get a gravity zing (during which it captured a cool video of the moon circling the Earth), and is now on its way to Jupiter, where it’ll arrive in July of 2016.19

 Once it arrives, Juno will orbit Jupiter, taking pictures and using sensors to try to figure out what’s going on in there underneath all the succulent-looking cloud tops. It’ll die by falling into Jupiter, hopefully snapping and relaying some quick photos of what it looks like inside Jupiter’s atmosphere before burning up so that someone can make a virtual reality video that lets you descend into Jupiter’s surface.

 4) Cassini (Saturn, NASA / European Space Agency / Italian Space Agency collaboration)

 Launched in 1997, Cassini set off towards Saturn, the only planet in the Solar System who decided it was okay to wear a tutu. Reaching Saturn in 2004, Cassini became the first probe in history to orbit the planet, sending back some jaw-dropping pictures, like this one:20

 And this one:

 And this close-up of the rings:

 And this absurdly cool picture of Saturn with the sun behind it:

 In 2005, Cassini dropped its attached lander, the upsettingly-named Huygens, down onto the largest of Saturn’s moons, Titan. Here’s a real image of the surface of Titan, taken by Huygens (it’s creepily fascinating seeing the actual surface of something as far away and mysterious as a Saturn moon):21

 5 and 6) Voyager 1 and 2 (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; NASA)

 Launched in 1977, the two Voyager probes were the first probes to collect images of the four outer giants of the Solar System. Voyager 2 is still the only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune, taking these eerie photos of the two, respectively:22

 The cool thing about the Voyagers is that even though their original missions are now long over, they’re still zooming outward. They’re both ridiculously far away now and going super fast. Voyager 1 is the faster of the two, going 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h)—so fast that it would cross the Atlantic Ocean in five minutes—and it’s the farthest man-made object from Earth, currently 131 AU10 away from Earth. It was also the first man-made object to leave the Solar System. At this rate, Voyager 1 will reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, in about 73,000 years.

 Another cool thing about the Voyagers is that before they launched, a NASA committee, led by Carl Sagan, loaded them each up with a time capsule, full of symbols, sounds, and images of Earth (and symbol instructions about how to play and view the media), so the probes can one day tell aliens what our deal is. Probably a waste of everyone’s time, but who knows.

 7) Rosetta (comet, ESA)

 Launched in 2004, Rosetta got a lot of attention last year when it reached comet 67P in August 2014 and successfully dropped its little lander, Philae, onto the comet a couple months later. Comet 67P turned out to kind of just be a big rock (2.7 mi/4.3 km long), but the images taken by Rosetta were cool:

 8) Dawn (Vesta and Ceres, NASA)

 Dawn can’t believe it made the cut on this list. The reason I included it is that I’m not sure people realize that there are huge, almost planet-size objects in the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt, a huge ring of millions of asteroids, including over 750,000 that are at least 1 km in diameter,23 lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (not to be confused with the much larger Kuiper belt that surrounds the outer Solar System). Among the many asteroids in the asteroid belt is Ceres, a dwarf planet 27% the diameter of the moon that makes up one-third of the asteroid belt’s total mass, and Vesta, the second largest object in the belt after Ceres and the brightest belt object in our night sky.11 I didn’t really know Ceres and Vesta were things. Anyway, Dawn, which was launched in 2007, spent nine months orbiting Vesta in 2011 before heading off to Ceres, where it arrived in March 2015 (making it the first probe to orbit two different bodies).

 There’s another handful of probes out there as well. Like Messenger, which orbited Mercury for seven years until intentionally crashing into it in April 2015; Akatsuki, a Japanese probe that was supposed to start orbiting Venus in 2010 but botched it, and will try again this year; a bunch of probes uneventfully circling the moon, including China’s Chang’e 3, which dropped the first lander on the moon since 1976; and a group of others taking measurements from the sun. Here’s an exhaustive list of all past and present probes, and an awesome National Geographic visualization that sums it all up (click the graphic for a larger view):24


 Looking and Learning Tool #2: Telescopes

 Telescopes have been around since the early 17th century, and as they got more and more powerful over the next 400 years, they became humanity’s primary tool for turning the pages of Where Are We?

 But there came a point when ground telescopes ran into a limit on what they’d be able to see, no matter how advanced they became. You know when you look at a light through a glass of water and the light is all bendy and silly? That’s what’s happening when stars twinkle, except instead of water, we’re looking at them through the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere doesn’t distort light as much as water does, but stars and galaxies are tiny pinpricks of light in our sky, so any level of blur is a big problem—it’s like being underwater in a swimming pool and looking upwards, trying to examine a bunch of birds flying in the sky above.

 In the 1960s, humans gained the ability to put telescopes in space, where they’d show us the first crystal-clear view of the stars in history. In 1990, NASA launched the first truly badass space telescope, the Hubble.1225

 The 13-ton, school bus-length Hubble Space Telescope’s 7.9 foot (2.4 m) lens is accurate enough to shine a laser beam on a dime 200 miles away and powerful enough to see a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Boston (if the Earth were flat). And in its position in orbit 340 miles above Earth, where there’s no atmosphere or light pollution in the way, the Hubble is on what NASA calls “the ultimate mountaintop.”26 All of this gives the Hubble an unprecedented view of the universe, allowing it to spend the last 25 years sending us the most astounding photographs of things I can’t really believe are real. Like this epic galaxy:27

 Or these two galaxies, which are in the slow process of merging:

 Or the inconceivably huge Pillars of Creation (the left finger is so big, at four light years from top to bottom, that if you started at the knuckle and flew in an airplane upwards, it would take 4.5 million years to get to the fingertip):

 Or the time Hubble aimed its lens at a tiny, seemingly empty square of the sky (seen here next to the moon to show the size of the square):

 And found thousands of galaxies:

 What Hubble and other space telescopes13 have shown us has revealed worlds of new information about where we are and how we got here, expanding our knowledge about everything from dark energy to the origin and age and size of the universe to the number of planets out there like ours that might have life on them.

 For over 40 years now, those two objectives—supporting Earth industries and continuing to learn and discover—have been the extent of our relationship with space.

 And because those two goals are both best accomplished by machine space travelers, the most recent chapter of The Story of Humans and Space has been all about space faring machines, with the human role taking place on or very near Earth, controlling things with joysticks.

 The only reason any humans have gone to space since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in 1972 is that sometimes, the machines aren’t yet advanced enough to do a certain task, so we need to send a human up to do it instead. Of the roughly 550 people who have ever been in space, over 400 of them have gone there in the post-Space Race era. But since Apollo, the reasons have been practical—scientists and technicians going to space to do a job. That’s why each and every manned mission of the past four decades has kept within the thin blanket of space surrounding the Earth—Low Earth Orbit.

 The International Space Station

 Today, the purpose of almost every manned space mission is to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). 28

 The ISS is an international collaboration among 16 countries, started in 1998 and constructed over the span of a decade. The space station orbits the Earth in the lowest strip of LEO at an altitude of between 205 and 255 miles (330–410 km14), about the distance across Iceland—close enough to the ground that you can easily see it at night with your naked eye.15 And it’s bigger than people realize, weighing as much as 320 cars and spanning the full length of an American football field:29

 What the Hell Does Anyone Do in the ISS? Blue Box

 As I began working on this post, I realized I didn’t really know what the ISS was for or what anyone did while they were there. Every time I see a video of what goes on inside the space station, it’s just some adult floating around having playtime.

 Conveniently, there’s such a thing as an ISS conference, and it happened to take place last month, in Boston. So I went. The conference was run by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which manages the US portion of the ISS. Here’s what I learned at the conference:

 * The ISS is a science laboratory. It’s kind of like other labs, except with the party trick that it’s soaring through space, so it’s the one lab where you can test things in zero gravity (it’s not actually zero gravity—it’s microgravity—something I’ll explain later in the post).
 * What most ISS experiments have in common is that they’re there for the gravity situation, but beyond that, they span a wide range of purposes—everything from learning about osteoporosis as astronauts’ bones atrophy (because they don’t have to fight against gravity), to testing how equipment holds up in space, to analyzing how fluids behave and interact without the influence of any other forces, to using the change in gravity to trick bacteria into revealing which genes make them immune to certain medicines.
 * Astronauts in the ISS have a tight and controlled schedule during the week. At all times, they’re either sleeping (8.5 hours), eating (1.5 hours for breakfast/dinner, 1 hour for lunch) exercising (mandatory 2.5 hours a day), or working on experiments (9 hours a day)—I took this photo of the current schedule of the three astronauts on the ISS.16 Weekends are off, which could not possibly sound more fun—you get to spend the whole time floating around and looking out the window.
 * I’m not the only one who badly wants to play on the ISS—there’s a furiously competitive process to be selected by NASA to go. Thousands apply, 100 are picked for a final round interview and physical examination, and only one or two end up getting the nod. On rare occasion, a private company or individual can buy a spot on the station for a few days, but it costs around $60 million.

 If you want to get a better feel for what it’s like to live on the ISS, here’s a video tour of the space station by a floaty astronaut.

 So far, 216 people have gotten to play on the ISS, from 15 countries:30


 How Stuff Gets to Space

 We’ve gone over what’s in space, but how does all that stuff get to space? Have you ever asked yourself how something like the GPS satellite gets up there in the first place? The answer is that there are nine countries that have the ability to launch something into orbit: Russia, the US, France, Japan, China, India, Israel, Iran and, um, North Korea—along with one non-national entity, the European Space Agency (ESA). If a satellite goes up into space, it’s because someone paid one of those ten entities to bring it there atop a massive, expensive rocket (or because a country is putting one up there for its own uses).

 As for launching humans into space, only three countries in history have done it—Russia, the US, and China (who is a fast-growing newcomer to the space industry). Since the 60s, Russia has used its Soyuz rockets to launch people into space, and the US, after wrapping up the Apollo program in 1972, regained the ability to put people in orbit in 1981 with the Space Shuttle program.31

 Over the next 30 years, the US launched 135 Space Shuttles into LEO, with 133 successes. The two exceptions are fairly traumatizing parts of American history—Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.

 The Space Shuttle Program retired in 2011. Today, only two countries can launch a human into orbit—Russia and China. With no capability themselves, the US—the country that once triumphantly put a man on the moon while the world watched—now has to launch their astronauts on Russian rockets, at Russia’s whim.

 ___________

 So what are we to make of The Story of Humans and Space? It’s a bit of an odd tale. In 1970, the story looked like this:

 So the assumption about where the story was headed was this:

 But now it’s 2015, and it turns out that this is what was happening:

 When I look at what’s going on with humans and space today, I should think it’s incredible. Just 58 years after the Soviets put the first man-made object into orbit, we now have a swarm of high-tech equipment soaring around our planet, giving humans magical capabilities in vision and communication. There’s a team of flying robot messengers spread out through the Solar System, reporting back to us with their findings. There’s a huge flying telescope high above Earth, showing us exactly what the observable universe looks like. There’s a football field-sized science lab 250 miles above our heads with people in it.

 Everything I just said is amazing.

 And if only The Story of Humans and Space looked like this—

 —I would be marveling at the things we’re currently doing out in The Situation.

 But unfortunately, the 60s happened. So instead, it’s like this:

 A good magic show follows a simple rule—make the act get better as it goes along. If you can’t continue to stay a step ahead of the increasingly-jaded crowd, they’ll quickly tune you out.

 In some areas, the Humans and Space magic show has continued steadily upward. In our quest for knowledge and understanding, for example, we continue to outdo ourselves, learning significantly more about the universe every decade. The human spirit of discovery is alive and well, having thrived in space in the years since Apollo.

 But as fascinated as we are by discovery—as much as we yearn to know all the secrets hidden in the pages of Where Are We?—when it comes to filling us with true excitement and inspiration and getting our adrenaline pumping, discovery doesn’t hold a candle to adventure. Probes and telescopes may fill us with wonder and light up our curiosity, but nothing gets us in our animal core like watching our species go where no man has gone before. And in that arena, the last four decades have left us feeling empty. After watching people land on the moon, following manned missions to and from the ISS is, as Ross Andersen said, “about as thrilling as watching Columbus sail to Ibiza.”

 And that’s why, in today’s world, The Story of Humans and Space has drifted off the front page of our consciousness. The topic that should drop all of us to our knees has become a geeky sideshow. Ask 10 well-educated people you know about what’s going on with Solar System probes or the ISS or NASA or SpaceX and most won’t be able to tell you very much. Some won’t even know that people ever go to space anymore. People don’t know because people don’t care. Because of the way it played out, The Story of Humans and Space feels like a disappointment. And looking at the world around us today, it’s intuitive to predict that future chapters of the space story will continue to putter along as they do today:

 Many people don’t think this is a bad thing. “Why spend exorbitant amounts of money sending people to the far reaches of space when we have so many problems right here on Earth?” they ask. Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who spent three decades playing a key role in US budget decision-making, calls ambitious manned space travel “at best a luxury that the country ought not to be indulging in” and “a complete and total waste of money” and “pure boondoggle.”32 And the dramatic slashes to NASA’s budget since the Space Race ended suggest that Frank isn’t the only US politician to hold this view.

 Upon first assessment, Frank is being perfectly rational—after all, in the face of concerns like healthcare, national security, education, and poverty, should we really make room for an “adventure budget”? And in that light, the graph projection above for The Future of Humans and Space seems all the more likely to continue on its current course.

 I’ve spent the last couple months reading, talking, and thinking almost non-stop about what the coming chapters of this story will look like—and my assumptions about the future have now changed dramatically.

 I think we’re all in for a big surprise.

 Part 2: Musk’s Mission →

 1. For those new to Wait But Why, blue circle footnotes (like this one) are good to click on—they’re for fun facts, extra thoughts, extraneous quotes from my conversations with Musk, and further explanation.↩

 2. It was actually the Germans who had the world’s early lead in rocket technology, but when they lost the war, the Americans, Soviets, and British pillaged Germany’s rocket engineers, with each successfully recruiting a number of them. The US was probably the biggest winner, snagging Wernher von Braun, who would ultimately lead them to their moon landing rocket, the Saturn V.↩

 3. Armstrong was selected to be the first man to walk on the moon, partially because he was known not to have an over-inflated ego. Gus Grissom might have been the front runner for the job, but in 1967, slated to command Apollo 1 on a mission to Low Earth Orbit, he and two other astronauts burned to death when they were trapped in a spacecraft as it caught fire during an on-the-ground test. Stressful.↩

 4. One inadvertent accomplishment during the Apollo 13 debacle was that the spacecraft at one point was farther away from Earth than any of the other Apollo missions, leaving the three Apollo 13 astronauts with the human high altitude record (248,665 miles / 400,187 km) that stands to this day.↩

 5. It’s technically two rotations every sidereal day, which is about 23 hours and 56 minutes, and correlates to the Earth’s rotation with respect to the stars instead of the sun. This annoys me because I don’t get why they would base it on a sidereal day instead of a normal day and I don’t want to spend the 17 minutes it’ll take to find out—if someone knows, please tell me in the comments. It also annoys me because sidereal is just an annoying word.↩

 6. Am I supposed to capitalize GIF? Unclear.↩

 7. The movie Gravity illustrated exactly what sucks about space debris.↩

 8. I’m not sure people realize that before this, we had never actually seen what Pluto looks like—it’s too small and too far away for even our best telescopes to get a decent photo. Before these new images came in, everything that looked like a good photo of Pluto was actually an artist’s rendition. That changed on July 14th.↩

 9. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was originally given planet status, but as we discovered more and more outer Solar System objects, we started to realize that Pluto was just the largest object in the crowded Kuiper belt, and that it kind of made no sense for it to be a planet. If it were alone out there, that would be one thing, but if none of the huge dwarf planets in the asteroid or Kuiper belts were planets (including Pluto’s newly-discovered and almost-as-large neighbor, Eris), then there was no good reason Pluto should randomly be one. So the dramatically nerdy International Astronomical Union got together and, amidst tantrums on both sides, settled on an official definition for a planet: 1) Had to orbit the sun, 2) Had to be big enough to become spherical-ish under its own gravity, 3) Had to have cleared out its own orbit. Pluto failed on #3, since there are many other objects in its orbit, which is part of the Kuiper belt. One other fun fact while we’re here: after Uranus was discovered and named, chemists soon after named a newly-invented element after it—uranium. They did the same thing with neptunian (apparently there’s a neptunium) after Neptune was named, and the newly-named Pluto turned into the naming of the element plutonium.↩

 10. An AU is an “astronomical unit”—the distance from the Earth to the sun—which is about 93 million miles (150 million km).↩

 11. To get a feel for the size of Ceres and Vesta, here’s what they’d look like next to our moon.↩

 12. Awkwardly, after almost 20 years of battling for a Hubble budget and creating the telescope, and after finally having launched a risky and difficult Space Shuttle mission to put it into orbit, NASA received the first Hubble photos, only to find that they were blurry. Turns out the mirror curvature was off by 2.2 thousandth of a millimeter. An almost imperceptible error, but with the vast distances the telescope needed to take in, it was enough to ruin everything. It wasn’t until almost four years later that another Space Shuttle mission was able to get back to the telescope to make a fix. The fix had to be worked out perfectly on Earth first, and the astronauts had to implement it perfectly in space—the mirror shape is so precise that if an astronaut even brushed up against it by accident during the repair process, it would ruin it. Luckily, everything went well and from 1994 on, the Hubble has worked flawlessly.↩

 13. The Hubble is expected to fail at some point not too far from now, maybe before 2020. Without anyone up there to repair system failures since 2009, it’s inevitable—and its orbit will decay slowly until between 2030-2040, when it’s expected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. This is kind of sad—the original plan was to have a Space Shuttle retrieve it and safely return it to Earth, where it could be a celebrity in the Smithsonian. But the Space Shuttle program ended, and now the Hubble will die a horrifying death instead. On the bright side, Hubble has an exciting successor—the James Webb Space Telescope—which is scheduled to be flown into orbit in 2018 and can detect objects that are 10 to 100 times fainter than the best Hubble can do.↩

 14. I’m gettin reallllll sick of this miles (km) thing. But I have no choice because 58% of WBW readers are from the US and kilometers measurements don’t mean much to them, and the other 42% are from the rest of the planet that doesn’t get mile measurements. How dare the US be on this inane system for no apparent reason.↩

 15. Cool video showing what it would look like if the moon orbited at the same altitude as the ISS.↩

 16. Two Russians, one American. The American is Scott Kelly, identical twin of astronaut Mark Kelly, who’s the husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. These are the only three humans in space currently—you can see the total “people in space” count at any given time here.↩

 1. Small gray square footnotes are boring and when you click on one of these, you’ll end up bored. They’re for sources and citations.↩

 2. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 3. GIF: http://acciolacquer.com/swatches/glam-polish-youre-never-too-old-to-be-young-pt-1/↩

 4. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 5. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 6. Graph: Wikimedia Commons↩

 7. SIA 2014 Report↩

 8. Graph source: SIA 2014 Report↩

 9. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 10. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 11. GIF: http://ucresearch.tumblr.com/post/124673707676/blasting-space-junk-with-a-laser-its-getting↩

 12. Image: One of those images that is everywhere and it’s hard to find the original source. Here’s one source for it: http://bizlifes.net/img/2015/07/1437578125_bozhthc.jpg↩

 13. ESA, Astronomy Cafe↩

 14. Astronomy Cafe↩

 15. ERAU Scholarly Commons, The History of Space Debris↩

 16. Image made by Michael Paukner.↩

 17. Probe image sources are hyperlinked when you click the image.↩

 18. Image: NASA↩

 19. Image: Wikimedia Commons.↩

 20. Images: NASA↩

 21. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 22. Images: NASA (Uranus, Neptune)↩

 23. Space.com↩

 24. Image: Couldn’t find this on the National Geographic website, but it’s on this random blog so http://cosmicdiary.org/fmarchis/2014/05/19/54_years_of_exploration/↩

 25. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 26. Facts and quote: NASA.↩

 27. Hubble Images: NASA↩

 28. Image: Couldn’t find the original source, so I’ll just put someone else who stole the image as the source—Imgur↩

 29. Facts and image: NASA↩

 30. Image: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/onthestation/facts_and_figures.html↩

 31. Image: How It Works Daily↩

 32. Sources: first quote, second two quotes.↩

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This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved,   start with Part 1. 
 Pre-Post Note: I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal. But like the Tesla post, I decided as I researched that this was A) a supremely important topic that will only become more important in the years to come, and B) something most people don’t know nearly enough about. My weeks of research and discussions with Musk and others built me an in-depth, tree-trunk understanding of what’s happening in what I’m calling The Story of Humans and Space—one that has totally reframed my mental picture of the future (yet again). And as I planned out what to include in the post, I wanted to make sure every Wait But Why reader ended up with the same foundation moving forward—because with everything that’s coming, we’re gonna need it. So like the Tesla post, this post became a full situation. Even the progress updates leading up to its publication became a full situation.
Thanks for your patience. I know you’d prefer this not to be a site that updates every two months, and I would too. The Tesla and SpaceX posts were special cases, and you can expect a return to more normal-length WBW posts now that they’re done.
About the post itself: There are three main parts. Part 1 provides the context and background, Part 2 explores the “Why” part of colonizing Mars, and Part 3 digs into the “How.” To make reading this post as accessible as possible, it’s broken into five pages, each about the length of a normal WBW post, and you can jump to any part of the post easily by clicking the links in the Table of Contents below. We’re also trying two new things, both coming in the next couple days:
 1) PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:
     
 2) An audio version  . You can find an unabridged audio version of the post, read by me, as well as a discussion about the post between Andrew and me here.
___________
Contents 
  Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space  
  Part 2: Musk’s Mission  
  Part 3: How to Colonize Mars   
→ Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space 
→  Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel 
→  Phase 3: Colonize Mars 
  A SpaceX Future  
  
2365 AD, Ganymede 
 One more day until departure. It was so surreal to picture actually being there that she still didn’t really believe it would happen. All those things she had always heard about—buildings that were constructed hundreds of years before the first human set foot on Ganymede; animals the size of a house; oceans the size of her whole world; tropical beaches; the famous blue sky; the giant sun that’s so close it can burn your skin; and the weirdest part—no Jupiter hovering overhead. Having seen it all in so many movies, she felt like she was going to visit a legendary movie set. It was too much to think about all at once. For now, she just had to focus on making sure she had everything she needed and saying goodbye to everyone—it would be a long time before she would see them again…
___________
   Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space 
About six million years ago, a very important female great ape had two children. One of her children would go on to become the common ancestor of all chimpanzees. The other would give birth to a line that would one day include the entire human race. While the descendants of her first child would end up being pretty normal and monkey-ish, as time passed, strange things began to happen with the lineage of the other.1 1  ← click these  
We’re not quite sure why, but over the next six million years, our ancestral line started to do something no creatures on Earth had ever done before—they woke up.
It happened slowly and gradually through the thousands of generations the same way your brain slowly comes to in the first few seconds after you rouse from sleep. But as the clarity increased, our ancestors started to look around and, for the very first time, wonder.
Emerging from a 3.6-billion-year dream, life on Earth had its first questions.
 What is this big room we’re in, and who put us here? What is that bright yellow circle on the ceiling and where does it go every night? Where does the ocean end and what happens when you get there? Where are all the dead people now that they’re not here anymore?  
We had discovered our species’ great mystery novel—Where Are We?—and we wanted to learn how to read it.
As the light of human consciousness grew brighter and brighter, we began to arrive at answers that seemed to make sense. Maybe we were on top of a floating disk, and maybe that disk was on top of a huge turtle. Maybe the pinpricks of light above us at night are a glimpse into what lies beyond this big room—and maybe that’s where we go when we die. Maybe if we can find the place where the ceiling meets the floor, we can poke our heads through and see all the super fun stuff on the other side.2
    
Around 10,000 years ago, isolated tribes of humans began to merge together and form the first cities. In larger communities, people were able to talk to each other about this mystery novel we had found, comparing notes across tribes and through the generations. As the techniques for learning became more sophisticated and the clues piled up, new discoveries surfaced.
The world was apparently a ball, not a disk. Which meant that the ceiling was actually a larger sphere surrounding us. The sizes of the other objects floating out there in the sphere with us, and the distances between them, were vaster than we had ever imagined. And then, something upsetting:
The sun wasn’t revolving around us. We were revolving around the sun.
This was a super unwarm, unfuzzy discovery. Why the hell weren’t we in the center of things? What did that mean?
 Where are we? 
The sphere was already unpleasantly big—if we weren’t in the center of it, were we just on a random ball inside of it, kind of for no apparent reason? Could this really be what was happening?
   
Scary.
Then things got worse.
It seemed that the pinpricks of light on the edge of the sphere weren’t what we thought they were—they were other suns like ours. And they were out there floating just like our sun—which means we weren’t inside of a sphere at all. Not only was our planet not the center of things, even our sun was just a random dude out there, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothingness.
   
 Scary. 
Our sun turned out to be a little piece of something much bigger. A beautiful, vast cloud of billions of suns. The everything of everything.
   
At least we had that. Until we realized that it wasn’t everything, it was this:
   
Darkness.
The better our tools and understanding became, the more we could zoom out, and the more we zoomed out, the more things sucked. We were deciphering the pages of Where Are We? at our own peril, and we had deciphered our way right into the knowledge that we’re unbelievably alone, living on a lonely island inside a lonely island inside a lonely island, buried in layers of isolation, with no one to talk to.
That’s our situation.
In the most recent 1% of our species’ short existence, we have become the first life on Earth to know about the Situation—and we’ve been having a collective existential crisis ever since.
You really can’t blame us. Imagine not realizing that the universe is a thing and then realizing the universe is a thing. It’s a lot to take in.
Most of us handle it by living in a pleasant delusion, pretending that the only place we live is in an endless land of colors and warmth. We’re like this guy, who’s doing everything he possibly can to ignore the Situation:3
    
And our best friend for this activity? The clear blue sky. The blue sky seems like it was invented to help humans pretend the Situation doesn’t exist, serving as the perfect whimsical backdrop to shield us from reality.
Then nighttime happens, and there’s the Situation, staring us right in the face.
   
 Oh yeah… 
This la-di-da → oh yeah… → la-di-da → oh yeah… merry-go-round of psychosis was, for most of recent history, the extent of our relationship with the Situation.
But in the last 60 years, that relationship has vaulted to a whole new level. During World War II, missile technology leapt forward,2 and for the first time, a new, mind-blowing concept was possible—
 Space travel. 
For thousands of years, The Story of Humans and Space had been the story of staring out and wondering. The possibility of people leaving our Earth island and venturing out into space burst open the human spirit of adventure.
I imagine a similar feeling in the people of the 15th century, during the Age of Discovery, when we were working our way through the world map chapter of Where Are We? and the notion of cross-ocean voyages dazzled people’s imaginations. If you asked a child in 1495 what they wanted to be when they grew up, “an ocean explorer” would probably have been a common response.
In 1970, if you asked a child the same question, the answer would be, “an astronaut”—i.e. a Situation explorer.
WWII advanced the possibility of human space travel, but it was in late 1957, when the Soviets launched the first man-made object into orbit, the adorable Sputnik 1, that space travel became the defining quest of the world’s great powers.
At the time, the Cold War was in full throttle, and the US and Soviets had their measuring sticks out for an internationally-televised penis-measuring contest. With the successful launch of Sputnik, the Soviet penis bolted out by a few centimeters, horrifying the Americans.
   
To the Soviets, putting a satellite into space before the US was proof that Soviet technology was superior to American technology, which in turn was put forward as proof, for all the world to see, that communism was a system superior to capitalism.
Eight months later, NASA was born.
The Space Race had begun, and NASA’s first order of business would be to get a man into space, and then a man into full orbit, preferably both before the Soviets. The US was not to be shown up again.
In 1959, NASA launched Project Mercury to carry out the mission. They were on the verge of success when in April of 1961, the Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into a full orbit around the Earth, making the first human in space and in orbit a Soviet.
   
It was time for drastic measures. John F. Kennedy’s advisors told him that the Soviets had too big a lead for the US to beat them at any near-term achievements—but that the prospect of a manned moon landing was far enough in the future that the US had a fighting chance to get there first. So Kennedy gave his famous “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hahhd” speech, and directed an outrageous amount of funding at the mission ($20 billion, or $205 billion in today’s dollars).
The result was Project Apollo. Apollo’s mission was to land an American on the moon—and to do it first. The Soviets answered with Soyuz, their own moon program, and the race was on.
As the early phases of Apollo started coming together, Project Mercury finally hit its stride. Just a month after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, American astronaut Alan Shepard became the second man in space, completing a little arc that didn’t put him in full orbit but allowed him to give space a high-five at the top of the arc. A few months later, in February of 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
The next seven years saw 22 US and Soviet manned launches as the superpowers honed their skills and technology. By late 1968, the furiously-sprinting US had more total launches under their belt (17) than the Soviets (10), and together, the two nations had mastered what we call Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
   
But LEO hadn’t really excited anyone since the early ’60s. Both powers had their sights firmly set on the moon. The Apollo program was making quick leaps, and in December of 1968, the US became the first nation to soar outside of LEO. Apollo 8 made it all the way to the moon’s orbit and circled around 10 times before returning home safely. The crew, which included James Lovell (who a few months later played the role of Tom Hanks on the Apollo 13 mission), shattered the human altitude record and became the first people to see the moon up close, the first to see the “dark” side of the moon, and the first to see the Earth as a whole planet, snapping this iconic photo:4
    
Upon return, the crew became America’s most celebrated heroes—which I hope they enjoyed for eight months. Three Apollo missions later, in July of 1969, Apollo 11 made Americans Neil Armstrong3 and Buzz Aldrin the first humans on the moon, and Armstrong took this famous photo of Aldrin looking all puffy:5
    
It’s hard to fully emphasize what a big deal this was. Ever since life on Earth began 3.6 billion years ago, no earthly creature had set foot on any celestial body other than the Earth. Suddenly, there are Armstrong and Aldrin, bouncing around another sphere, looking up in the sky where the moon is supposed to be and seeing the Earth instead. Insane.
Project Apollo proved to be a smashing success. Not only did Apollo get a man on the moon before the Soviets, the program sent 10 more men to the moon over the next 3.5 years on five other Apollo missions. There were six successful moon trips in seven tries, with the famous exception being Apollo 13, which was safely aborted after an explosion in the oxygen tank.4
 The Soviet Soyuz program kept running into technical problems, and it never ended up putting someone on the moon.
The final Apollo moonwalk took place in late 1972. In only one decade, we had conquered nearby space, and progress was accelerating. If at that time you had asked any American, or any other human, what the coming decades of space travel would bring, they’d have made big, bold predictions. Many more people on the moon, a permanent moon base, people on Mars, and beyond.
So you can only imagine how surprised they’d be if you told them in 1972, after just watching 12 humans walk on the moon, that 43 years later, in the impossibly futuristic-sounding year 2015, the number of people to set foot on the moon would still be 12. Or that after leaving Low Earth Orbit in the dust years earlier and using it now as our pre-moon trip parking lot, 2015 would roll around and LEO would be the farthest out humans would ever go.
1972 people would be blown away by our smart phones and our internet, but they’d be just as shocked that we gave up on pushing our boundaries in space.
So what happened? After such a wildly exciting decade of human space adventure, why did we just stop? 
Well, like we found in the Tesla post, “Why did we stop?” is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask:
 Why were we ever adventurous about sending humans into space in the first place? 
Space travel is unbelievably expensive. National budgets are incredibly tight. The fact is, it’s kind of surprising that a nation ever ponied up a sizable chunk of its budget for the sake of adventure and inspiration and pushing our boundaries.
And that’s actually because no nation did blow their budget for the sake of adventure and inspiration and pushing our boundaries—two nations blew their budgets because of a penis–length contest. In the face of international embarrassment at a time when everyone was trying to figure out whose economic system was better, the US government agreed to drop the usual rules for a few years to pour whatever resources were necessary on the problem to make sure they won that argument—
   
And once they won it, the contest was over and so were the special rules. And the US went back to spending money like a normal person.6
    
Instead of continuing to push the limits at all costs, the US and the Soviets got a grip, put their pants back on, shook hands, and started working together like adults on far more practical projects, like setting up a joint space station in LEO.
In the four decades since then, the Story of Humans and Space has again become confined to Earth, where we find ourselves with two primary reasons to interact with space (Note: the next whole chunk of the post is a slight diversion for an overview on satellites, space probes, and space telescopes. If that doesn’t excite you, I won’t be hurt if you skip down to the International Space Station section):
 1) Support for Earth Industries 
The first and primary reason humans have interacted with space since the Apollo program isn’t about human interest in space. It’s about using space for practical purposes in support of industries on Earth—mostly in the form of satellites. The bulk of today’s rocket launches into space are simply putting things into LEO whose purpose is to look back down at Earth, not to the great expanses in the other direction.
Here’s a little satellite overview:
 Satellites Blue Box 
We don’t think about them that often, but above us are hundreds of flying robots that play a large part in our lives on Earth. In 1957, lonely Sputnik circled the Earth by itself, but today, the worlds of communication, weather forecasting, television, navigation, and aerial photography all rely heavily on satellites, as do many national militaries and government intelligence agencies.
The total market for satellite manufacturing, the launches that carry them to space, and related equipment and services has ballooned from $60 billion in 2004 to over $200 billion in 2015. Satellite industry revenue today makes up only 4% of the global telecommunications industry but accounts for over 60% of space industry revenue.7
 Here’s how the world’s satellites break down by role (in 2013):8 
   
Of the 1,265 active satellites in orbit at the beginning of 2015, the US owns by far the largest number at 528—over 40% of the total—but over 50 countries own at least one orbiting satellite.
As for where all of these satellites are, most of them fall into two distinct “layers” of space:
About two-thirds of active satellites are in Low Earth Orbit. LEO starts up at 99 miles (160 km) above the Earth, the lowest altitude at which an object can orbit without atmospheric drag messing things up. The top of LEO is 1,240 miles (2,000 km) up. Typically, the lowest satellites are at around 220 miles (350 km) up or higher.
Most of the rest (about one-third) of the satellites are much farther out, in a place called geostationary orbit (GEO). It’s right at 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth, and it’s called geostationary because something orbiting in it rotates at the exact speed that the Earth turns, making its position in the sky stationary relative to a point on the Earth. It’ll seem to be motionless to an observer on the ground.9
    
GEO is ideal for something like a TV satellite because a dish on the Earth can aim at the same fixed spot all the time.
A small percentage of other satellites are in medium Earth orbit (MEO), which is everything in between LEO and GEO. One notable resident of MEO is the GPS system that most Americans, and people from many other countries, use every day. I never realized that the entire GPS system, a US Department of Defense project that went live in 1995, only uses 32 satellites total. And until 2012, the number was only 24—six orbits, each with four satellites. But you can see in the GIF below that even with 24, a given point on the Earth can be seen by at least six of the satellites at any given time, and usually it’s nine or higher (in the GIF, the blue dot on the Earth is a hypothetical person on the ground, and whichever satellites can see him at a given time are blue, with the green lines showing their line of sight to the person):10
    
This is why your phone’s map can still show your location even when you’re somewhere with no cellular service—because it has nothing to do with cellular service. The system is also set up to be redundant—only four satellites need to simultaneously see you in order for the system to pinpoint your location. GPS satellites have an orbital period of about 12 hours, making two full rotations of the Earth each day.5
 You can see satellite locations using Google Earth (here’s a cool video of Google Earth showing the satellites).
 Space Debris Bluer Box 
There’s a big problem happening in the world of satellites. In addition to the 1,265 active satellites up in orbit, there are thousands more inactive satellites, as well as a bunch of spent rockets from previous missions. And once in a while, one of them explodes, or two of them collide, creating a ton of tiny fragments called space debris. The number of objects in space has risen quickly over recent decades, as a GIF6 made by the ESA shows (with exaggerated-sized objects relative to the Earth’s size):11
    
The majority of satellites and debris are bunched around the Earth in LEO, and the outer ring of objects is what’s located in GEO.
Earth space agencies track about 17,000 objects in space, only 7% of which are active satellites. Here’s a map showing every known object in space today.12
    
But the crazy thing is they only track the large objects, and that’s what we’re seeing in that image. Estimates for the number of smaller debris objects (1 – 10 cm) range from 150,000 to 500,000, and there are over a million total pieces of debris larger than 2 mm.13
 The issue is that at the incredible speeds at which space objects move (most LEO objects zip along at over 17,000 mph), a collision with even a tiny object can cause devastating damage to an active satellite or spacecraft. An object of only 1 cm at those speeds will cause the same damage in a collision as a small hand grenade.7 14
 Over a third of all space debris originated from just two events: China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, when China shat on the world’s face by intentionally blowing up one of its own satellites, creating 3,000 new pieces of debris large enough to be trackable, and a 2009 collision between two satellites that exploded into 2,000 debris chunks.15 Each collision increases the amount of debris, which in turn increases the likelihood of more collisions, and there’s danger of a domino effect situation, which scientists call the Kessler Syndrome. A bunch of parties are proposing ways to mitigate the amount of debris in LEO—everything from harpooning the debris to laser blasting it to intercepting it with a cloud of gas.
Here’s a chart that sums up each nation’s “space footprint,” showing the quantity of active satellites, inactive satellites, and space debris caused by each country:16
    
There are a few other space activities in the “Support for Earth Industries” category of human/space interaction—like space mining, space burial, and space tourism—but at least for now, satellites account for almost the entire category.
 2) Looking and Learning 
The second reason humans have interacted with space in the last four decades proves that while we may have stopped sending people into The Situation, we never lost our hunger to learn about what’s out there. As society moved on from space and turned its attention elsewhere, astronomers have kept busy at work deciphering their way through page after page of the old mystery novel, Where Are We?   
Astronomers learn best with their eyes, and a side effect of the Space Race was the development of far better technology for seeing what’s out there. There are two high-tech ways modern astronomers see things:
 Looking and Learning Tool #1: Sending probes around the Solar System 
Basically, scientists fire a fancy robot toward some distant planet, moon, or asteroid, and the robot spends months or years flying through space, bored, until it finally arrives. Then, depending on the plan, it either just flies by the object, taking some pictures on the way, orbits the object to get more detailed information, or lands on the object for a full inspection. Everything it learns, it sends back to us, and one day, when its job is done, we either kill the probe by crashing it into the object or let it just fly out into deep space to be depressed.
I often use myself as a litmus test for what the public probably knows about or doesn’t know about. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been seriously dating astronomy ever since I was three years old—so if I don’t know something going on in the world of space, I assume that most people don’t. And when it comes to space probes, I’ve felt pretty disoriented. Are there 200 of them flying around out there? 50? 9? Why are they out there, who sent them, and what are they doing? All I’d know is that sometimes there would be a random story about some probe sending back stunning pictures—I’d open the cnn.com gallery, click through them, be thrilled for a second, send the link to the three friends of mine who are also dating astronomy, and then try to close the page but instead see some trashy CNN clickbait headline on the side of the page, click that, and ruin my life for the next three hateful hours. That’s my relationship with humanity’s space probes.
But in researching this post, I quickly realized there’s not that much to know, and it doesn’t take too big an effort to get fully oriented. Here are what I consider the eight key space robots to know about right now:17
  1) New Horizons (Pluto, NASA)
   
New Horizons goes first because its big moment just happened. Launched in 2006 on a decade-long trip to Pluto (sped up on its way by a Jupiter fly-by in 2007 that gravity-zinged it to a much faster speed), New Horizons finally reached Pluto on July 14th, 2015. It didn’t land on Pluto, but it flew very near to it and showed us Pluto for the first time:8 18
    
Next, New Horizons will be on its way further outwards into the Kuiper belt to send back images of comets and dwarf planets. You can track New Horizons’ location here.
Awkwardly, Pluto was still a planet when New Horizons launched, and everyone spent the years following Pluto’s demotion avoiding making eye contact with the New Horizons team. While I agree with the common sentiment that it’s sad that Pluto’s sad about its demotion,9 the truth is, Pluto should probably appreciate that it got away with 76 illegitimate years as a planet celebrity, pulling in a ton of Kuiper belt ass in the process, given that fellow Kuiper belt dwarf planet Eris spent that whole time living its life in total obscurity, only discovered in 2005.
 2) Curiosity  (Mars, NASA)
   
Curiosity is a now-famous rover. A car-sized lovable lander robot dropped down on Mars’s surface in 2012, Curiosity is studying a bunch of things inside a large crater, with its primary objective being to figure out if there’s ever been life on Mars. The last two Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 days. Both lasted way past their expiry date, and Opportunity is still active. Such a good boy.
There are a bunch of other probes orbiting around Mars as well, but Curiosity is the main event there.
In my research, I came across this video from an IMAX movie about getting the rover Spirit from Earth to the surface of Mars and thought it was the coolest video ever. Until I found this video about getting Curiosity on Mars, which was even cooler.
 3) Juno (Jupiter, NASA)
   
Juno left Earth in 2011, made a big loop and came back to Earth in 2013 to get a gravity zing (during which it captured a cool video of the moon circling the Earth), and is now on its way to Jupiter, where it’ll arrive in July of 2016.19
    
Once it arrives, Juno will orbit Jupiter, taking pictures and using sensors to try to figure out what’s going on in there underneath all the succulent-looking cloud tops. It’ll die by falling into Jupiter, hopefully snapping and relaying some quick photos of what it looks like inside Jupiter’s atmosphere before burning up so that someone can make a virtual reality video that lets you descend into Jupiter’s surface.
 4) Cassini (Saturn, NASA / European Space Agency / Italian Space Agency collaboration)
   
Launched in 1997, Cassini set off towards Saturn, the only planet in the Solar System who decided it was okay to wear a tutu. Reaching Saturn in 2004, Cassini became the first probe in history to orbit the planet, sending back some jaw-dropping pictures, like this one:20
    
And this one:
   
And this close-up of the rings:
   
And this absurdly cool picture of Saturn with the sun behind it:
   
In 2005, Cassini dropped its attached lander, the upsettingly-named Huygens, down onto the largest of Saturn’s moons, Titan. Here’s a real image of the surface of Titan, taken by Huygens (it’s creepily fascinating seeing the actual surface of something as far away and mysterious as a Saturn moon):21
    
 5 and 6) Voyager 1 and 2 (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; NASA)
   
Launched in 1977, the two Voyager probes were the first probes to collect images of the four outer giants of the Solar System. Voyager 2 is still the only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune, taking these eerie photos of the two, respectively:22
    
The cool thing about the Voyagers is that even though their original missions are now long over, they’re still zooming outward. They’re both ridiculously far away now and going super fast. Voyager 1 is the faster of the two, going 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h)—so fast that it would cross the Atlantic Ocean in five minutes—and it’s the farthest man-made object from Earth, currently 131 AU10 away from Earth. It was also the first man-made object to leave the Solar System. At this rate, Voyager 1 will reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, in about 73,000 years.
Another cool thing about the Voyagers is that before they launched, a NASA committee, led by Carl Sagan, loaded them each up with a time capsule, full of symbols, sounds, and images of Earth (and symbol instructions about how to play and view the media), so the probes can one day tell aliens what our deal is. Probably a waste of everyone’s time, but who knows.
 7) Rosetta (comet, ESA)
   
Launched in 2004, Rosetta got a lot of attention last year when it reached comet 67P in August 2014 and successfully dropped its little lander, Philae, onto the comet a couple months later. Comet 67P turned out to kind of just be a big rock (2.7 mi/4.3 km long), but the images taken by Rosetta were cool:
   
 8) Dawn  (Vesta and Ceres, NASA)
   
Dawn can’t believe it made the cut on this list. The reason I included it is that I’m not sure people realize that there are huge, almost planet-size objects in the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt, a huge ring of millions of asteroids, including over 750,000 that are at least 1 km in diameter,23 lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (not to be confused with the much larger Kuiper belt that surrounds the outer Solar System). Among the many asteroids in the asteroid belt is Ceres, a dwarf planet 27% the diameter of the moon that makes up one-third of the asteroid belt’s total mass, and Vesta, the second largest object in the belt after Ceres and the brightest belt object in our night sky.11 I didn’t really know Ceres and Vesta were things. Anyway, Dawn, which was launched in 2007, spent nine months orbiting Vesta in 2011 before heading off to Ceres, where it arrived in March 2015 (making it the first probe to orbit two different bodies).
There’s another handful of probes out there as well. Like Messenger, which orbited Mercury for seven years until intentionally crashing into it in April 2015; Akatsuki, a Japanese probe that was supposed to start orbiting Venus in 2010 but botched it, and will try again this year; a bunch of probes uneventfully circling the moon, including China’s Chang’e 3, which dropped the first lander on the moon since 1976; and a group of others taking measurements from the sun. Here’s an exhaustive list of all past and present probes, and an awesome National Geographic visualization that sums it all up (click the graphic for a larger view):24
    
  
Looking and Learning Tool #2: Telescopes 
Telescopes have been around since the early 17th century, and as they got more and more powerful over the next 400 years, they became humanity’s primary tool for turning the pages of Where Are We? 
But there came a point when ground telescopes ran into a limit on what they’d be able to see, no matter how advanced they became. You know when you look at a light through a glass of water and the light is all bendy and silly? That’s what’s happening when stars twinkle, except instead of water, we’re looking at them through the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere doesn’t distort light as much as water does, but stars and galaxies are tiny pinpricks of light in our sky, so any level of blur is a big problem—it’s like being underwater in a swimming pool and looking upwards, trying to examine a bunch of birds flying in the sky above.
In the 1960s, humans gained the ability to put telescopes in space, where they’d show us the first crystal-clear view of the stars in history. In 1990, NASA launched the first truly badass space telescope, the Hubble.12 25
    
The 13-ton, school bus-length Hubble Space Telescope’s 7.9 foot (2.4 m) lens is accurate enough to shine a laser beam on a dime 200 miles away and powerful enough to see a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Boston (if the Earth were flat). And in its position in orbit 340 miles above Earth, where there’s no atmosphere or light pollution in the way, the Hubble is on what NASA calls “the ultimate mountaintop.”26 All of this gives the Hubble an unprecedented view of the universe, allowing it to spend the last 25 years sending us the most astounding photographs of things I can’t really believe are real. Like this epic galaxy:27
    
Or these two galaxies, which are in the slow process of merging:
   
Or the inconceivably huge Pillars of Creation (the left finger is so big, at four light years from top to bottom, that if you started at the knuckle and flew in an airplane upwards, it would take 4.5 million years to get to the fingertip):
   
Or the time Hubble aimed its lens at a tiny, seemingly empty square of the sky (seen here next to the moon to show the size of the square):
   
And found thousands of galaxies:
   
What Hubble and other space telescopes13 have shown us has revealed worlds of new information about where we are and how we got here, expanding our knowledge about everything from dark energy to the origin and age and size of the universe to the number of planets out there like ours that might have life on them.
For over 40 years now, those two objectives—supporting Earth industries and continuing to learn and discover—have been the extent of our relationship with space.
And because those two goals are both best accomplished by machine space travelers, the most recent chapter of The Story of Humans and Space has been all about space faring machines, with the human role taking place on or very near Earth, controlling things with joysticks.
The only reason any humans have gone to space since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in 1972 is that sometimes, the machines aren’t yet advanced enough to do a certain task, so we need to send a human up to do it instead. Of the roughly 550 people who have ever been in space, over 400 of them have gone there in the post-Space Race era. But since Apollo, the reasons have been practical—scientists and technicians going to space to do a job. That’s why each and every manned mission of the past four decades has kept within the thin blanket of space surrounding the Earth—Low Earth Orbit.
 The International Space Station 
Today, the purpose of almost every manned space mission is to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). 28
    
The ISS is an international collaboration among 16 countries, started in 1998 and constructed over the span of a decade. The space station orbits the Earth in the lowest strip of LEO at an altitude of between 205 and 255 miles (330–410 km14), about the distance across Iceland—close enough to the ground that you can easily see it at night with your naked eye.15 And it’s bigger than people realize, weighing as much as 320 cars and spanning the full length of an American football field:29
    
 What the Hell Does Anyone Do in the ISS? Blue Box 
As I began working on this post, I realized I didn’t really know what the ISS was for or what anyone did while they were there. Every time I see a video of what goes on inside the space station, it’s just some adult floating around having playtime.
Conveniently, there’s such a thing as an ISS conference, and it happened to take place last month, in Boston. So I went. The conference was run by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which manages the US portion of the ISS. Here’s what I learned at the conference:
The ISS is a science laboratory. It’s kind of like other labs, except with the party trick that it’s soaring through space, so it’s the one lab where you can test things in zero gravity (it’s not actually zero gravity—it’s microgravity—something I’ll explain later in the post).
What most ISS experiments have in common is that they’re there for the gravity situation, but beyond that, they span a wide range of purposes—everything from learning about osteoporosis as astronauts’ bones atrophy (because they don’t have to fight against gravity), to testing how equipment holds up in space, to analyzing how fluids behave and interact without the influence of any other forces, to using the change in gravity to trick bacteria into revealing which genes make them immune to certain medicines.
Astronauts in the ISS have a tight and controlled schedule during the week. At all times, they’re either sleeping (8.5 hours), eating (1.5 hours for breakfast/dinner, 1 hour for lunch) exercising (mandatory 2.5 hours a day), or working on experiments (9 hours a day)—I took this photo of the current schedule of the three astronauts on the ISS.16 Weekends are off, which could not possibly sound more fun—you get to spend the whole time floating around and looking out the window.
I’m not the only one who badly wants to play on the ISS—there’s a furiously competitive process to be selected by NASA to go. Thousands apply, 100 are picked for a final round interview and physical examination, and only one or two end up getting the nod. On rare occasion, a private company or individual can buy a spot on the station for a few days, but it costs around $60 million.
If you want to get a better feel for what it’s like to live on the ISS, here’s a video tour of the space station by a floaty astronaut.
So far, 216 people have gotten to play on the ISS, from 15 countries:30
    
  
How Stuff Gets to Space
 
We’ve gone over what’s in space, but how does all that stuff get to space? Have you ever asked yourself how something like the GPS satellite gets up there in the first place? The answer is that there are nine countries that have the ability to launch something into orbit: Russia, the US, France, Japan, China, India, Israel, Iran and, um, North Korea—along with one non-national entity, the European Space Agency (ESA). If a satellite goes up into space, it’s because someone paid one of those ten entities to bring it there atop a massive, expensive rocket (or because a country is putting one up there for its own uses).
As for launching humans into space, only three countries in history have done it—Russia, the US, and China (who is a fast-growing newcomer to the space industry). Since the 60s, Russia has used its Soyuz rockets to launch people into space, and the US, after wrapping up the Apollo program in 1972, regained the ability to put people in orbit in 1981 with the Space Shuttle program.31
    
Over the next 30 years, the US launched 135 Space Shuttles into LEO, with 133 successes. The two exceptions are fairly traumatizing parts of American history— Challenger in 1986 and  Columbia in 2003.
The Space Shuttle Program retired in 2011. Today, only two countries can launch a human into orbit—Russia and China. With no capability themselves, the US—the country that once triumphantly put a man on the moon while the world watched—now has to launch their astronauts on Russian rockets, at Russia’s whim.
___________
So what are we to make of The Story of Humans and Space? It’s a bit of an odd tale. In 1970, the story looked like this:
   
So the assumption about where the story was headed was this:
   
But now it’s 2015, and it turns out that this is what was happening:
   
When I look at what’s going on with humans and space today, I should think it’s incredible. Just 58 years after the Soviets put the first man-made object into orbit, we now have a swarm of high-tech equipment soaring around our planet, giving humans magical capabilities in vision and communication. There’s a team of flying robot messengers spread out through the Solar System, reporting back to us with their findings. There’s a huge flying telescope high above Earth, showing us exactly what the observable universe looks like. There’s a football field-sized science lab 250 miles above our heads with people in it.
Everything I just said is amazing.
And if only The Story of Humans and Space looked like this—
   
—I would be marveling at the things we’re currently doing out in The Situation.
But unfortunately, the 60s happened. So instead, it’s like this:
                 
   
     
A good magic show follows a simple rule—make the act get better as it goes along. If you can’t continue to stay a step ahead of the increasingly-jaded crowd, they’ll quickly tune you out.
In some areas, the Humans and Space magic show has continued steadily upward. In our quest for knowledge and understanding, for example, we continue to outdo ourselves, learning significantly more about the universe every decade. The human spirit of discovery is alive and well, having thrived in space in the years since Apollo.
But as fascinated as we are by discovery—as much as we yearn to know all the secrets hidden in the pages of Where Are We?—when it comes to filling us with true excitement and inspiration and getting our adrenaline pumping, discovery doesn’t hold a candle to adventure. Probes and telescopes may fill us with wonder and light up our curiosity, but nothing gets us in our animal core like watching our species go where no man has gone before. And in that arena, the last four decades have left us feeling empty. After watching people land on the moon, following manned missions to and from the ISS is, as Ross Andersen said, “about as thrilling as watching Columbus sail to Ibiza.”
And that’s why, in today’s world, The Story of Humans and Space has drifted off the front page of our consciousness. The topic that should drop all of us to our knees has become a geeky sideshow. Ask 10 well-educated people you know about what’s going on with Solar System probes or the ISS or NASA or SpaceX and most won’t be able to tell you very much. Some won’t even know that people ever go to space anymore. People don’t know because people don’t care. Because of the way it played out, The Story of Humans and Space feels like a disappointment. And looking at the world around us today, it’s intuitive to predict that future chapters of the space story will continue to putter along as they do today:
   
Many people don’t think this is a bad thing. “Why spend exorbitant amounts of money sending people to the far reaches of space when we have so many problems right here on Earth?” they ask. Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who spent three decades playing a key role in US budget decision-making, calls ambitious manned space travel “at best a luxury that the country ought not to be indulging in” and “a complete and total waste of money” and “pure boondoggle.”32 And the dramatic slashes to NASA’s budget since the Space Race ended suggest that Frank isn’t the only US politician to hold this view.
Upon first assessment, Frank is being perfectly rational—after all, in the face of concerns like healthcare, national security, education, and poverty, should we really make room for an “adventure budget”? And in that light, the graph projection above for The Future of Humans and Space seems all the more likely to continue on its current course.
I’ve spent the last couple months reading, talking, and thinking almost non-stop about what the coming chapters of this story will look like—and my assumptions about the future have now changed dramatically.
I think we’re all in for a big surprise.
 Part 2: Musk’s Mission →
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/why-im-always-late.html
Why I'm Always Late — Wait But Why
2015-07-07
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>I woke up this morning to a text from Andrew. It was a link:</p>
<p><a href="http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late/1097735/">http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late/1097735/</a></p>
<p>“optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late”</p>
<p>Intriguing. Nothing’s better than the headline, “The reason people are [bad quality that describes you] is actually because they’re [good quality].”</p>
<p>I got reading. And as it turns out, late people are actually the best people ever.<em> </em>They’re optimistic and hopeful:</p>
<p><em>“People who are continuously late are actually just more optimistic. They believe they can fit more tasks into a limited amount of time more than other people and thrive when they’re multitasking. Simply put, they’re fundamentally hopeful.”</em></p>
<p>They’re big-thinking:</p>
<p><em>“People who are habitually late don’t sweat over the small stuff, they concentrate on the big picture and see the future as full of infinite possibilities.”</em></p>
<p>Late people just <em>get </em>it:</p>
<p><em>“People with a tendency for tardiness like to stop and smell the roses…l</em><em>ife was never meant to be planned down to the last detail. Remaining excessively attached to timetables signifies an inability to enjoy the moment.”</em></p>
<p>By the end of the article, I had never felt prouder to be a chronically late person.</p>
<p>But also, what the hell is going on? Late people are the <em>worst</em>. It’s the quality I like <em>least </em>in myself. And I’m not late because I like to smell the roses, or because I can see the big picture, or because the future is full of infinite possibilities.</p>
<p>I’m late because I’m insane.</p>
<p>So I thought about this for a minute, and I think I figured out what’s going on. The issue is that there are two kinds of lateness:</p>
<p><strong>1) Okay lateness.</strong> This is when the late person being late does not negatively impact anyone else—like being late to a group hangout or a party. Things can start on time and proceed as normal with or without the late person being there yet.</p>
<p><strong>2) Not okay lateness. </strong>This is when the late person being late <em>does</em> negatively impact others—like being late to a two-person dinner or meeting or anything else that simply can’t start until the late party arrives.</p>
<p>Haltiwanger’s article is (I hope) talking mostly about <em>okay </em>lateness. In which case sure, maybe those people are the best, who knows.</p>
<p>But if you read the comment section under Haltiwanger’s article, people are <em>furious</em> with him for portraying lateness in a positive light. And that’s because <em>they’re </em>thinking about the far less excusable <em>not </em>okay lateness.</p>
<p>All of this has kind of left me with no choice but to take a quick nine-hour break from working on the gargantuan SpaceX post to discuss <em>not </em>okay late people.</p>
<p>When it comes to people who are chronically not okay late, I think there are two subgroups:</p>
<p><strong>Group 1) Those who don’t feel bad or wrong about it. </strong>These people are assholes.</p>
<p><strong>Group 2) Those who feel terrible and self-loathing about it. </strong>These people have problems.</p>
<p>Group 1 is simple. They think they’re a little more special than everyone else, like the zero-remorse narcissist <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Screen-Shot-2015-12-06-at-3.43.42-AM.png">at the top</a> of Haltiwanger’s article. They’re unappealing. Not much else to discuss here.</p>
<p>Punctual people think <em>all </em>not okay late people are in Group 1 (as the comments on this post will show)—because they’re assuming all late people are sane people.</p>
<p>When a sane person thinks a certain kind of behavior is fine, they do it. When they think it’s wrong, they don’t do it. So to a punctual person—one who shows up on time because they believe showing up late is the wrong thing to do—someone who’s chronically late must be an asshole who thinks being late is okay.</p>
<p>But that’s misunderstanding the entire second group, who, despite being consistently late, usually detest the concept of making other people wait. Let call them CLIPs (Chronically Late Insane Person).</p>
<p>While both groups of not okay late people end up regularly frustrating others, a reliable way to identify a Group 2 CLIP is a bizarre compulsion to defeat themselves—some deep inner drive to inexplicably miss the beginning of movies, endure psychotic stress running to catch the train, crush their own reputation at work, etc. etc. As much as they may hurt others, they usually hurt themselves even more.</p>
<p>I come from a long line of CLIPs. I spent around 15% of my youth standing on some sidewalk alone, angrily kicking rocks, because yet <em>again</em>, all the other kids had gotten picked up and I was still waiting for my mom. When she finally arrived, instead of being able to have a pleasant conversation with her, I’d get into the car seething. She always felt terrible. She has problems.</p>
<p>My sister once missed an early morning flight, so they rescheduled her for the following morning. She managed to miss that one <em>too</em>, so they put her on a flight five hours later. Killing time during the long layover, she got distracted on a long phone call and <em>missed that flight too. </em>She has problems<em>. </em></p>
<p>I’ve been a CLIP my whole life. I’ve made a bunch of friends mad at me, I’ve embarrassed myself again and again in professional situations, and I’ve run a cumulative marathon through airport terminals. It’s often the same story, something like this:</p>
<p>I’ll be meeting someone, maybe a professional contact, at, say, a coffee place at 3:00. When I lay out my schedule for the day, I’ll have the perfect plan. I’ll leave early, arrive early, and get there around 2:45. That takes all the stress out of the situation, and that’s ideal because non-stressful commutes are one of my favorite things. It’ll be great—I’ll stroll out, put on a podcast, and head to the subway. Once I’m off the subway, with time to spare, I’ll take a few minutes to peruse storefronts, grab a lemonade from a street vendor, and <em>enjoy New York</em>. It’ll be such a joy to look up at the architecture, listen to the sounds, and feel the swell of people rushing by—oh magnificent city!</p>
<p>All I have to do is be off the subway by 2:45. To do that, I need to be on the subway by 2:25, so let’s be safe and get to the subway by 2:15. So I have to leave my apartment by 2:07 or earlier, and I’m set. What a plan. Here’s how it’ll play out (if you’re new to WBW, you’re advised to <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">check this out</a> before proceeding):</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Latea.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Lateb.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Latec.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late3.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late4.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late5.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late6.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late7.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late8.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late9.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late10.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late16.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late17.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late18.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late19.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late20.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late21.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late22.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late23.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late24.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late25.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Late26.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/PM1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/PM2.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/PM31.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/traffic1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Cab1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Cab2.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Cab31.png"></a></p>
<p>CLIPs are strange people. I’m sure each CLIP is insane in their own special way, and to understand how they work, you’ll usually have to get to some dark inner psychology. For me, it’s some mix of these three odd traits:</p>
<p><strong>I’m late because I’m in denial about how time works. </strong>The propensity of CLIPs to underestimate how long things take comes out of some habitual delusional optimism. Usually what happens is, of all the times the CLIP has done a certain activity or commute, what they remember is that one time things went the <em>quickest</em>. And <em>that </em>amount of time is what sticks in their head as how long that thing takes. I don’t think there’s <em>anything </em>that will get me to internalize that packing for a week-long trip takes 20 minutes. In my head, it’s eternally a five-minute task. You just take out the bag, throw some clothes in it, throw your toiletries in, zip it up and done. Five minutes. The empirical data that shows that there are actually a lot of little things to think about when you pack and that it takes 20 minutes every time is irrelevant. Packing is clearly a five-minute task. As I type this, that’s what I believe.</p>
<p><strong>I’m late because I have a weird aversion to changing circumstances. </strong>Not sure what the deal is with this, but something in me is strangely appalled by the idea of transitioning from what I’m currently doing to doing something else. When I’m at home working, I <em>hate </em>when there’s something on my schedule that I have to stop everything for to go outside and do. It’s not that I hate the activity—once I’m there I’m often pleased to be there—it’s an irrational resistance to the <em>transition</em>. The positive side of this is it usually means I’m highly present when I finally do haul my ass somewhere, and I’m often among the last to leave.</p>
<p><strong>Finally, I’m late because I’m mad at myself. </strong>There’s a pretty strong correlation here—the worse I feel about my productivity so far that day, the more likely I am to be late. When I’m pleased with how I’ve lived the day so far, the Rational Decision-Maker has a much easier time taking control of the wheel. I feel like an adult, so it’s easy to act like an adult. But times when the monkey had his way with me all day, when the time rolls around that I need to stop working and head out somewhere, I can’t <em>believe</em> that this is <em>all</em> I’ve gotten done. So my brain throws a little tantrum, refusing to accept the regrettable circumstances, and stages a self-flagellating protest, saying, “NO. This can<em>not </em>be the situation. Nope. You didn’t do what you were supposed to do, and now you’ll sit here and get more done, even if it makes you late.”</p>
<p>So yeah, that’s why I’m late—because I’m insane. Don’t excuse the CLIPs in your life—it’s not okay and they need to fix it—but remember, it’s not about you. They have problems.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More Wait But Why discussions of human insanity:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">Life is a Picture But You Live in a Pixel</a></strong></p>
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 Why I’m Always Late

 July 7, 2015 By Tim Urban


 I woke up this morning to a text from Andrew. It was a link:

 http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late/1097735/

 “optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late”

 Intriguing. Nothing’s better than the headline, “The reason people are [bad quality that describes you] is actually because they’re [good quality].”

 I got reading. And as it turns out, late people are actually the best people ever. They’re optimistic and hopeful:

 “People who are continuously late are actually just more optimistic. They believe they can fit more tasks into a limited amount of time more than other people and thrive when they’re multitasking. Simply put, they’re fundamentally hopeful.”

 They’re big-thinking:

 “People who are habitually late don’t sweat over the small stuff, they concentrate on the big picture and see the future as full of infinite possibilities.”

 Late people just get it:

 “People with a tendency for tardiness like to stop and smell the roses…life was never meant to be planned down to the last detail. Remaining excessively attached to timetables signifies an inability to enjoy the moment.”

 By the end of the article, I had never felt prouder to be a chronically late person.

 But also, what the hell is going on? Late people are the worst. It’s the quality I like least in myself. And I’m not late because I like to smell the roses, or because I can see the big picture, or because the future is full of infinite possibilities.

 I’m late because I’m insane.

 So I thought about this for a minute, and I think I figured out what’s going on. The issue is that there are two kinds of lateness:

 1) Okay lateness. This is when the late person being late does not negatively impact anyone else—like being late to a group hangout or a party. Things can start on time and proceed as normal with or without the late person being there yet.

 2) Not okay lateness. This is when the late person being late does negatively impact others—like being late to a two-person dinner or meeting or anything else that simply can’t start until the late party arrives.

 Haltiwanger’s article is (I hope) talking mostly about okay lateness. In which case sure, maybe those people are the best, who knows.

 But if you read the comment section under Haltiwanger’s article, people are furious with him for portraying lateness in a positive light. And that’s because they’re thinking about the far less excusable not okay lateness.

 All of this has kind of left me with no choice but to take a quick nine-hour break from working on the gargantuan SpaceX post to discuss not okay late people.

 When it comes to people who are chronically not okay late, I think there are two subgroups:

 Group 1) Those who don’t feel bad or wrong about it. These people are assholes.

 Group 2) Those who feel terrible and self-loathing about it. These people have problems.

 Group 1 is simple. They think they’re a little more special than everyone else, like the zero-remorse narcissist at the top of Haltiwanger’s article. They’re unappealing. Not much else to discuss here.

 Punctual people think all not okay late people are in Group 1 (as the comments on this post will show)—because they’re assuming all late people are sane people.

 When a sane person thinks a certain kind of behavior is fine, they do it. When they think it’s wrong, they don’t do it. So to a punctual person—one who shows up on time because they believe showing up late is the wrong thing to do—someone who’s chronically late must be an asshole who thinks being late is okay.

 But that’s misunderstanding the entire second group, who, despite being consistently late, usually detest the concept of making other people wait. Let call them CLIPs (Chronically Late Insane Person).

 While both groups of not okay late people end up regularly frustrating others, a reliable way to identify a Group 2 CLIP is a bizarre compulsion to defeat themselves—some deep inner drive to inexplicably miss the beginning of movies, endure psychotic stress running to catch the train, crush their own reputation at work, etc. etc. As much as they may hurt others, they usually hurt themselves even more.

 I come from a long line of CLIPs. I spent around 15% of my youth standing on some sidewalk alone, angrily kicking rocks, because yet again, all the other kids had gotten picked up and I was still waiting for my mom. When she finally arrived, instead of being able to have a pleasant conversation with her, I’d get into the car seething. She always felt terrible. She has problems.

 My sister once missed an early morning flight, so they rescheduled her for the following morning. She managed to miss that one too, so they put her on a flight five hours later. Killing time during the long layover, she got distracted on a long phone call and missed that flight too. She has problems.

 I’ve been a CLIP my whole life. I’ve made a bunch of friends mad at me, I’ve embarrassed myself again and again in professional situations, and I’ve run a cumulative marathon through airport terminals. It’s often the same story, something like this:

 I’ll be meeting someone, maybe a professional contact, at, say, a coffee place at 3:00. When I lay out my schedule for the day, I’ll have the perfect plan. I’ll leave early, arrive early, and get there around 2:45. That takes all the stress out of the situation, and that’s ideal because non-stressful commutes are one of my favorite things. It’ll be great—I’ll stroll out, put on a podcast, and head to the subway. Once I’m off the subway, with time to spare, I’ll take a few minutes to peruse storefronts, grab a lemonade from a street vendor, and enjoy New York. It’ll be such a joy to look up at the architecture, listen to the sounds, and feel the swell of people rushing by—oh magnificent city!

 All I have to do is be off the subway by 2:45. To do that, I need to be on the subway by 2:25, so let’s be safe and get to the subway by 2:15. So I have to leave my apartment by 2:07 or earlier, and I’m set. What a plan. Here’s how it’ll play out (if you’re new to WBW, you’re advised to check this out before proceeding):

 CLIPs are strange people. I’m sure each CLIP is insane in their own special way, and to understand how they work, you’ll usually have to get to some dark inner psychology. For me, it’s some mix of these three odd traits:

 I’m late because I’m in denial about how time works. The propensity of CLIPs to underestimate how long things take comes out of some habitual delusional optimism. Usually what happens is, of all the times the CLIP has done a certain activity or commute, what they remember is that one time things went the quickest. And that amount of time is what sticks in their head as how long that thing takes. I don’t think there’s anything that will get me to internalize that packing for a week-long trip takes 20 minutes. In my head, it’s eternally a five-minute task. You just take out the bag, throw some clothes in it, throw your toiletries in, zip it up and done. Five minutes. The empirical data that shows that there are actually a lot of little things to think about when you pack and that it takes 20 minutes every time is irrelevant. Packing is clearly a five-minute task. As I type this, that’s what I believe.

 I’m late because I have a weird aversion to changing circumstances. Not sure what the deal is with this, but something in me is strangely appalled by the idea of transitioning from what I’m currently doing to doing something else. When I’m at home working, I hate when there’s something on my schedule that I have to stop everything for to go outside and do. It’s not that I hate the activity—once I’m there I’m often pleased to be there—it’s an irrational resistance to the transition. The positive side of this is it usually means I’m highly present when I finally do haul my ass somewhere, and I’m often among the last to leave.

 Finally, I’m late because I’m mad at myself. There’s a pretty strong correlation here—the worse I feel about my productivity so far that day, the more likely I am to be late. When I’m pleased with how I’ve lived the day so far, the Rational Decision-Maker has a much easier time taking control of the wheel. I feel like an adult, so it’s easy to act like an adult. But times when the monkey had his way with me all day, when the time rolls around that I need to stop working and head out somewhere, I can’t believe that this is all I’ve gotten done. So my brain throws a little tantrum, refusing to accept the regrettable circumstances, and stages a self-flagellating protest, saying, “NO. This cannot be the situation. Nope. You didn’t do what you were supposed to do, and now you’ll sit here and get more done, even if it makes you late.”

 So yeah, that’s why I’m late—because I’m insane. Don’t excuse the CLIPs in your life—it’s not okay and they need to fix it—but remember, it’s not about you. They have problems.

 ___________

 More Wait But Why discussions of human insanity:

 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

 Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

 Life is a Picture But You Live in a Pixel

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 * 
I woke up this morning to a text from Andrew. It was a link:
 http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late/1097735/ 
“optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late”
Intriguing. Nothing’s better than the headline, “The reason people are [bad quality that describes you] is actually because they’re [good quality].”
I got reading. And as it turns out, late people are actually the best people ever. They’re optimistic and hopeful:
 “People who are continuously late are actually just more optimistic. They believe they can fit more tasks into a limited amount of time more than other people and thrive when they’re multitasking. Simply put, they’re fundamentally hopeful.” 
They’re big-thinking:
 “People who are habitually late don’t sweat over the small stuff, they concentrate on the big picture and see the future as full of infinite possibilities.” 
Late people just get it:
 “People with a tendency for tardiness like to stop and smell the roses…l ife was never meant to be planned down to the last detail. Remaining excessively attached to timetables signifies an inability to enjoy the moment.” 
By the end of the article, I had never felt prouder to be a chronically late person.
But also, what the hell is going on? Late people are the worst. It’s the quality I like least in myself. And I’m not late because I like to smell the roses, or because I can see the big picture, or because the future is full of infinite possibilities.
I’m late because I’m insane.
So I thought about this for a minute, and I think I figured out what’s going on. The issue is that there are two kinds of lateness:
 1) Okay lateness. This is when the late person being late does not negatively impact anyone else—like being late to a group hangout or a party. Things can start on time and proceed as normal with or without the late person being there yet.
 2) Not okay lateness. This is when the late person being late does negatively impact others—like being late to a two-person dinner or meeting or anything else that simply can’t start until the late party arrives.
Haltiwanger’s article is (I hope) talking mostly about okay lateness. In which case sure, maybe those people are the best, who knows.
But if you read the comment section under Haltiwanger’s article, people are furious with him for portraying lateness in a positive light. And that’s because they’re thinking about the far less excusable not okay lateness.
All of this has kind of left me with no choice but to take a quick nine-hour break from working on the gargantuan SpaceX post to discuss not okay late people.
When it comes to people who are chronically not okay late, I think there are two subgroups:
 Group 1) Those who don’t feel bad or wrong about it. These people are assholes.
 Group 2) Those who feel terrible and self-loathing about it. These people have problems.
Group 1 is simple. They think they’re a little more special than everyone else, like the zero-remorse narcissist at the top of Haltiwanger’s article. They’re unappealing. Not much else to discuss here.
Punctual people think all not okay late people are in Group 1 (as the comments on this post will show)—because they’re assuming all late people are sane people.
When a sane person thinks a certain kind of behavior is fine, they do it. When they think it’s wrong, they don’t do it. So to a punctual person—one who shows up on time because they believe showing up late is the wrong thing to do—someone who’s chronically late must be an asshole who thinks being late is okay.
But that’s misunderstanding the entire second group, who, despite being consistently late, usually detest the concept of making other people wait. Let call them CLIPs (Chronically Late Insane Person).
While both groups of not okay late people end up regularly frustrating others, a reliable way to identify a Group 2 CLIP is a bizarre compulsion to defeat themselves—some deep inner drive to inexplicably miss the beginning of movies, endure psychotic stress running to catch the train, crush their own reputation at work, etc. etc. As much as they may hurt others, they usually hurt themselves even more.
I come from a long line of CLIPs. I spent around 15% of my youth standing on some sidewalk alone, angrily kicking rocks, because yet again, all the other kids had gotten picked up and I was still waiting for my mom. When she finally arrived, instead of being able to have a pleasant conversation with her, I’d get into the car seething. She always felt terrible. She has problems.
My sister once missed an early morning flight, so they rescheduled her for the following morning. She managed to miss that one too, so they put her on a flight five hours later. Killing time during the long layover, she got distracted on a long phone call and missed that flight too. She has problems.  
I’ve been a CLIP my whole life. I’ve made a bunch of friends mad at me, I’ve embarrassed myself again and again in professional situations, and I’ve run a cumulative marathon through airport terminals. It’s often the same story, something like this:
I’ll be meeting someone, maybe a professional contact, at, say, a coffee place at 3:00. When I lay out my schedule for the day, I’ll have the perfect plan. I’ll leave early, arrive early, and get there around 2:45. That takes all the stress out of the situation, and that’s ideal because non-stressful commutes are one of my favorite things. It’ll be great—I’ll stroll out, put on a podcast, and head to the subway. Once I’m off the subway, with time to spare, I’ll take a few minutes to peruse storefronts, grab a lemonade from a street vendor, and enjoy New York. It’ll be such a joy to look up at the architecture, listen to the sounds, and feel the swell of people rushing by—oh magnificent city!
All I have to do is be off the subway by 2:45. To do that, I need to be on the subway by 2:25, so let’s be safe and get to the subway by 2:15. So I have to leave my apartment by 2:07 or earlier, and I’m set. What a plan. Here’s how it’ll play out (if you’re new to WBW, you’re advised to check this out before proceeding):
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
CLIPs are strange people. I’m sure each CLIP is insane in their own special way, and to understand how they work, you’ll usually have to get to some dark inner psychology. For me, it’s some mix of these three odd traits:
 I’m late because I’m in denial about how time works. The propensity of CLIPs to underestimate how long things take comes out of some habitual delusional optimism. Usually what happens is, of all the times the CLIP has done a certain activity or commute, what they remember is that one time things went the quickest. And that amount of time is what sticks in their head as how long that thing takes. I don’t think there’s anything that will get me to internalize that packing for a week-long trip takes 20 minutes. In my head, it’s eternally a five-minute task. You just take out the bag, throw some clothes in it, throw your toiletries in, zip it up and done. Five minutes. The empirical data that shows that there are actually a lot of little things to think about when you pack and that it takes 20 minutes every time is irrelevant. Packing is clearly a five-minute task. As I type this, that’s what I believe.
 I’m late because I have a weird aversion to changing circumstances. Not sure what the deal is with this, but something in me is strangely appalled by the idea of transitioning from what I’m currently doing to doing something else. When I’m at home working, I hate when there’s something on my schedule that I have to stop everything for to go outside and do. It’s not that I hate the activity—once I’m there I’m often pleased to be there—it’s an irrational resistance to the transition. The positive side of this is it usually means I’m highly present when I finally do haul my ass somewhere, and I’m often among the last to leave.
 Finally, I’m late because I’m mad at myself. There’s a pretty strong correlation here—the worse I feel about my productivity so far that day, the more likely I am to be late. When I’m pleased with how I’ve lived the day so far, the Rational Decision-Maker has a much easier time taking control of the wheel. I feel like an adult, so it’s easy to act like an adult. But times when the monkey had his way with me all day, when the time rolls around that I need to stop working and head out somewhere, I can’t believe that this is all I’ve gotten done. So my brain throws a little tantrum, refusing to accept the regrettable circumstances, and stages a self-flagellating protest, saying, “NO. This cannot be the situation. Nope. You didn’t do what you were supposed to do, and now you’ll sit here and get more done, even if it makes you late.”
So yeah, that’s why I’m late—because I’m insane. Don’t excuse the CLIPs in your life—it’s not okay and they need to fix it—but remember, it’s not about you. They have problems.
___________
 More Wait But Why discussions of human insanity: 
  Why Procrastinators Procrastinate  
  Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think  
  Life is a Picture But You Live in a Pixel
Why I'm Always Late — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/why-im-always-late.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
How Tesla Will Change The World — Wait But Why
2015-06-02
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><i>This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, </i><i><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">start with Part 1</a>.</i></p>
<p>____________</p>
<p><strong>PDF and ebook options: </strong>We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Why-Tesla-Will-Change-the-World-PDF-Preview.pdf">here</a>), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-musk"></a><a href="http://amzn.to/1RkVeEm"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>A Wait But Why post can be a few different things. One type of WBW post is the “let’s just take this whole topic and really actually get to the bottom of it so we can all completely get it from here forward.” The ideal topic for that kind of post is one that’s really important to our lives, and that tends to come up a lot, but that’s also hugely complex and confusing, often controversial with differing information coming out of different mouths, and that ends up leaving a lot of people feeling like they don’t totally get it as well as they “should.”</p>
<p>The way I approach a post like that is I’ll start with the surface of the topic and ask myself what I don’t fully get—I look for those foggy spots in the story where when someone mentions it or it comes up in an article I’m reading, my mind kind of glazes over with a combination of “ugh it’s that icky term again nah go away” and “ew the adults are saying that adult thing again and I’m seven so I don’t actually understand what they’re talking about.” Then I’ll get reading about those foggy spots—but as I clear away fog from the surface, I often find more fog underneath. So then I research that new fog, and again, often come across other fog even further down. My perfectionism kicks in and I end up refusing to stop going down the rabbit hole until I hit the floor.</p>
<p>For example, I kind of got the Iraq situation, but there was a lot of fog there too—so when I wrote <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">a post</a> about it, one fog-clearing rabbit hole took me all the way back to Muhammad in 570AD. That was the floor. Digging into another part of the story brought me to the end of World War I. Another brought me to the founding of ISIS.</p>
<p>Hitting the floor is a great feeling and makes me realize that the adults weren’t actually saying anything that complicated or icky after all. And when I come across that topic again, it’s <em>fun </em>now, because I <em>get </em>it and I can nod with a serious face on and be like, “Yes, interest rates are problematic” like a real person.</p>
<p>I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about. And what I usually find is that so many of the topics I’ve pegged as “boring” in my head are actually just foggy to me—like watching episode 17 of a great show, which would be boring if you didn’t have the tree trunk of the back story and characters in place.</p>
<p>So when it was time to start what I had labeled in my head as “the Tesla post,” I knew this was going to be one of those posts. To understand if and why Tesla Motors matters, you have to understand both the story of cars and the story of energy—two worlds I somehow am simultaneously confused by and tremendously sick of. Just hearing someone say “climate change” or “energy crisis” or “tailpipe emissions” makes me kind of gag at this point—just too much politics, too many annoying people, too much misinformation on all sides, and it’s just hard to know how much I actually care and if there can be a solution to all of it anyway. So I did what I do when my tortoise shits when I’m out of the apartment and then spends hours walking through it and tracking it across everything, including the walls somehow—I rolled up my sleeves, took a deep breath, whispered, “Be a man, Tim,” and started scraping through layers of shit. If I have to live in a world with people arguing constantly about energy and oil and greenhouse gases and incentive programs, I might as well build myself a proper tree trunk.</p>
<p>After weeks of reading and asking questions and writing, I’ve emerged from the tortoise sewage with something that toes the line between a long blog post and a short book. I could have broken this into multiple posts, but it’s all one story and I wanted to keep it all together. It’ll be a bit of a time investment, but I think you’ll come out of it with a sturdier tree trunk about all of this than you have now. And as it turns out, when it comes to this topic, we may be witnessing a very awesome moment in history without quite realizing it yet.</p>
<p>Two disclaimers before we start:</p>
<p>1) This is a highly politicized issue, but this post has no political agenda. I’m not political because nothing could <em>ever possibly be more annoying </em>than American politics. I think both parties have good points, both also have a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things, and I want nothing to do with it. So I approached this post—like I try to with every post—from a standpoint of rationality and what I think makes sense.</p>
<p>2) Spoiler: The post is very pro-Tesla. Which might seem suspicious since A) Elon Musk asked me to write about this and B) I just wrote a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">post</a> calling him the raddest possible man. But two things to keep in mind:</p>
<p>First, this isn’t commissioned by Musk, and I’m being paid $0.00 for doing it. He suggested I take the issue on because I think he thinks there’s a lack of full tree trunks in people’s heads about it—but he never suggested that I say good things about Tesla, electric cars, or anything else.</p>
<p>Second, the currency Wait But Why lives on is integrity. Without it, WBW loses its ability to make an impact. And integrity came first here, even at the expense of Musk potentially hating me at the end of it, if that’s what was necessary. If I didn’t think this would have made a great WBW topic, I wouldn’t have taken it on, and I’m pro-Tesla in the post because after a ton of learning and thinking—including as many counterarguments to Tesla and its worldview as I could find—that’s how I feel.</p>
<p>And with that, let’s dive in.</p>
<p>Contents</p>
<p><strong> <a href="#part1">Part 1: The Story of Energy</a></strong><br />
<strong><a href="#part2">Part 2: The Story of Cars</a></strong><br />
<strong> <a href="#part3">Part 3: The Story of Tesla<br />
</a></strong></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong><a></a>Part 1: The Story of Energy</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Story-of-Energy.png"></a></p>
<p>Energy is important. Without energy, we’d all be like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Lying-Down.png"></a></p>
<p>But what really is energy? The dictionary says it’s “the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform work.” And it says “work” is “the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.” Putting that together, we get energy being “the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.”</p>
<p>That was pretty unfun, so for our purposes, let’s call energy “the thing that lets something do stuff.”</p>
<p>But the tricky thing about energy is the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed from one form to another. And since every living thing needs energy in order to do stuff—and you can’t make your own energy—we’re all awkwardly left with no choice but to steal the energy we need from someone else.<a href="#footnote-1-3667">1</a><a href="#footnote2-1-3667">1</a><sup>← click these</sup></p>
<p>Almost all of the energy used by the Earth’s living things got to us in the first place from the sun.<a href="#footnote-2-3667">2</a> The sun’s energy is what makes the wind blow and the rain fall and it’s what powers the Earth’s living things—the biosphere.</p>
<p>The joule is a common unit of energy—defined as the amount of energy it takes to apply a force of one newton through a distance of one meter<a href="#footnote-3-3667">3</a>. While the sun’s joules can provide any animal with heat and light, the joules that <em>power </em>all of us from the inside enter the biosphere in the first place when the sun gives them to plants.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Sun.png"></a></p>
<p>That’s how food is invented—plants know how to take the sun’s joules and turn them into food.</p>
<p>At that point, all hell breaks loose as everyone starts murdering everyone else so they can steal their joules.</p>
<p>We use “the food chain” as a cute euphemism for this murder/theft cycle, and we use the word “eating” to refer to “stealing someone else’s joules and also murdering them too.” A “predator” is a dick who always seems to want <em>your </em>joules over everyone else’s, and “prey” is just some sniveling nerd you particularly like to bully and steal lunch money from. Plants are the only innocent ones who actually follow the Golden Rule, but that’s just because they have the privilege of having the sun as their sugar daddy—and humans are the biosphere’s upsetting mafia boss who just takes what he wants from anyone he wants, whenever he wants. It’s not a great system, but it works.</p>
<p>And that all went on normally for a while, but in the last few hundred thousand years, humans started to realize something: while it was enjoyable to put new joules into your body, actually <em>using</em> those joules sucked. It’s much less fun to use a bunch of joules running fast or lifting something heavy than it is to just sit on a log pleasantly and hold onto those joules instead. So humans got clever and started to figure out ways to get joules<em> outside </em>their bodies to do work for them—by doing that, humans could have their joules and eat them too. Sometimes the methods would be dickish:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Horse-hand.png"></a></p>
<p>But joules aren’t only in living things. There are joules floating and swirling and zooming all around us, and by inventing the concept of <em>technology</em>, humans figured out ways to get use out of them. They made windmills that could steal some of the wind’s joules as it went by and convert them into mechanical energy to grind food. They built sailboats that would convert wind joules into kinetic boat energy they could control. Water absorbs the sun’s radiation joules and turns them into gravitational potential energy joules when it evaporates and then kinetic energy joules when it rains and slides down land, and humans saw the opportunity to snatch some of those up by creating water wheels or dams.</p>
<p>But the most exciting joule-stealing technology humans came up with was figuring out how to <em>burn</em> something. With wind or water, you can only capture moving joules as they go by—but when you burn something, you can take an object that has been soaking up joules for years and release them <em>all at once</em>. A joule explosion.</p>
<p>They called this explosion fire, and because the joules that emerged were in the useful-to-humans formats of heat energy and light energy, burning things became a popular activity.</p>
<p><strong>Taming a Dragon</strong></p>
<p>We had learned to <em>harness </em>the joules of the wind and the water—to take those forces by the reins and make them ours—but when it came to the most joule-heavy force of all, fire, we couldn’t really figure out how to do anything with it other than hang out near it, cook some stuff, and generally benefit from its existence. Fire was a hectic dragon and no one had figured out how to grab its reins.</p>
<p>And then came the breakthrough. Steam.</p>
<p>Fire joules were hard to harness, but if you sent them into water, they’d get the water molecules to increasingly freak out and bounce around until finally those molecules would fully panic and start flying off the surface, evaporating upwards with the force of the raging fire below. You’d have successfully converted the thermal energy joules of the fire—which we didn’t know how to directly harness—into a powerful jet of steam we could control.</p>
<p>With the muscle of steam in their toolkit, the inventors of the 18th century burst into innovation. They had some serious <em>joules </em>to work with now, which opened worlds of previously-unthinkable possibility. Breakthroughs led to more breakthroughs, and at the turn of the 19th century, the progress culminated in an invention that’s often called the most impactful turning point in human history: the steam engine.</p>
<p>Picture your tea kettle when it gets all angry at you and starts whistling. Now imagine that instead of the steam spewing out through the nozzle, you connected the nozzle to a tube, which directs the bursting steam into an empty cylinder and then finally releases it. When the steam goes into and then out of the cylinder, it shoves a “piston” inside the cylinder on a powerful back-and-forth motion. That’s (a dramatic oversimplification of) how a steam engine works. Depending on the vehicle, the back-and-forth motion of the piston can do different things. In the example of a locomotive, the piston is attached to a rod whose back-and-forth motion turns the wheels:<a href="#footnote2-2-3667">2</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/rodsmed.gif"></a></p>
<p>Using the steam engine, humanity upgraded from sailboats to steamships and from animal-drawn carts to locomotives.<a href="#footnote-4-3667">4</a> Inside factories, people put steam to work too, swapping out their water wheels for much more effective steam-powered wheels.</p>
<p>With the new ability to transport many more goods and materials, much farther away, much more quickly, and to far more efficient factories, the Industrial Revolution ignited in full force. People say the Industrial Revolution was powered by steam, but steam was just the middleman—after hundreds of thousands of years of existing as passive benefactors of combustion, we had tamed the dragon, and the Industrial Revolution was powered by <em>fire.</em></p>
<p><strong>Striking Gold</strong></p>
<p>The one thing about having made fire our bitch is that we now wanted to burn a lot more things than we ever had before. For most of human history, when people wanted to burn something, they just went and found some wood. Easy. Except now it was the 19th century, and with our new appetite to burn, wood wouldn’t cut it anymore.</p>
<p>We knew there were other things we could burn—in Britain, they would often supplement wood by burning a black rocky substance they found on their shores. They called it coal.</p>
<p>The problem is that unlike wood, most of the coal in Britain wasn’t just sitting conveniently on land—it was underground. When the Industrial Revolution got going, the British started digging—they were gonna need a lot of coal. As the revolution spread through Europe and to North America, Europeans and Americans started digging too—they also were gonna need a lot of coal.</p>
<p>As everyone dug, they started finding other things too. They found pockets of burnable air we call natural gas and underground lakes of thick, black burnable liquid we call crude oil. It turns out that this whole time, humans had been walking around with a vast untapped treasure of tightly packed, burnable joules right underneath them. It was like a dog digging in the woods to bury a bone and uncovering an underground cave full of pulled pork.</p>
<p>And what does a dog do who finds a cave of pulled pork? Does he pause to think cautiously about how to proceed or consider consequences for his health? No—he eats the shit out of it. Mindlessly, at full speed.</p>
<p>And throughout the 19th century, coal mines and oil rigs popped up everywhere. Burning this new treasure of joules made economies soar and the incentive to innovate soared along with them—and new, fantastic technologies were born.</p>
<p>Like steam engine technology, the credit for the electricity revolution is owed to a collaboration of dozens of innovators spanning centuries, but it was in the 1880s that it all finally came together. In what is still probably the most significant technological shift of all time, electricity allowed the raucous power of burning to be converted into a highly tame and remarkably versatile form of energy called electrical energy. With steam as a key middleman, all those spastic combustion joules could now be sent into an organized grid of wires, transferred long distances, and delivered into residential and commercial buildings where it would wait patiently in an outlet ready to be discharged at the user’s convenience.<a href="#footnote-5-3667">5</a> At that point, the now electrical joules could be converted into almost any kind of energy—they could boil water, freeze ice, light up the room, or make a phone call. If steam had tamed the dragon, electricity had turned the dragon into a magical butler, forever at our service. And for the first time in human history, the power was on.</p>
<p>Right around the time this was happening, another revolution was underway. Fire was now powering our ships, our trains, our factories, and even the new wizardry of electricity, but individual transportation was still powered by hay like it was 1775—and late 19th century humanity knew we could do better. Biological horses got super upset if you tried to power them by fire, so again, humanity got innovating, and a couple decades later, there were big, metal horses everywhere with engine cylinders full of fire.</p>
<p>As coal, oil, and natural gas motivated unprecedented innovation, the resulting waves of new technologies created an unprecedented need to burn stuff—which motivated the diggers. Companies that focused on digging, sucking, and siphoning up more and more of our underground joule treasure, like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, became the world’s biggest corporate empires. It was a new world, powered by an endless cave of pulled pork, being gorged upon by the world’s happiest dog…</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Flash forward to the present day.</p>
<p>Burning our bounty of underground joule-packed fuel to power our world is now an innovation more than two centuries old—but in 2015, it’s still the main way humans get their power:<a href="#footnote2-3-3667">3</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Total_World_Energy_Consumption_by_Source_2013.png"></a></p>
<p>That’s the thing about dogs—if given something delicious, they tend to eat until the food runs out or they get sick, whichever comes first, and there aren’t too many other factors in play. The modern energy debate essentially boils down to whether it’s okay that the dog is still fully enjoying himself in the cave or whether it’s not because he might be making himself dangerously sick or risk running out of pulled pork—which would be a problem, because he has grown increasingly large since finding the cave, and he has no way outside the cave of feeding his now-immense appetite.</p>
<p>As you might have noticed, there are a lot of people who have a lot of opinions for a lot of reasons saying a lot of things about this situation. And some are saying real things, but a large portion of them either don’t especially know what they’re talking about or they have some ulterior motive for saying what they’re saying. This makes an already complex, murky, multi-faceted topic even more confusing.</p>
<p>So let’s lay out what we do know and try to clarify what the hell is really going on.</p>
<p>To begin with—what exactly are fossil fuels and where do they come from?</p>
<p>Fossil fuels are called fossil fuels because they’re the remains of ancient living things. “Ancient” in this case spans a wide range. The earliest organisms that contribute to today’s fossil fuels lived during the Precambrian Eon, before there were any plants and animals on land—the fossil organisms then would have been ocean algae. People often think fossil fuels are made of dinosaurs, but any dinosaurs in our gasoline are from the last couple hundred million years—the later stretch of the timespan—and only a small contributor. The largest portion of our fossil fuels comes from plants, animals, and algae that lived during the Carboniferous Period—a 50 million year period that ended about 300 million years ago and during which there were lots of huge, shallow swamps. The swamps were important because it made it more likely that a dead organism would be preserved. You don’t become a fossil fuel if you die in a normal place and decompose away. But by dying in a swamp and sinking to the bottom, Carboniferous organisms often ended up being quickly covered by sand and clay and were able to make it underground with their joules still intact.</p>
<p>After hundreds of millions of years, all those organisms were squashed under intense heat and pressure and became converted into joule-dense solid, liquid, or gas—coal, oil, and natural gas. Quick blue box brush-up:</p>
<div>
<p><strong>Fossil Fuels Brush-Up</strong></p>
<p><strong>Coal</strong>, a black sedimentary rock that’s found in underground layers called coal beds, is the cheapest and most plentiful of the three and is used almost entirely for making electricity. It’s also the worst culprit for CO<sub>2</sub> emissions, releasing about 30% more CO<sub>2</sub> than the burning of oil and about double that of natural gas when generating an equivalent amount of heat.<a href="#footnote2-4-3667">4</a> The US is to coal as Saudi Arabia is to oil, possessing 22% of the world’s coal, the most of any nation. China, though, has become by far the world’s largest consumer of coal—over <em>half </em>of the coal burned in the world in recent years was burned in China.<a href="#footnote2-5-3667">5</a>
</p><p><strong>Oil</strong>, also known as crude oil or petroleum, is a gooey black liquid normally found in deep underground reservoirs. When crude oil is extracted, it heads to the refinery, where it’s separated, using different boiling points, into a bunch of different things. Here’s how a typical barrel of US oil was broken down in 2014:<a href="#footnote2-6-3667">6</a>
</p><ul>
<li>44.9% gas for cars</li>
<li>29.8% heating oil and diesel fuels</li>
<li>13.8% other products like wax, synthetic rubber, and plastics</li>
<li>9.5% jet fuel (kerosene)</li>
<li>2.0% asphalt</li>
</ul>
<p>The United States is by far the biggest consumer of oil in the world, consuming over 20% of the world’s oil and about double the next biggest consumer. The US is also one of the three biggest oil producers in the world, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia, who all produce roughly the same amount.<a href="#footnote-6-3667">6</a>
</p><p><strong>Natural gas</strong>, which is formed when underground oil gets to a super-high temperature and vaporizes, is found in underground pockets, usually in the vicinity of oil reserves. The “cleanest” of the three fossil fuels, it’s the gas that fires up your stove or heats your apartment (if those aren’t electricity-powered or heated by oil), and it’s one of the major sources of electricity (it makes up about 20% of electricity in the US). Natural gas is on the rise and now makes up almost a quarter of the world’s energy. One of the reasons it’s on the rise is that scientists have found a new way of extracting natural gas from the Earth called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which uses a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to create cracks in natural gas-rich shale and force out the gas. This method has been hugely effective, but it’s also controversial because of some serious environmental concerns—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uti2niW2BRA">this video</a> explains it well.</p>
</div>
<p>As for the reasons people argue that fossil fuels are problematic, we’re going to focus on the two most common—</p>
<p><strong>ISSUE 1: Climate Change is a Thing</strong></p>
<p>Let’s ignore all the politicians and professors and CEOs and filmmakers and look at three facts:</p>
<p><strong>Fact 1) Burning Fossil Fuels Makes Atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> Levels Rise</strong></p>
<p>We’ll get to the data in a second, but first—why does burning fossil fuels emit CO<sub>2</sub>?</p>
<p>The answer is simple: <strong>combustion is reverse photosynthesis.</strong></p>
<p>When a plant grows, it makes its own food through photosynthesis. At its most oversimplified, during photosynthesis, the plant takes CO<sub>2</sub> from the air<a href="#footnote-7-3667">7</a> and absorbs light energy from the sun to split the CO<sub>2</sub> into carbon (C) and oxygen (O<sub>2</sub>). The plant keeps the carbon and emits the oxygen as a waste product. The sun’s light energy stays in the plant as chemical energy the plant can use.</p>
<p>So wood is essentially a block of carbon and stored chemical energy.</p>
<p>When you burn a log, all you’re doing is reversing the photosynthesis. Normally, oxygen in the air just bounces off carbon molecules in wood—that’s why trees aren’t constantly on fire. But when an oxygen molecule gets moving fast enough and <em>smashes </em>into a log’s carbon molecule, they <em>snap</em> together and the oxygen and carbon are reunited again as CO<sub>2</sub>. This snapping releases chemical energy, which knocks into other nearby oxygen molecules, causing <em>them </em>to get going fast—and if they get going fast enough, they’ll snap together with another of the log’s carbon molecules, which releases <em>more</em> chemical energy. This causes a chain reaction, and the log is now on fire. So a log burning is the process of the carbon in the log combining with oxygen in the air and floating off as CO<sub>2</sub>.</p>
<p>Of course, that’s all irrelevant to the person burning the log—what <em>they </em>care about is the <em>energy </em>released during all of this CO<sub>2 </sub>formation. The release of all of the log’s stored chemical energy creates a glorious blaze of heat and light. The tree spent years quietly absorbing carbon<sub> </sub>molecules and sunshine joules, and all at once, during combustion, that carbon and sunshine explode back out into the world.<a href="#footnote-8-3667">8</a>
</p><p>To put it another way, photosynthesis just kidnaps carbon and sun energy out of the atmosphere, and after years of holding them hostage, combustion sets them both free—the carbon as a billowing eruption of newly reunited CO<sub>2</sub>, and the sun energy as fire—meaning that fire is essentially just tightly packed sunshine.</p>
<p>But burning a log and releasing all that CO<sub>2 </sub>does <em>not </em>tamper with the atmosphere’s carbon levels. Why? Because the carbon that’s being released was recently <em>in</em> the atmosphere, and if you hadn’t set the log on fire, it would have likely decomposed, which would release the carbon back into the world anyway. The log’s carbon was only being held <em>temporarily</em> hostage, and releasing it through combustion has little effect.</p>
<p>Carbon flows from the atmosphere into plants and animals, into the ground and water, and then back out of all those things into the atmosphere—that’s called the carbon cycle. At any given point in time, the Earth’s active carbon cycle contains a specific amount of carbon. Burning a log doesn’t change that level because the carbon cycle “expects” that carbon to be hanging around the ground, water, or air.</p>
<p>But sometimes, a small portion of carbon in the cycle drops <em>out </em>of the cycle for the long term—it happens when a plant or animal dies but for some reason <em>doesn’t </em>decay normally. Instead, before it can decay and release its carbon back into the cycle, it’s buried underground. Over time, that lost carbon adds up. And today, the Earth’s fossil fuels make up a huge mass of lost carbon—carbon that long ago was taken hostage <em>permanently</em>, and carbon that the carbon cycle does <em>not </em>expect to be involved in its routine.</p>
<p>When humans discovered all of this underground kidnapped carbon, you have to remember that for them, the carbon wasn’t the point. They were staring at an endless sea of 300 million-year-old, densely packed sunshine—trillions of ancient plants with their <em>joules</em><em> intact</em>—and since there are no laws protecting the estates of Carboniferous plants, we could seize it all for ourselves. The grandest joule theft in history.</p>
<p>And as we helped ourselves, we didn’t worry about the fact that extracting those joules also meant extracting carbon that had been buried as far back as the Precambrian period—there were locomotives to fuel and cars to power and buildings to heat, and the joules were irresistible.</p>
<p>And those joules have gone a long way—you can thank them for the comforts and quality of your life today. But those carbon molecules have gone a long way too.</p>
<p>Starting in 1958, scientist Charles Keeling started measuring atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> levels from an observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Those measurements are still going on today. Here’s what they show:<a href="#footnote2-7-3667">7</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg_.png"></a></p>
<p>The zig-zaggy motion of the line is due to the level falling each year in the summer when plants are sucking up CO<sub>2</sub> and rising up again during the winter when the leaves are dead. But the overarching trend is unmistakable. To put that into context, ice drilling technology<a href="#footnote-9-3667">9</a> allows scientists to collect accurate data on what CO<sub>2</sub> levels have been throughout the last 400,000 years. Here’s what they’ve found:<a href="#footnote2-8-3667">8</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/co2_variations.png"></a></p>
<p>So atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> levels have oscillated<a href="#footnote-10-3667">10</a> between about 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 400,000 years, never eclipsing 300, and suddenly in the last century the level has vaulted up to 400 (it’s <a href="http://co2now.org/">currently</a> at 403ppm).</p>
<p>So instead of the atmosphere being .02% or .03% carbon, it’s now .04% carbon and maybe moving towards .05% and higher. But let’s not judge anything yet. All we know is Fact #1, which tells us that CO<sub>2</sub> levels are rising quickly.</p>
<p><strong>Fact 2) Where Atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> Levels Go, Temperatures Follow</strong></p>
<p>The ice cores dug up by scientists don’t just reveal the CO<sub>2</sub> levels going backwards in time—they reveal temperature too. Here’s what they show:<a href="#footnote2-9-3667">9</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/temp-graph.png"></a></p>
<p>Not a hard correlation to see. The reason for this is simple—CO<sub>2</sub> is a greenhouse gas. The way an actual greenhouse works is the glass lets in sun energy and traps a lot of it inside as heat. There are a handful of chemicals in our atmosphere that do the same thing—sun rays come in, bounce off the Earth, and they’re on their way out when the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere block some of them and spread them through the atmosphere, warming things up.</p>
<p>Mars has an average temperature of -55ºC (-67ºF), which isn’t fun, but Venus is literally actual hell, with an average temperature of 462ºC (864ºF). No one is more of a dick than Venus. Why? CO<sub>2</sub>. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth so the sun’s energy easily escapes, while Venus’s atmosphere is much thicker, with <em>300 times</em> the CO<sub>2</sub> as Earth, so it traps in a ton of heat. Mercury is <em>closer</em> to the sun than Venus, but with no atmosphere, it’s cooler than Venus. During the day, Mercury gets almost as hot as Venus, but at night it gets freezing, while Venus is just as hot at night as it is during the day, because the heat lives permanently in its thick atmosphere.</p>
<p>So it makes sense that an increase in CO<sub>2</sub> here would increase temperature—but by how much? When compared to the Pre-Industrial average temperature, our current average temperature has risen by a little less than 1ºC. But as CO<sub>2 </sub>levels keep rising, most scientists expect temperatures to keep rising. The UN-supported Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from a bunch of different countries, came out with <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf">a report</a> that laid out the temperature projections of a number of independent labs. This is what those labs think will happen if no action is taken to alter the current trends in CO<sub>2</sub> emissions:<a href="#footnote2-10-3667">10</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Global_Warming_Predictions.png"></a></p>
<p>A small minority argue that these future projections are overblown—they <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/fossil-fuels-will-save-the-world-really-1426282420">point out</a> that they ride on the largely accepted theory that water vapor in the atmosphere multiplies the effect of carbon emissions because of a “feedback” loop, whereby a small increase in temperature from extra CO<sub>2 </sub>increases water evaporation, and since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, that creates more warmth, which further increases more evaporation, and on and on. Without this feedback loop, the temperature increases resulting from CO<sub>2 </sub>emissions would be 2-3 times smaller. But even the greatest skeptics usually agree that CO<sub>2 </sub>emissions do lead to temperature increases.</p>
<p>The IPCC also puts it at over 90% that the changes in both CO<sub>2 </sub>levels and temperature are caused by human activity (which is kind of like saying there’s over a 90% chance that a rain storm has been caused by cloud activity). Now the question becomes—how much does the temperature need to change to make everything shitty?</p>
<p><strong>Fact 3) The Temperature Doesn’t Need to Change Very Much to Make Everything Shitty</strong></p>
<p>18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice. That’s what 5ºC can do.<a href="#footnote2-11-3667">11</a>
</p><p></p>
<p>100 million years ago, temperatures were 6-10ºC higher than they are now—and every region of the Earth was tropical, there was no permanent ice anywhere, ocean levels were <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/142729/Cretaceous-Period">200 meters</a> higher, and this kind of shit was happening:<a href="#footnote2-12-3667">12</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/T-rex-120501.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So we’re currently in this not-that-big window we probably should try to stay in:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/temp-spectrum.png"></a></p>
<p>This is also even more fragile than is intuitive. First, you don’t need the <em>average</em> temperature to go up by a catastrophic amount to have a catastrophe—because the average temp could go up by only 3ºC but the <em>max </em>temp rises by a lot more. Just <em>one day</em> at an outlier high like 58ºC (136ºF) would wipe out most of the Earth’s crops and animals. Second, because the total range of temperature a planet can be goes all the way down to absolute zero: -273ºC (-459ºF). So a difference of 5ºC, enough to bury the northern part of the world under an ocean of ice, is really only about a 1.5% fluctuation in temperature—not something like 10%, which is what it seems like. Looking at the window on a spectrum that shows the full range emphasizes that the world we’re used to is what it is only because of a very specific and delicate balance of conditions.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/temp-spectrum-2.png"></a></p>
<p>As mentioned above, right now, the average temp is edging upwards to 1ºC above the Pre-Industrial norm (the IPCC <a href="http://www.climatechange2013.org/">puts us</a> at +.86ºC currently). Scientists debate how high that number can go before really dramatic changes start to happen. For the last 20 years, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7242/full/nature08017.html">over 100 countries</a> have agreed to try to limit global warming to a 2ºC increase, but there are all of these different opinions going around about that. Regarding the effects of a 2ºC increase, in my research, I came across some credible sources saying 2º is an unnecessarily low ceiling and that we can afford to safely go higher and others saying that 2º is <em>too</em> high a target and that we’re underestimating how catastrophic a change of 2º would be. Regarding our ability to stay under 2º, I’ve also heard varying opinions—some think we can stay under 2º with proper restrictions; others think there’s no possible way we can stay under 2º—that there’s enough upward momentum already that even if we stopped creating carbon emissions in the next few years, the Earth would keep warming past 2º.</p>
<p>So what are we supposed to make of this?</p>
<p>Our goal today is <em>not </em>to dig deep into these conflicting opinions and try to figure out the truth, because no one knows for sure anyway. We’re not going to talk about specific things like sea levels, pollution, storms, or that polar bear in the video who’s extra sad because his ice is melting. We’re just going to take our three facts and put them all together and see what happens:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Cancel.png"></a></p>
<p>This simplifies down to:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Cancel-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Interesting. But let’s not ostracize the skeptics. We can massage it into a statement that leaves plenty of room for doubt:</p>
<p><strong>If we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon.</strong></p>
<p>With this in mind, let’s now move on to the second major concern people cite regarding fossil fuels:</p>
<p><b>ISSUE 2: Fossil Fuels Are Endful</b></p>
<p>A couple times so far, I’ve referred to our fossil fuels supply, that succulent underground sea of dense energy, as “endless”—because that’s how it seemed in the 19th century and how it often seems today when you realize how much of it is still underground waiting to be tapped. But actually, the Earth’s fossil fuel supply is not endless—it’s endful.</p>
<p><em>When </em>we run out is a complicated and hazy question. You have reports like <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/how-long-before-we-run-out-of-fossil-fuels">this</a> and <a href="https://knoema.com/smsfgud/bp-world-reserves-of-fossil-fuels">this</a> making charts that suggest that if we continue as is, we’re not very far from the end:<a href="#footnote2-13-3667">13</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/FFs-remaining.png"></a></p>
<p>Then you have sites like <a href="https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-energy/energy-independence/the-end-of-fossil-fuels">this</a> citing the <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html">CIA World Factbook</a> and reminding us that when oil and natural gas run out, the coal usage will ramp up, so we actually have even <em>less</em> time:<a href="#footnote2-14-3667">14</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/end-of-fossil-fuels-graph.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/fossil-fuels-will-save-the-world-really-1426282420">Other sites</a> point out that those cited totals are just referring to <em>proven</em> reserves, and that each year, we’re discovering new sources of fossil fuels, like oil locked in <a href="http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/tarsands/index.cfm">tar sands</a> or abundant reserves of <a href="http://geology.com/articles/methane-hydrates/">methane hydrate</a> under the ocean floor, and developing new technologies to reach them, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uti2niW2BRA">fracking</a> or <a href="http://www.dccleaningsystem.com/development-tendency-of-horizontal-directional-drilling/">horizontal drilling</a>. Those sources suggest we’re unlikely to run out of fossil fuels for many centuries. A common counter to those sources is that even without running out, we could face a serious problem if the extraction of the fuels becomes more and more difficult and expensive over time.</p>
<p>The problem with running out, whenever it happens, is that if the world is anywhere near as reliant on fossil fuels at that point as we are now, it’ll cause an epic economic collapse. As fossil fuels grow more and more scarce, prices will skyrocket. That will cause a furious rush to develop renewable energy technology, but it may be too late at that point to prevent a worldwide economic meltdown.</p>
<p>Basically, we’re currently living off of a trust fund we found underground, and we’d better learn how to get a job before it runs out.</p>
<p>For our sum-up for this section, how about:</p>
<p><strong>At some point in the future, either really soon or just a little soon, we’ll have no choice but to stop running everything on fossil fuels, because they’ll either be gone or too expensive.</strong></p>
<p>This statement highlights the fact that we’re very much in what will be known as the Fossil Fuel Era of human history.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FF-Timeline.png"></a></p>
<p>Bringing back our first statement—<em>if we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon</em>—suggests that if we continue to dick around in the black zone until we’re forced out by short supply, we’re risking <em>making the yellow zone permanently worse for humans to exist in. </em></p>
<p>This is why Elon Musk likes to say that the indefinite extension of the Fossil Fuels Era is “the dumbest experiment in history.” He emphasized this point to me: “The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be. Given that at some point they’ll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it’ll be? We know it’s at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it’ll be really bad.”</p>
<p>In other words, as it relates to the above timeline—<em>there’s potentially huge long-term downside to staying in the black area for too long, so let’s just get ourselves to the yellow part as soon as we can. </em>Some skeptics I read made what seemed like very valid points, but even most skeptics agreed that burning of fossil fuels causes <em>some </em>degree of warming and that warming <em>might </em>turn out to be harmful. And even if we view this as a genuine debate—when one possibility is “turns out burning fossil fuels wasn’t actually dangerous” and the other side is “turns out burning fossil fuels was horribly catastrophic,” don’t we want to play it safe??</p>
<p>So how do we get from the black to the yellow?</p>
<p>To help us answer that question, let’s turn to the <a href="https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/international/2007EnergyInternational.pdf">Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory</a> and their useful energy charts. They update the US flowchart every year, and we’ll get there in a minute, but first, let’s check out some of the charts from their <a href="https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/international/2007EnergyInternational.pdf">2011 report</a>, where they have a flow chart for every country and the world as a whole for the year 2007. (The charts look icky and confusing at first, but they’re actually really simple—just showing how much of each source is used and how that source is broken up among sectors.)</p>
<p>Here’s the<strong> combined world energy flow </strong>in 2007:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/World-2007-copy-compressor.jpg"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/World-2007.png"><br />
</a><br />
The unit, PJ, is in petajoules. 1 petajoule = 1 quadrillion joules. Some thoughts:</p>
<p>– The most consistent fact I noticed about all countries is how much petroleum (i.e. crude oil) dominates the transportation sector. 94% of the world’s transportation runs on oil, and in most developed countries, the percentage is even higher.</p>
<p>– Biomass use is pretty substantial, and almost all of it comes from developing countries, many of them in Africa. Biomass is typically the burning of things like wood, oil distilled down from food like corn, and manure.</p>
<p>– That’s a whole lot of rejected energy on the right side. Rejected energy is energy we lose, usually in the form of heat, due to inefficiency. Especially unimpressive is the transportation performance, where engines only end up using a quarter of the fuel they burn.</p>
<p>Next, let’s look at<strong> France:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/France-2007-copy-compressor.jpg"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/France-2007.png"><br />
</a><br />
Thoughts:</p>
<p>– Lots of nuclear, and as a result, very little coal. That makes France a pretty light CO<sub>2</sub> emitter.</p>
<p>– Their transportation, though, is like everyone else’s—running on oil.</p>
<p>– France is an example of a factor we’re not going to discuss in this post, but an important one: <strong>fossil fuels are a bit of a geopolitical nightmare</strong>. Nation interdependence can be productive and important, but nations being dependent on other nations for their <em>survival</em> is never a great thing, and the need to import fossil fuels is one of the major reasons for modern nation ultra-dependency. France is totally reliant on oil for its transportation and totally reliant on other countries for oil—this puts them in a vulnerable position. The US isn’t as dependent. It relied on other nations for 60% of its oil a decade ago but has since become one of the top three oil-producing countries, and the EIA <a href="http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/">projects</a> net oil imports to make up only 21% of the US’s 2015 oil consumption. I was also surprised <a href="http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm">to see</a> that only a small portion of US oil imports were from the Middle East, with only 12.5% of them coming from Saudi Arabia and 20% from the entire combined Persian Gulf. Far more was from the Western Hemisphere, with Canada by far the largest at 37% of imports and Mexico and Venezuela also prominent at 9% each.</p>
<p>Okay and how about <strong>China?</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/China-2007-copy-compressor.jpg"></a><br />
China is an energy monster, mostly because they’re an industrial monster. They’re also a coal-burning beast, burning through almost half of the world’s <em>total</em> coal consumption each year. That 57,000 PJ of coal consumption number is insane—over five times France’s total energy flow.</p>
<p><strong>Saudi Arabia:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Saudi-Arabia-2007-copy-compressor.jpg"></a><br />
Kind of a one-trick pony.</p>
<p>North Korea’s energy flow is, unsurprisingly, just weird:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/North-Korea-2007-copy-compressor.jpg"></a><br />
You can check out the <a href="https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/international/2007EnergyInternational.pdf">full report</a> to see the rest of the countries.</p>
<p>Now let’s move to 2013 and look at the <strong>US energy flow. </strong>The unit is different here. A quad = 1 quadrillion BTU, which is about 1,000 petajoules.<br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/US-2013-copy-compressor.jpg"></a><br />
Two things that stand out:</p>
<p>– The US has become a natural gas consumption beast and by far the <a href="http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/?view=consumption">biggest one</a> in the world.</p>
<p>– The US is even <em>more </em>of an oil-consumption beast—almost double the <a href="http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/?view=consumption">second biggest</a> oil-consuming country, China, and more than four times #3 on the list, Japan.</p>
<p>To put in perspective how much energy the US uses, I found a country in the world that uses a similar amount of energy as each US state:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Energy-Map.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Finally, let’s go back to the reason we started with these charts in the first place—to figure out how we’re gonna get from the black part of the timeline to the yellow and out of the fossil fuels area. The LLNL also produces a chart showing the US carbon emissions and where they come from. The US is the world’s <a href="http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=90&amp;pid=44&amp;aid=8">second biggest</a> carbon emissions culprit (China is first with 50% more than the US) and the world leader in transportation emissions—so if we can figure out what the US needs to fix, that’s a good start.</p>
<p>Getting from the black to the yellow means getting rid of carbon emissions. Looking at the US emissions flowchart, I see two glaring numbers:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/US-Emissions-2013-compressor.jpg"></a></p>
<p>There are many things that need to happen to get us into the yellow zone, but these two figures—which make up 72% of total US emissions—seem like the biggest and most urgent problems to address:</p>
<p>1) Electricity production throughout the world makes up about 40% of the total energy flow, and roughly two thirds of electricity production comes from burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels, most prominently coal. Or, put simply: <strong>Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty.</strong></p>
<p>2) Transportation makes up a large chunk of the world’s energy flow, including near a third in most developed countries, and almost all the world’s transportation runs on petroleum. Put simply: <strong>Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty.</strong></p>
<p>We’ve spent this post zoomed far out on all of this. Now it’s time to zoom in, and we’ll zoom in on the second major problem listed above—transportation, and in particular, cars. Transportation covers planes, trains, ships, trucks, and cars—but cars cause more carbon emissions than the other four combined, and without major changes, car emissions are <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=7&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CEcQFjAG&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mckinsey.com%2F~%2Fmedia%2FMcKinsey%2Fdotcom%2Fclient_service%2FSustainability%2FPDFs%2Froads_toward_low_carbon_future_new.ashx&amp;ei=YbRbVbKpHpDZgwTv1oHgCg&amp;usg=AFQjCNG3SEeN0mjEnhTVGWEcgP3FFGFzDg&amp;sig2=Ycq_mTE6XiZBtnFhiqOB0Q">expected</a> to rise by over 50% by 2030. By zooming in on one major piece of this puzzle—car emissions—and examining how it became a problem, why it’s still a problem, and the way we might solve that problem, we’ll get a better sense of what this entire struggle is really made of.</p>
<p><strong><a></a>Part 2: The Story of Cars</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Story-of-Cars.png"></a></p>
<p>Meet the world’s first car owner.<a href="#footnote2-15-3667">15</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/640px-Portrait_of_the_Kangxi_Emperor_in_Court_Dress.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s the Chinese Emperor, Kangxi, in his driving clothes. He got the car in 1672, when he was 18. It was given to him by the first car-maker.<a href="#footnote2-16-3667">16</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/verbiest2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit missionary who apparently didn’t have time to get his hands in a normal position before the painter had already finished. Verbiest spent his life in China, where, in 1670, he became the empire’s chief mathematician and astronomer after winning a contest against a rival over who could create the most accurate calendar—the loser would be “cut up into bits while still alive”<a href="#footnote2-17-3667">17</a>. In his new position, he started inventing things, one of which was the first-ever car, which he made as a toy for the emperor. It was sleek.<a href="#footnote2-18-3667">18</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/SteamMachineOfVerbiestIn1678.jpg"></a></p>
<p>It wasn’t big enough to hold a driver, but by figuring out how to boil steam and aim it at a spinny wheel that rotated a gear that would turn the front wheels, Verbiest had created the world’s first known self-propelled vehicle.</p>
<p>Verbiest’s car would remain world class until 1769, when French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot finally figured out how to improve upon it by inventing the first car that could hold a driver.<a href="#footnote2-19-3667">19</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FardierdeCugnot20050111.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Next came this little sassypants:<a href="#footnote2-20-3667">20</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Francois_de_rivaz.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s François Isaac de Rivaz, who in 1807 invented the world’s first internal combustion engine and a little vehicle to go along with it.<a href="#footnote2-21-3667">21</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Francois_automobile1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>With a steam engine, the fire burns outside the engine and heats steam inside the engine to make it work. So it’s an <em>external </em>combustion engine. An <em>internal </em>combustion engine cuts out the steam and burns the fuel inside the engine itself to generate power.</p>
<p>But it would take until 1886 for the arrival of the first actually-useful car, invented by German engineer Karl Benz, along with his wife Bertha Benz, who <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Berthabenzportrait.jpg">I might love</a>, and his mustache.<a href="#footnote2-22-3667">22</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Carl_Benz-compressor.png"></a></p>
<p>Their car is considered the world’s first real automobile—the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.<a href="#footnote2-23-3667">23</a>
</p><p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Patent-Motorwagen_Nr.1_Benz_2.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p>The car cost $1,000 ($26,248 today), had three wheels, and was powered by a primitive version of a modern internal combustion engine.</p>
<p>A few years later, across the world in the US state of Michigan, a young farm boy named Henry Ford, deciding that taking over his family farm would “bore his dick off [<em>sic</em>],” applied for a job to work for Thomas Edison. Edison’s company was busy rolling out electrical generating systems to power US cities, and working on these, Ford got good at working with the steam-powered engines the company used to make electricity. In his spare time, Ford sat in a little workshop next to his home playing around with the still-novel concept of the internal combustion engine, and in 1896, at the age of 32, he came up with what he called the Ford Quadricycle, powered by a simple internal combustion engine.<a href="#footnote2-24-3667">24</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/FordQuadricycle-compressor.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Becoming increasingly obsessed with building self-propelled vehicles, Ford quit his job in 1899 and first formed the Detroit Automobile Company, which failed, before forming the Henry Ford company in 1901. But Ford soon left the company over a dispute with the company’s investors, who then renamed it Cadillac Automobile Company, and in 1903, he went on to partner with a guy named Alexander Malcomson to create a company called Ford &amp; Malcomson, Ltd., which was later renamed Ford Motor Company. Super annoying for Malcomson.</p>
<p>Ford and his new company charged ahead making gas-powered cars, but at the time, gas cars were hardly the norm. Cars were a new technology, and at the beginning of the century, 40% of American cars were powered by steam and 38% were electric—gas cars only made up 22% of the American market.</p>
<p>These numbers make sense. Steam-centered external combustion was the older and best-understood technology of the three and was initially the most common way to power a car. Its fancier new cousin, the internal combustion engine, powered by burning gasoline, cut out the middleman and burned fuel more efficiently. But it’s no surprise that the quickest up-and-comer type of car was the electric car. It was 1900 and electricity was at the core of all the coolest, newest technology.</p>
<p>The 35 years between the mid-1860s and the turn of the century had just witnessed an electricity revolution, driven by inventors like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and George Westinghouse, during which the world went from normal to positively <em>magical</em>. The first magic happened in the middle of the century, when the telegraph used long-range electricity to communicate with people really far away, and in 1866, the first successful cross-Atlantic telegraph message was sent, allowing Europe and the US to magically communicate with each other <em>instantly</em>. The magic revolution hit full force in the late 1870s. The first telephone call happened in 1876, followed by the first time in human history someone could record sound and then play it back, in 1877. Light bulbs began to light up city streets in the early 1880s, and by 1896, the first electrical grid brought widespread electricity into people’s homes. Also in 1896, the first primitive motion picture went on display in New York, and the first wireless transmission of a human voice—the birth of the radio—went through in Brazil in 1900. Meanwhile, magical horseless cars were appearing on the streets, and only a few years later, in 1903, the Wright Brothers would take humanity’s first heavier-than-air flight. It’s hard to imagine how <i>insanely cool </i>a time this must have been for everyone.</p>
<p>And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity.</p>
<p>So if someone in the year 1900 had to bet on the outcome of the battle between external steam combustion, internal gasoline combustion, and electricity as the future standard for powering cars, they’d have probably put their money on electricity. And at the time, electricity was not only winning the battle over gasoline with far more cars on the road, but the world’s most prominent inventors, including Edison and Tesla, were pouring their efforts into an electric car future. Early in the century, the New York Times referred to the electric car as “ideal,” citing it as quieter, cleaner, and more economical than the gas car.<a href="#footnote2-25-3667">25</a>
</p><p>But <em>ideal</em> wasn’t the driving force of the early auto industry—<em>scalable</em> was. Cars were, up until that point, fairly impractical toys for rich people. There would be time to idealize everything later—the first step was to figure out how to make the car fast, sturdy, and most importantly, affordable. Money and brains poured into car technology from all over the world, and in 1908, Henry Ford and his five-year-old company came out with the car that launched the automotive industry into the stratosphere: The Model T.<a href="#footnote2-26-3667">26</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1908-model-t-ford.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Before the Model T, there had been big problems with both electric and gas vehicles. Electric had shorter ranges and longer refueling times. Gas cars were loud, hard to start, and spewed smoke like it was 1802.</p>
<p>But Ford was a masterful industrialist, and by coming up with the concept of making cars by moving assembly line instead of hand-crafting them, he dramatically brought down costs and created America’s first car for the masses. In 1912, engineer Charles Kettering invented the electric car starter, eliminating the need to laboriously and dangerously hand crank your gas car on, and the newly invented muffler significantly reduced gas engine noise. Suddenly, a lot of the things that sucked about gas cars didn’t suck anymore—and they had become much cheaper than electric cars. Ford’s Model T took over America, and by 1914, 99% of new American cars ran on gas. By 1920, electric cars dropped entirely out of commercial production.<a href="#footnote2-27-3667">27</a>
</p><p>This was not an inevitable outcome. The future of cars had been up for grabs, and Ford had simply outsmarted his competition. Burning fuel was the way of the past and electricity was the way of the future—but Ford had created a provable, profitable business model for making cars, one that didn’t yet exist for electric cars, and it quickly became too much of an uphill battle for electric car makers to try to turn the tide. So they stopped.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Now it’s a century later. The most primitive local telephone call through a wire has become a person in Delhi being able to take a slab of glass out of his pocket, tap it with his finger, and instantly be talking to, and looking at, his friend in Sao Paulo. The grainiest, choppiest black-and-white silent movies have become Pixar. Mixing chemicals in a lab has become splitting atoms in the Large Hadron Collider. The Wright Brothers’ 12 second, 120-foot flight has become routine trips 250 miles up to the International Space Station.</p>
<p>But instead of me finishing that paragraph with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become [something rad we can’t even imagine],” I have to finish it with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become the better gas-burning car.”</p>
<p>As I said, if you were alive in 1900, you’d have probably thought the idea of an AC induction electric car motor was awesome and futuristic, and the internal combustion engine, which was only an incremental advance from the early locomotive steam engines invented a century earlier, was kind of cool but not especially futuristic. But we’re not alive in 1900, we’re alive in 2015, so when <em>we </em>look at the modern gas engine that’s in all of our cars, and we see <em>pistons </em>moving back and forth because of something hot exploding inside their cylinders—<a href="#footnote2-28-3667">28</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/img11.gif"></a></p>
<p>—they should seem <em>outrageously ancient</em>. Quick aside:</p>
<div>
<p><strong>Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>Welcome to the Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box. Here’s the deal:</p>
<p>The animation above is of a four-stroke, four-cylinder engine. The four cylinders are those four tubes the pistons are moving up and down inside of. Each time a piston slides up or down, that’s called a stroke, and the fuel-burning happens in a four-stroke cycle:</p>
<p><strong>1) The Intake Stroke:</strong> This is the part where the piston is moving down and there’s blue stuff above it. The blue stuff is air that’s being sucked in along with a small amount of gasoline that’s fired in at just the right time by the fuel injector.</p>
<p><strong>2) The Compression Stroke: </strong>This is the stroke where the piston moves up and as it does, the blue stuff turns orange. What’s happening is that the valve that let the air in on the intake stroke has now closed and as the piston moves up, there’s nowhere for the air/gas mixture to go, so it just compresses really tightly.</p>
<p><strong>3) The Power Stroke: </strong>This is the stroke I feel like passionate car men talk about with a little twinkle in their eye. In the animation, this is where the piston moves down and there’s orange above it which then turns gray by the end. The previous compression stroke has squeezed the air and gas tightly, and at the top of that stroke, the spark plug at the top of the cylinder emits a spark which ignites the compressed air and gas on fire and creates a little explosion. This explosion blows the piston back downwards. This stroke is where the power of the car engine comes from.</p>
<p><strong>4) The Exhaust Stroke: </strong>This is the part where the piston pushes the gray stuff up and out of the cylinder. The gray stuff is exhaust—i.e. smoke because you just lit a campfire in that cylinder—that then makes its way out of the car’s tailpipe. This smoke consists of mostly non-toxic gases with a little carbon monoxide and other poison mixed in for fun. Also in the exhaust is the carbon dioxide that just got created during the explosion, which allows the long-buried carbon in the gasoline to happily re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere after the most boring 300 million years ever underground.</p>
<p>The furious back-and-forth motion of the pistons work together to forcefully turn what’s called a crankshaft—that metal bar contraption they’re all connected to below—which creates the turning motion that eventually turns the car’s wheel axles. I think.<a href="#footnote-11-3667">11</a>
</p><p>(For more info: first two minutes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA_19bHxEYg">this video</a> shows this all in action, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_NRHxekaY">this</a> is aesthetically pleasing.)</p>
</div>
<p>Now. I’ll admit that car engines are cool. And I can see why some people are kind of obsessed with them. But when I look at these two animations next to each other—</p>
<p><b>1815 locomotive engine:</b></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/rodsmed1.gif"></a></p>
<p><strong>2015 car engine:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/img11.gif"></a></p>
<p><em>—they look</em> <em>too similar to be 200 years</em> <em>apart.</em></p>
<p>“Hot explosions in cylinders pushing pistons back and forth to force metal bars to turn wheels and sending the resulting smoke billowing out of a pipe” <em>sounds </em>like an old-fashioned technology, and it’s just very odd that we’re still using it today. We get used to the world we live in, whatever that world is like, but if you examine history and take a big step back, some things suddenly make no sense. And this is one of them.</p>
<p>So the question we need to ask is why.</p>
<p>If electric motors were the more advanced technology—if they were considered <em>ideal</em> because they were quiet, clean, and took advantage of cutting edge technology—why did the world give up on them? In 1900, neither electric nor gas cars were viable for mass adoption—both needed a few key technological breakthroughs. The key breakthroughs needed for gas cars happened <em>first</em>—but why was that reason for us to just settle, <em>permanently</em>, for the more primitive technology and the one that, over time, would make our cities smoggy and change the chemical makeup of our atmosphere? If 20th-century human invention could go from the Wright Brothers’ 12-second flight to the moon in just 66 years, surely advancing battery technology enough to bring electric car prices and charging times down while increasing range shouldn’t have been beyond our scope. Why did innovation and progress in something as important to the world as car-powering technology just <em>stop</em>?</p>
<p>This question could be asked about other parts of the bigger story of the Fossil Fuels Era. You could just as easily puzzle over the question, “America’s first electricity power station, Edison’s Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, first lit up in 1882, powered by burning coal—how is it possible that in 2015, burning coal is still by far the primary way humanity produces electricity even though we’ve known for decades that it’s not an optimal or sustainable long-term method?”</p>
<p>The problem with the question “Why did X technology stop moving forward?” is that it’s misunderstanding how progress works. Instead of asking why technological progress sometimes <em>stops</em>, we have to ask the question:</p>
<p><em>Why does technological progress ever happen at all? </em></p>
<p>The mistake of the first question is the intuitive but incorrect notion that technology naturally moves forward on its own over time—it doesn’t. I can tell you this for sure, because my Time Warner DVR has the exact same horrible user interface it had in 2004. The way technology works is that by default, it stands still, and it moves forward only when something <em>pushes </em>it forward.</p>
<p>We often have the same intuitive misconception when we think about evolution. Natural selection doesn’t make things “better”—it just optimizes biology to best survive in whatever environmental circumstances it finds itself. When something in that environment changes—a predator mutates and becomes faster, a certain type of food becomes scarce, an ice age rolls in—it means species that were previously optimized to the environment no longer are. The environmental change alters the natural selection criteria, which applies a <em>pressure </em>on the species as it is, and over time, the genetics of the species will react to the pressure by changing in order to optimize to the new environment.</p>
<p>When it comes to technology, a totally free and open market is the natural environment. But unlike the world of species, which is the eternal Wild West, human societies have another factor in play—a god-type force called government. So if we’re trying to figure out what makes technology move and change, we have to look at <em>two</em> sources of pressure: natural market conditions that ebb and flow and apply continual new pressures on all the actors within, and the “god” on top who can artificially change the environment below to create manufactured pressures. Let’s examine both, starting with government:</p>
<p><strong>1) Pressure From Government-Induced Environment Changes</strong></p>
<p>The nature and power of a market’s government-god varies significantly throughout the world. In North Korea, it is a Biblical-style, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful ruler of the universe to the point where there <em>is</em> no natural market environment—just the one god created and maintains. In Scandinavia, god is a wealthy power mom and the market is nestled in her warm bosom of safety and opportunity. In Central Africa, god made a lifestyle change and got a new job, working for the wealthiest families—huge step up the ladder for him.</p>
<p>In the US, god has an identity crisis, alternating between feelings of pride and self-loathing. It wants to have the best country, but it’s standing on the street corner alone yelling out in an argument with itself about the right way to do that. When the US government (or a government like it) wants to play god and alter the American natural market environment to apply certain pressures in certain places, it uses three main tools: funding, regulation, and taxes.</p>
<p><strong>Funding: </strong>In order for government funding to lead to major progress, there has to be a lot of it, and in an open democracy, that only flies when the nation needs to do something so important that everyone agrees on it—like in the 1960s, when the fear of losing global influence kicked the US government’s adrenaline in and it put a man on the moon. Likewise, significant US military funding is something the American electorate can agree on enough that it receives tremendous funding and plays an important part in advancing technology in a number of industries. In most cases, though, a divided democracy is too paralyzed by conflicting interests and political squabbling to be the main driver of a serious tech revolution.</p>
<p><strong>Regulation: </strong>Another democratic government muscle is its ability to make rules—laws, restrictions, quotas, etc. These can be effective at pushing through minor changes—the seatbelt and airbag are both products of government regulation. But at least when it comes to the car industry, I’m having a hard time thinking of instances of major technological <em>leaps</em> caused by government regulation.</p>
<p><strong>Tax Code: </strong>The government often uses the tax code to add its own economic pressures into the free market. Again though, while this can be effective for <em>nudging </em>something in a certain direction, it doesn’t tend to lead to sweeping advances.</p>
<p>Of course, America is in a big fight about this, with fiscal liberals typically feeling a lot more optimistic about government’s ability to play a positive role in moving things forward than fiscal conservatives. But I think both would agree that major tech progress being <em>forced </em>forward<em> </em>by the government is more the way of places like the Soviet Union and modern-day China where government has a lot more power. The incredible innovation that often emerges from open democracies tends to come from pressures from below, in the bubbling cauldron of the free market—</p>
<p><strong>2) Pressures From Natural Market Forces</strong> </p>
<p>In the natural world, to catch food and stay away from predators, animals will optimize by becoming fast and elusive runners. When food on the ground becomes scarce, species will feel the pressure of hunger and over time, their genetics will re-optimize by developing good bodies for climbing or long necks or wings. A running species that becomes a flying species hasn’t become <em>better—</em>just better fit for the current circumstances. In the world of species, the definition of optimization is simple because the end goals are simple: the core needs of biological creatures are always the same—to self-preserve and reproduce. So optimization in the natural world always has the same definition: to adjust in a way that makes you mostly likely to self-preserve and reproduce.</p>
<p>In order to understand what optimization means in the market, we need to know what the core goals are of the actors there. Of course, people are also biological creatures, and self-preservation will always be at the top of the list—if you’re hungry, cold, or sick, fixing that will be the core goal. But for people whose base needs are being met, what are the yearning desires that then lie at the core of their motivation? What does “pursuing your self-interest” mean for them?</p>
<p>Well, it depends on the culture. In certain cultures, the fear of failure is so strong that it outweighs desires like glory or great fortune, and the primary inner drive becomes to just make sure you’re passable. In others, the deepest drive of the people might be religious salvation, community or family service, a leisurely lifestyle, or spiritual enlightenment.</p>
<p>When it comes to technological advancement, those motivations aren’t likely to get you there because thinking up tech innovations isn’t a helpful step on the path to optimization for those people. So if we want tech progress, what kind of yearning do we want people to feel?</p>
<p>I think the ideal mix is a two-part cocktail:</p>
<p><strong>First ingredient: Greed. </strong>In a perfect, fair, open market, greed works great as the core lifeblood motivation. The way capitalism theoretically works is that the more real-world value you create, the more money you’ll make. So companies in a competitive landscape will put their effort into creating better and better products and services in order to optimize, which for them means making as much money as they possibly can. Individual people are greedy as a means to all kinds of ends—a lavish lifestyle, personal freedom, security, admiration, power, sex—but <em>what</em> they want is irrelevant. As long as their burning desire makes them <em>really want stuff</em>, their drive to optimize will move technology forward. Greed is a double-edged sword though—to be beneficial, greed has to be contained inside a high-integrity, meritocratic, free market. If it’s not, greed will turn into the enemy of progress, because the more vulnerable the system is to corruption, the more the greedy on top will be able to game the system to ensure their own long-lasting victory.</p>
<p><strong>Second ingredient: Raging ambition.</strong> Greed can lead to steady forward progress, but in order for progress to <em>leap </em>forward, a second ingredient is usually key: a burning desire to do something great. Again, the underlying reasons for this kind of ambition can vary. Sometimes it’ll be an ego-driven desire—to be famous and renowned, to leave one’s mark, to be thought of and posthumously remembered as <em>great</em>. Other times the ambition will be fueled by a borderline-insane level of confidence and optimism that gives someone the gall to be idealistic. These are the yearnings of the <em>hungry underdog. </em></p>
<p>An established industry full of existing winners running on greed is like the highest layer of trees in a crowded rainforest. They’ll push upward only as needed, elbowing each other for little gains and victories as they vie for sunlight, mostly just trying to keep their spot in the canopy. Greed just wants sunlight—it doesn’t care how high up it is when it gets it.</p>
<p>But below, the hungry underdog <em>burns</em> for sunlight and will spend 100 hours a week trying to figure out how to get it. When the breakthrough comes, the underdog <em>bursts </em>up through the canopy into the open sky and spreads its leaves out wide. Suddenly, the trees that had been on top are blocked from the sun. Greed is then replaced by the much more powerful drive of <i>survival</i>, and innovation kicks into high gear as they scramble upwards for their life. The environment has changed—it’s been <i>disrupted</i>—and in this new world, created by the underdog disruptor, companies have to innovate in order to re-optimize. Some end up back on top, others die—and at the end of it all, technology has jolted forward. We all witnessed an example of this when Apple rocketed through the mobile phone canopy in 2007 and forced all of the other companies to make a smartphone or die. Samsung managed to get itself back into the sun. Nokia did not.</p>
<p>With all this in mind, let’s go back to the car industry and our original question:</p>
<p><strong>Why hasn’t the car technology forest moved upward over the past century?</strong> </p>
<p>I see two primary reasons:</p>
<p><strong>1) Insanely high barriers to entry—so no leaps forward caused by hungry underdogs</strong></p>
<p>Try to think of something ickier and harder than starting a car company.</p>
<p>First, before you can sell one product, you’ll need to put down an absurd amount of capital to buy a factory, figure out how to design a car and all of its parts, build a prototype, use that to raise a lot more money, get a much bigger factory and hire thousands of people, and pump many millions of dollars into marketing to tell the world that your company exists. And you probably need to be incredibly rich and risk-tolerant yourself since very few people are zany enough to invest money in a startup car company.</p>
<p>Second, in order to be profitable, you have to sell at a high volume. Cars are too expensive to make and margins are too thin to only sell a few each year. So for this to be a good idea, you not only have to create an awesome car, but one that a ton of people will want to buy.</p>
<p>Third, gas cars are already well-optimized—if you want to aggressively burst through the canopy like an underdog without any brand awareness needs to, you have to create a <em>much better type of car than what’s out there</em>. In the case of cars, that probably means addressing the core of the car itself and the thing that’s been stressing everyone out with its billowing emissions—the engine. But since no one has really done this yet, it means you need to not only create the first successful startup car company in a long time, you need to create the first startup to <em>ever </em>succeed at making whatever type of car you’re creating. And since you’ll be there first to do it, you’ll have to put a huge amount of time and money into innovation research and development and bear the brunt of the invention costs for the whole industry. You’ll also have to bear the marketing costs to educate the world on why they should want this new type of car—that’s a one-time expense and once it’s done, other companies will be able to ride on the consumer demand you spent a ton of money building.</p>
<p>So it’s not surprising that the last successful startup car company in America was Chrysler in 1925—90 years ago. It’s basically an impossible endeavor.</p>
<p>And without any threat from below on the forest floor—from the wild innovation of scrappy entrepreneurs with nothing to lose—the car industry has had the luxury of calmly sunbathing in a tight canopy quilt, making only incremental advances, only when they’re needed. But there’s a problem here too—</p>
<p><strong>2) A glitch in the car market separates car company optimization from what’s best for the world.</strong></p>
<p>As I mentioned above, greed works nicely as an optimization criterion <em>if </em>the market is perfect—open, accurate, and fair.</p>
<p>Greedy companies will make their decisions based on whatever the best way is to optimize to their environment—i.e. How can we make the most possible money? But a company’s drive for maximum money is only beneficial to society when the company’s profit is tightly and accurately correlated with the amount of net positive value its product or service provides to society.</p>
<p>If I start a lemonade stand, every time I give someone a delicious cup of lemonade, they’ll be likely to recommend me to their friends and become a recurring customer. I provided positive value and my business’s success went up with it.</p>
<p><strong>Success = Value Provided. </strong>Incentives are aligned.</p>
<p>If another customer comes to the stand and I give him a cup of lemonade with a fly in it, he won’t come back and he’ll tell his friends not to go—I caused harm and my success went down.</p>
<p><strong>Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused]. </strong>Incentives still aligned.</p>
<p>But what if I then discover a chemical I can spray on my lemonade that prevents flies from landing on it. The chemical is tasteless, but I know that drinking it regularly will cause customers immense harm a few decades down the road. Customers won’t experience the harm in the present, so it won’t affect their opinion of my lemonade or the success of my business.</p>
<p><strong>Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused]</strong><b>. </b></p>
<p>The harm caused is now an <em>unaccounted-for cost</em>, also known as a negative externality, and my incentives are no longer aligned with the customer’s best interests. If all I care about is greed and maximizing profit, I will continue to use the chemical, because I’m economically incentivized to do so.</p>
<p>This kind of negative externality is how tobacco companies got away with murder for so many decades. The long-term cost to customers’ health was unaccounted for because customers were ignorant to the consequences, the negative effects were years away, and there was no regulatory penalty in place to charge for the harm. Thinking purely from a greed-optimizing perspective, cigarette companies acted completely rationally. They kicked up nicotine levels in cigarettes and added shards of glass into filters to create tiny cuts and increase nicotine absorption, which caused further harm but increased demand—but since the harm was unaccounted for, this was a pure net positive for the company. And when anti-tobacco campaigns started to educate customers on cigarette harm—which attaches the harm to the cost of scared customers and lower demand—the tobacco industry hired low-integrity scientists to discredit the negative campaigns and muddle the message. Awareness would get there eventually, but the longer they could delay and keep the harm hidden, the better off they’d be from a greed standpoint.</p>
<p>People call this evil, but all it really is is an industry acting in its own best interests within the parameters of its environment. Greed is a simple motivation—it takes whatever it can get, and it’ll push all available limits it can in order to fully optimize. I used tobacco companies as an example, but you could easily tell the story with fast food, radiation-emitting consumer electronics, politician behavior, the finance industry, and many others.</p>
<p>In the auto industry, CO<sub>2</sub> emissions are the negative externality. If you have a cheap and easy way to build cars that dump garbage into the atmosphere and no one makes you pay for it, why would you ever change anything?</p>
<p>It’s the same story as cigarettes. Instead of the tobacco industry and the cigarette companies who support it, you have the oil industry and the car companies who support it. Instead of short-term emphysema, you have short term city smog. Instead of long-term harm to people’s health like lung cancer, you have long-term harm to the human way of life like underwater coastal cities.</p>
<p>A lot of people have written about the hidden cost of carbon emissions, and many of them, on <a href="http://niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/The-Conservative-Case-for-a-Carbon-Tax1.pdf">both</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/opinion/paul-krugman-conservatives-and-climate-change.html">sides</a> of the political spectrum, have proposed a logical solution: <strong>a revenue-neutral carbon tax.</strong></p>
<p>A revenue-neutral carbon tax is revenue-neutral because any increase in government revenue as a result of the tax would be offset by an equal decrease in something else like income taxes. This makes it a politically moot proposal.</p>
<p>The tax could be applied at any point along the supply chain from oil extraction to the gas pump and the effect would be the same—it would either become more expensive to drive a gas car, less profitable to be in the business of gas, or both. With a carbon tax in place, when you’re contributing to the carbon problem, you’re also paying for it—which incentivizes consumers and companies to explore alternatives. This wouldn’t be the government meddling in the market—it would be the government fixing a glitch in the market.</p>
<p>Instead, the government offers tax breaks to people for buying an electric vehicle and subsidies for the renewable energy industry, which is like a town full of businesses who throw their trash in the street, and the government reacting by paying businesses to stop doing that, instead of just charging businesses for doing it. Other times, the government tries to force emissions downwards by forcing car companies to create a minimum number of zero-emissions cars—with limited effect. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both tried this, to some extent, and both times the next president (Reagan and Bush) removed the regulations upon taking office (ironically, the Clinton mandate for more hybrid cars accomplished nothing in the US, but it scared the shit out of Toyota, who began furiously innovating and created the Prius). Another time, in 1990, the California government tried to institute its own zero-emissions regulations, which the car and oil companies fought until they finally bullied California out of it and the regulations were removed in 2003.<a href="#footnote-12-3667">12</a> The problem is, giant companies have enough influence that any government attempt at making changes through regulation ends up being watered down to the point where it’s ineffective.</p>
<p>When it comes to a carbon tax, the only explanation for not having one seems to be the power big oil has over the US government—because to me, it seems like every politician in either party should be in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Right?</p>
<p>Without any negative consequence of emitting carbon, optimizing for greed pushes certain car technologies forward, like safety, comfort, and drive quality, because getting high safety and quality ratings is tied to demand—but it <em>doesn’t</em> change anything about carbon emissions, because the greed equation doesn’t currently include that cost.</p>
<p>So the reason why, 112 years after Ford Motor Company’s founding, we’re still using harmful, old-fashioned engines is simple: none of the pressures on the car industry are pushing it to change. The car industry still needs to work hard to optimize in <em>certain</em> areas—that’s why cars have become safer, smoother, more comfortable, and more efficient over the years. But the most glaring flaw of the modern car—that it constantly dumps garbage into the atmosphere—remains untouched, because doing so is free, because big oil’s influence means government keeps allowing it, and because there’s no one from underneath to burst through the canopy and show customers that there’s a better way.</p>
<p>It’s scary. Something really, terribly bad might be happening that could make our actual lives legitimately worse in the future, but we have a prisoner’s dilemma on our hands—it’s much, much better for all of us collectively to make a change, but for <em>each individual </em>CEO, lobbyist, or politician, there’s more to <em>personally </em>gain from maintaining the status quo. People like to say, “this is the world our children will live in and we’re botching it for them,” but for the people with the power to change something, their <em>particular</em> children will be best off if they make the most money possible. The situation is stuck.</p>
<p>A deeply-set, stagnant industry is like a country led by a deeply-entrenched dynasty—it’s hard to penetrate the status quo. But even in the case of the most powerful caste systems, sometimes the right person comes along at the right time and starts the right movement, and a revolution can ignite.</p>
<p><strong><a></a>Part 3: The Story of Tesla</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Story-of-Tesla.png"></a></p>
<p>Christie Nicholson remembers meeting Elon Musk for the first time at a party back in 1989.</p>
<p>“I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was ‘I think a lot about electric cars,’” Christie said. “And then he turned to me and said, ‘Do you think about electric cars?’”<a href="#footnote-13-3667">13</a>
</p><p>Electric cars seems like an odd thing to spend your time thinking about in 1989. To understand why Musk felt so strongly about them, let’s start by understanding what electric cars are and how they work.</p>
<p>There are a handful of common modern types of cars considered greener than traditional gas cars—namely hybrid cars, plug-in hybrid cars, and electric cars (which we’ll call EVs for “electric vehicles”). There’s also a lot of talk about another type—hydrogen fuel cell cars, which we’ll just call hydrogen cars. The one thing these cars all have in common is an electric motor.</p>
<p>There are two types of electric motors—the AC induction motor and the brushless DC electric motor. Since 98% of people reading this aren’t licking their lips to read a three-paragraph description of the difference, let it suffice to say that they’re the same basic idea:</p>
<p>An electric motor is a <a href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/173/432632095_8b49ad80ba.jpg">pig in a blanket</a> where electricity is sent into the outer bread part (called the stator), which is always stationary, and that electric current causes the hot dog part (called the rotor) to rotate. The rotor is attached to the wheel axle which turns the wheels. Like this:<a href="#footnote2-29-3667">29</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/indhvtuiction.gif"></a></p>
<div>
<p><b>How an AC Induction Motor Works Blue Box</b></p>
<p>One of the two common types of electric motor is the AC induction motor (that’s what Tesla cars use). AC stands for alternating current,<a href="#footnote-14-3667">14</a> and induction means there’s no physical contact between the rotor and the stator—electricity in the stator generates a rotating magnetic field which enters the rotor through electrical induction and causes it to spin.</p>
<p>The stator generates a rotating magnetic field by sending electricity through it in a three phase system:<a href="#footnote2-30-3667">30</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/inductionmotoranimation.gif"></a></p>
<p>So there are three different wires each with an alternating back-and-forth pull—just look at any one color and you’ll see it’s just going back and forth. But the three wires’ currents are staggered in just the right way that the point of “pull” in the stator rotates in a smooth circle. When the rotor is added in, this rotating magnetic field causes it to spin:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/generatoranimation.gif"></a></p>
<p>The idea is that the rotor can never quite catch up to where it wants to be—it’s always “chasing” the rotating field, and that chase is what powers the car. The AC induction motor was invented by Nikola Tesla, and that’s why Tesla Motors is named after him.<a href="#footnote-15-3667">15</a>
</p></div>
<p>Here are the types of cars that use an electric motor:</p>
<p><strong>Hybrids </strong>(also called HEVs for hybrid electric vehicles), like the Toyota Prius, have both an electric motor <em>and </em>an internal combustion engine. You don’t plug a hybrid car in—the gas charges the battery. The battery also gets charge from an electric motor trick called regenerative braking. Normally, all the joules of kinetic energy a car is harnessing when it’s moving are lost when the car brakes and they’re just converted into heat. With regenerative braking, electric cars send some of that kinetic energy back into the battery, holding onto those joules to be used again later. The electric component of a hybrid replaces some of the need to burn gas, increasing the miles per gallon, decreasing the car’s emissions, and saving the driver gas money. Hybrids are a big step up in technology from normal gas cars.</p>
<p>But they still kind of suck. Why? Because they’re only kind of helping the emissions problem, not solving it, and they still need to burn gas to work. As I’ve heard people say, a world 100% full of Prius drivers is still a world 100% addicted to oil.</p>
<p><strong>Plug-in hybrids </strong>(also called PHEVs) are a better option. Plug-in hybrid cars, like the Chevy Volt, the Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid, and the Ford Fusion Energi, allow you to charge the battery at home and typically drive 10-40 miles just on battery power before the gas kicks in. That’s often enough to get most people through most of their day, meaning they may rarely need to use gas.</p>
<p>But if we’re gonna get <em>so close</em>, why not just go all the way?</p>
<p><strong>Hydrogen cars </strong>are entirely electric—but they don’t use a battery. Instead, they fill up with fuel at a station just like a gas car—except they fill up with compressed hydrogen, not gas. The hydrogen mixes with oxygen in the air to produce electricity, which it sends to the motor to power the car. They produce no tailpipe emissions because the only byproduct is clean water. Sounds great, right?</p>
<p>Musk, for the life of him, cannot understand how anyone could make an argument in favor of hydrogen cars,<a href="#footnote-16-3667">16</a> but it’s confusing because lots of car companies, like Toyota, Honda, and General Motors, are currently pouring big investments into making hydrogen cars. I wanted to understand the disagreement, so I read like 12 articles in favor and opposed to the technology. At the end of it, I’m having a hard time seeing why hydrogen cars would have a more promising future than electric vehicles. For those who want details, here’s a footnote.<a href="#footnote-17-3667">17</a>
</p><p>Finally, there are <strong>electric cars, or</strong> <strong>EVs</strong>, like the Nissan Leaf, the BMW i3, the Ford Focus Electric, and the Tesla Model S.<strong> </strong>These are simple—there’s a big battery, which you charge, and it powers the electric motor. No liquid involved.</p>
<p>Now, in <em>theory</em>, EVs make a lot of sense. Forgetting the rest of the car for a second, let’s look at some of the advantages of the electric motor over the internal combustion gas engine:</p>
<p><strong>Electric motors are more convenient than gas engines most of the time. </strong>Gas cars have to go to the gas station; EV owners plug their car in every night the same way they charge their phone—no stopping for gas. A gas engine is a lot more complicated than an electric motor, with over 200 parts; an electric motor has fewer than 10. A gas engine requires a transmission, a tailpipe, gears, and a bunch of other grease-covered shit; an EV has none of those things—when you open the hood, it’s more storage space, like the trunk. Gas engines need oil, which means they need oil changes; EVs don’t. The extra complexity means gas cars end up needing a lot more maintenance than EVs.</p>
<p><strong>It costs a lot less to power an electric motor than a gas engine. </strong>The extra costs gas car owners incur for oil changes and car repairs aside, the gas engine’s fuel—gas—is much more expensive than the electric motor’s fuel—electricity. Let’s look at the math:</p>
<p>The average electric car gets about 3 miles per kWh<a href="#footnote-18-3667">18</a> of electricity, and the US national average electricity rate is 12 cents per kWh. That means that driving a mile in an electric car costs about 4 cents. </p>
<p>The cost of driving a gas car is harder, because gas prices and car fuel efficiency widely vary. The best case scenario for a gas car is unusually cheap gas (let’s say $1.40/gallon) coupled with unusually high fuel efficiency (let’s say it’s a rare gas car that gets 35 mpg). That would produce the same 4 cents/mile that electric cars get. But very few gas car owners ever pay 4 cents/mile. Without being crazy extreme, for the worse case scenario, let’s say a high $4.00/gallon gas and a below-average 15 mpg—in that case, a mile in a gas car costs 27 cents per mile. At a pretty typical 12,000 miles/year, that means at absolute best, gas is tied with electric for cost, and at worst, it costs over $3,000/year more to drive on gas.</p>
<p><strong>The gas engine is one of the two major causes of the energy/climate crisis. </strong>We’ve already discussed this—transportation burning oil makes up a third of the world emissions, pollutes cities, and makes nations over-dependent on other nations. The electric motor emits nothing. Yes, it may run on electricity that was produced in a dirty way—but we’ll get to that later.</p>
<p>So that’s why Musk told Christie Nicholson that he thinks a lot about electric cars. The electric motor is clearly the easier, cheaper, and more sensible long-term plan for powering cars.</p>
<p>But when the electric motor made its first appearance over 100 years ago, there were serious drawbacks that prevented it from becoming the norm—and since electric cars went out of production back then, little time or money has been spent trying to fix those issues. There tend to be three age-old concerns about the viability of the electric car:</p>
<p><strong>EV Concern 1) Range. </strong>This is really three issues rolled into one:</p>
<p>A) Will the battery life be too short for long drives, limiting an EV to a car only for local driving?</p>
<p>B) If I’m out and about and need to recharge my battery on the road, is there anywhere to do it? Or will I end up stranded?</p>
<p>C) If I do find a charging station while on the road, will I have to sit there for five hours while it charges?</p>
<p>These issues are such a prevalent concern among potential EV-owners that they have their own term: range anxiety.</p>
<p><b>EV Concern 2) Performance. </b>The most common electric vehicle you’ll see around today is the golf cart. Which doesn’t excite car owners very much. No one wants a car that drives like shit, and when people think about zooming acceleration, they tend to think about powerful gas engines, not electric motors.</p>
<p><strong>EV Concern 3) Price. </strong>Ever since the beginning, EVs have cost more than gas cars, mainly because of the high cost of the battery.</p>
<p>Back in 1910, people cited these exact same three concerns over electric cars, and they’re part of the reason gas cars won the day. Gas cars had had their own major problems, but Ford had figured out how to make them viable—something no one has yet done for the electric car.</p>
<p>I asked Musk about his opinion on Henry Ford. He said, “Ford was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed.”</p>
<p>When he decided in 2003 to stop thinking about electric cars and start making them, the odds weren’t in Musk’s favor. There were the high barriers to entry that had prevented any startup car company from succeeding in almost a century; there was the unaccounted for cost of carbon emissions, which made starting an EV company like trying to stand out on a basketball court as a rookie when all the players except you can foul with no penalty; there was the gargantuan oil industry, which would do everything in its power to stomp on any effort to make it obsolete; and on top of that, the EV was a new kind of car whose development had essentially been on pause ever since EV makers threw in the towel a century earlier, and a daunting and costly catch-up process would lay ahead—the three concerns listed above would all need to somehow be addressed for this to have a chance.</p>
<p>The overarching question was, had electric cars never had their day because of irreconcilable issues? Or had the right person—the Henry Ford of EVs—just not come along yet?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Car companies aren’t supposed to start in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley startups aren’t supposed to make cars.</p>
<p>But the electric car industry is not your grandfather’s car industry. And in 2003, it wasn’t anyone’s car industry. After the brief bubble of new electric cars in California in the 1990s between the year the state passed the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate and the year they were bullied into repealing it, the electric car industry had withered into the oblivion of the scattered California garages and tech labs of car geeks. But big things have emerged out of small groups of cutting-edge California geek labs. Apple. Microsoft. Google. So why not the modern electric car industry?</p>
<p>One of these little car technology companies was AC Propulsion, and while carmakers in Detroit, Tokyo, and Munich continued to not realize that electric cars were clearly the future, the guys at AC Propulsion were experimenting away, quietly making one giant EV breakthrough after another.</p>
<p>One day last week, I cold called AC Propulsion and accosted their CTO, Paul Carosa, who had been there since the beginning. He was too polite to figure out how to get off the phone with me, so he told me about those years in the late 90s and early 2000s when they created their fanciest car to date—the tzero (pronounced t-zero). AC Propulsion had figured out two huge things:</p>
<p>First, the tzero was <em>fast—</em>it went 0 to 60 in 4.9 seconds, which was crazy fast for an electric car and put it on par with the fast gas cars.</p>
<p>Second, they had made big progress on an enormous EV shortcoming by getting innovative with the battery. Previous EVs had used lead-acid batteries, which were heavy and limited. AC Propulsion realized that the laptop and mobile phone industry had been pouring development into making small 18650 lithium-ion batteries increasingly efficient, and that those batteries had gotten <em>really</em><em> </em>advanced. 18650 batteries look like AA batteries, which seems like an odd match for a car, but by lining up a few <em>thousand </em>of them in a big battery case, they had just created by <em>far </em>the world’s best ever car battery. EVs had always been limited to a 60 or 80 or <em>maybe</em> a 120-mile range. The tzero could go 250 miles on a single charge.</p>
<p>In 2003, a California engineer named JB Straubel was then tinkering around with EVs himself, met Musk to ask for funding for a car project he was working on. Soon after that, Straubel brought Musk by the AC Propulsion office to see the tzero. Musk was blown away. Musk had suspected for a while that EVs were the way of the future, and now that he saw the possibilities with his own eyes, he was convinced.</p>
<p>At the time, he was already running SpaceX and trying to colonize Mars, so launching a startup car company wasn’t something he could really fit into his calendar. He really wanted the world to see the tzero because he was sure it would excite people and help to stoke a new wave of EV interest—and he tried to convince the AC Propulsion guys to bring the tzero to market, with his funding, but they didn’t want to deal with that because it sounded icky. Instead, AC Propulsion introduced Musk to a group of three other entrepreneurs who had also recently approached them with a similar idea and had also been rebuffed. Those three guys, who included Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, had come up with the idea of licensing AC Propulsion’s technology and bringing it to market themselves as a new company called Tesla Motors<a href="#footnote-19-3667">19</a>—but to make any of this real, they needed money. It was a perfect match, so they decided to make a run at it together. Musk, who could only dedicate part time to the project, could fund the effort, become Chairman and maintain a strong influence, but by making Eberhard CEO, he could focus on SpaceX with the bulk of his time. And Tesla was on its way.</p>
<p>The group formed a team and started figuring out how to be a car company. One big problem they had was that this was a new technology, and the R&amp;D costs early on for a new technology drive up the price of the product—that’s the same reason the very first cell phones and computers started out really expensive. Except in those cases, they were the first of their kind, so the product could be super expensive and still sell. Because perfectly good, affordable gas cars already exist, it wouldn’t work to come out with the equivalent quality of a $25,000 gas car for $100,000+. So this became the business plan:</p>
<p><strong>Step 1: High-priced, low-volume car for the super rich.</strong> Come out with the expensive first product, but make the car so fancy that it’s worth that price—i.e. just make it a legit Ferrari competitor and then it’s okay to charge over $100,000 for it.</p>
<p><strong>Step 2: Mid-priced, mid-volume car for the pretty rich. </strong>Use the profits from Step 1 to develop the Step 2 car. It would still be expensive, but more like a $75,000 Mercedes or BMW competitor instead of Ferrari.</p>
<p><strong>Step 3: Low-priced, high-volume car for the masses. </strong>Use the profits from Step 2 to develop a $35,000-ish car that, after the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit and the savings on gas, would be affordable to the middle class.</p>
<p>It’s kind of a Hershey’s Kiss business plan:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/pyramid.png"></a></p>
<p>The overarching mission wasn’t to build the biggest car company in the world. It was to solve a bunch of long-standing EV shortcomings and build such an insanely great car that it could change everyone’s perception of what an EV could be and force the world’s big car companies to have to develop their own line of great EVs. Their end goal, and the company’s official mission, was “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” In other words, EVs are gonna happen, but we’re gonna make them happen a lot <em>sooner</em>. Sooner, in this case, is important, because it means carbon emissions decrease earlier and the long term effects of them are much less damaging.</p>
<p>So they got working. And four years later, they had their Step 1 car, the<strong> Roadster:</strong><a href="#footnote2-31-3667">31</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Tesla1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>With the Roadster, Tesla wasn’t trying to make their long term car (one Tesla employee told me that from the beginning, Musk would make sure everyone knew that the company’s long-term mission “was <em>not</em> to make toys for rich people.”) They just wanted to build something awesome to A) show the world how great an EV could be, and B) generate revenue to develop their Step 2 car. So they didn’t start from scratch on the body design, instead basing it on a Lotus Elise.</p>
<p>The Roadster didn’t change the world—no $110,000 car ever could—but it sent a message to the industry that Tesla was for real. You may not have heard of the Roadster when it was announced in 2006 or when it started shipping in 2008, but some of the major car companies took notice—Nissan soon launched the all-electric Leaf and GM launched the plug-in electric Chevy Volt soon after the Roadster’s appearance (Bob Lutz, who was Chairman of GM at the time, openly credits Tesla for their decision to make the Volt, saying that after the Roadster unveiling, he went to the GM board and asked, “If a little company in California can do this, why can’t we?”).</p>
<p>But there were some pretty big problems with the first product. Finishing the car was taking way longer than planned, the cost of making each Roadster was way higher than planned, and the early shipments often had defects. This made Musk sad, so he and the board fired Eberhard as CEO, which made Eberhard sad.<a href="#footnote-20-3667">20</a> Just as this was going down, the most inconvenient thing ever happened—the 2008 recession—which made the entire car industry sad, but especially Tesla, who didn’t yet have brand recognition and wasn’t yet profitable because of all the upfront investment they had been pouring in. A crippling recession is never helpful, but it was <em>really, really </em>bad timing for Tesla.</p>
<p>Musk had hired a second CEO, but a year in, in late 2008, the company was in one of those movie scenes where the person’s been badly wounded and clearly about to die and there’s this dramatic dialogue scene and the dying person is saying some last words and every time they pause for a second the audience is like, “Is that it? Are they dead? Oh no they just talked again I guess there’s one more line.” Musk, who wasn’t enjoying the drama of the scene, finally was like, “PAUSE THE MOVIE QUICKLY PAUSE IT PAUSE IT” and took over as CEO,<a href="#footnote-21-3667">21</a>going into full adrenaline mode to try to keep the company alive. And as mentioned in the last post, SpaceX was in the same movie at the same time playing the same role, so Musk’s life was like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/S-T1.png"></a></p>
<p>But enough people had been impressed enough by Tesla that a couple key investments at critical moments came in and kept the company alive, and at the end of the whole mess, Tesla was now a new company. Musk was CEO, and the Jonathan Ive of the car industry, star car designer Franz von Holzhausen, who had been the Design Director at GM and then Mazda, had decided to bet his career on the barely-standing Tesla and became their chief designer.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, when I stepped into the Tesla design studio to meet von Holzhausen, I was excited to meet the uber-flamboyant diva celebrity car designer, just hoping I would understand what he was saying through his unbelievably thick German accent—and was horribly disappointed to meet an extremely normal-acting American man.</p>
<p>The studio, which I described in the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">last post</a>, is a shiny playroom of art and physics. Von Holzhausen showed me a full-size clay car that was simultaneously testing two different possible designs for the upcoming Model 3 by making the two halves of the model different. He explained how precise everything about car design is and how “a difference of a quarter millimeter can spread itself across the entire car.”</p>
<p>I asked him what it was like to come to Tesla after having spent years at more established car companies. He described the difference like this: “A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around—the product is successful when it’s great, and the company becomes great because of that.” (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: “The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company’s done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO—it’s done. Game over.”) Von Holzhausen went on, saying, “Another difference is that at other companies, engineering comes first—a design package is prescribed on the designer and they’re told to make it beautiful. At Tesla, design and engineering are assigned equal value, and Elon keeps them opposed to each other.” Now that von Holzhausen has gotten used to his freedom to be obsessed with the product at Tesla, he says he “would dread to go back to pre-historic ways.”</p>
<p>Von Holzhausen’s first mission at Tesla was to design their Step 2 car—the mid-priced, mid-volume one—that would be called the<strong> Model S</strong>. The Roadster was based on existing design and was a springboard for the company more than a long-term product. The Model S would be Tesla’s first flagship product, and it was their chance to reinvent the concept of a car, from scratch. Von Holzhausen said, “When we started Model S, it was a clean sheet of paper.”</p>
<p>This all sounded uncannily similar to how Steve Jobs had done things at Apple. He obsessed over making “insanely great products,” and he never paid attention to what other companies were doing, always coming at things from a clean sheet of paper perspective. When Apple decided to make a phone, they didn’t try to make a better Blackberry—they asked, “What should a mobile phone be?”</p>
<p>Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse—and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there’s often a huge opportunity there.</p>
<p>When the iPhone came out, it turned the phone industry on its head. So should we be surprised that when the Tesla Model S came out, Consumer Reports <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/04/consumer-reports-10-top-picks-of-2015/index.htm">anointed it</a> the best car that had ever been made with an unheard of 99/100 rating, and that Tesla owners are <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2014/1205/Tesla-Model-S-leads-the-pack-in-customer-satisfaction.-Again.">across-the-board</a> obsessed with the car? No, because it’s like the iPhone—it’s a 15-year leap into the future.<a href="#footnote2-32-3667">32</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/6667.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The Model S is the fastest 4-door sedan in history, with 3.2-second 0-60 time. It saves battery power by being insanely aerodynamic with the industry’s lowest drag coefficient (.24). A bunch of engineering innovations have combined to give it the <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/19/tesla-model-s-highest-safety-rating/">highest NHTSA safety rating</a> of any car ever tested by the US government, 5.4 stars.</p>
<p>The Model S is already <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=17&amp;v=EJmhpgW0Dmc">driving itself</a> and soon, it’ll be able to drive itself to meet you out in the driveway in the morning with the temperature already set and the right music on; at night, you’ll be able to pull up to the house and just get out of the car and the car will park itself into the garage and <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2894345/Tesla-teases-electric-car-plugs-charge-Elon-Musk-describes-metal-snake-automatically-connects-vehicles.html">plug itself in</a>. They did away with model years (i.e. the 2014 Toyota Camry, the 2015 Toyota Camry, etc.), so instead of holding all the year’s new features until the new release, they just put features in as they go. Someone who buys a Tesla today might have a slightly different car than someone who bought one two weeks ago. And they’re constantly rolling out fixes and new features through automatic wifi software updates—owners often wake up in the morning to discover the car has a new capability.</p>
<p>In a bunch of cases, Tesla has wanted to do something that wasn’t technically possible with the current world or industry limitations—so they’d build what they needed to build to change those limitations:</p>
<p>The Tesla battery is heavy and they wanted to make the body super light to offset some of that weight—so they turned to SpaceX and used its advanced rocket technology to make Tesla the only North American car with an all aluminum body.</p>
<p>Musk and von Holzhausen’s<a href="#footnote-22-3667">22</a> team had spent all this time perfecting the design of the car before it was time to put the door handles on, and they got really used to it that way. When it was time for handles, they didn’t want to ruin how it was, so they figured out how to make the handles lay <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIU73kK7ZUk">flush</a> with the door.</p>
<p>They didn’t like the dealership model and wanted to sell directly to customers, but many states don’t allow that, so one by one, they’re <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/fr_CH/forum/forums/where-can-tesla-sell-cars">fighting</a> the states that won’t and slowly overturning direct car sales bans.</p>
<p>They wanted to get rid of buttons altogether and have all controls on a huge, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVsHEZivqm8">17″ touchscreen</a>—but when their first car came out, there was no iPad yet, and 17″ touchscreens suitable for a car didn’t exist. So they built their own.<a href="#footnote2-33-3667">33</a>
</p><p>Innovations like these helped make the Tesla a standout car, but there were still questions around the major shortcomings of EV cars. Of the three EV concerns we listed earlier, AC Propulsion had made significant headway on two—performance and battery range—and the Tesla team had picked it up from there and had continued to improve both. Performance was now the best in the world for a sedan and the battery range—between 208 and 270 miles per charge, depending on the model—was excellent.</p>
<p>But there were still two problematic questions that needed to be addressed:</p>
<p>Can you take a road trip? And can anyone afford the car? Tesla is working on both.</p>
<p><strong>How Tesla is solving the road trip problem:</strong></p>
<p>With a 200+ range, the Tesla battery has plenty of juice to get most people through the day on any normal day. Even a busy day of commuting and errands and exploration rarely gets close to 200 miles driving. But on long city-to-city drives or road trips, EVs have always had an issue. So Musk came up with a solution:</p>
<p>Build a worldwide energy network. Tesla came up with the <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/videos/tesla-motors-supercharger-event">Supercharger</a>—a high-caliber, on-the-road charger—and there would be public stations that would contain a whole row of Superchargers, just like a row of gas pumps at a gas station. A normal garage charger takes either 5 or 10 hours to fully charge the Model S battery, depending on which type of in-car charging system you opted for. Clearly no one wants to stop for multiple hours while on the road to accomplish what a gas car can by stopping for five minutes—so the Supercharger goes much faster. It can charge a Model S at a rate that gives it about 60 miles of range for every 10 minutes of charging time. So if you’re driving between Boston and New York (215 miles), you might make it with no stopping, but if you did need to stop, you could just charge up for 5 or 10 minutes—not that much more than a stop for gas. Driving from LA to San Francisco (382 miles), you’d need to stop for 20 or 30 minutes.</p>
<p>And the thing is—on a 4-hour drive from Boston to New York, isn’t a 5-10 minute stop desirable anyway? On a 6-7 hour drive from LA to SF, wouldn’t most people stop for 20-30 minutes to get some food and go to the bathroom anyway?</p>
<p>The more I thought about this, the more I realized how little of an issue range is for an EV with a good battery like the Tesla. Just say you do a long drive five days a year. That means on 360 of the 365 days, you have to do nothing. You just drive, and <em>you never need to stop at a gas station.</em> And the other five days? You’d probably just need to stop for about as long as you would stop on a long drive anyway.</p>
<p>Seems like a perfect solution, but you need to have a Supercharger along <em>your </em>drive if it’s going to work. Here’s where Superchargers are today in the US:<a href="#footnote2-34-3667">34</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Supercharger-US-14.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And they’re building them at a furious pace—here’s where they’ll be by the end of 2016:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Supercharger-US-16-compressor.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Supercharger-Europe.jpg">Europe</a> and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Supercharger-Asia.jpg">Asia</a> will be equally well-covered.</p>
<p>For now, only Teslas can use the Supercharger stations, and only the Tesla can really make long-distance drives right now anyway. But down the road, Musk plans to partner with other EV car companies so any EV can stop at one.</p>
<p>A couple other things about Superchargers: they’re all free to use, and soon, they’ll all be entirely solar-powered. Musk jokes that if there’s a zombie apocalypse, Tesla owners will be fine because they won’t need the grid to fuel their car. And it means that if you had friends to stay with, you could technically drive across the US without taking a wallet.</p>
<p>This is also going to become even easier with time, because Tesla is making new innovations every year. For example, the Roadster now has a 350 mile range battery and you can just about do LA to SF without stopping—it’s only a matter of time before their cheaper cars have a similar range. Tesla also recently <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/videos/battery-swap-event">unveiled</a> a new Supercharger feature—<strong>the battery swap</strong>. A Tesla driver will be able to pull up to a little rectangle and stop the car. The ground opens up and a machine comes out and takes the car’s battery off, brings up a fresh battery and puts it on, and you’re good to go—<em>all in 90 seconds</em>. This would cost $60-80, or as much as an expensive tank of gas—so Tesla drivers would now have the option of “fast or free.”</p>
<p>So with that problem very close to being out of the way, Tesla seems to only have one issue left:</p>
<p><em>Who the hell can afford a $75,000 car? </em></p>
<p>The starting price of a Tesla Model S is technically $69,900. But if you want the higher-range cars and the faster charging battery, the price jumps up. There are a bunch of other “well shit now that you mention it yeah I do want that too” features, and a Model S can quickly work its way toward the $100,000 mark.</p>
<p>Musk is always quick to point out that for the moment, the US offers a $7,500 tax credit for buying an EV of sufficient range. He also points out what I mentioned above about the $2,000-ish a year gas savings. Sure—but even subtracting all that, we’re around $55,000 for a Tesla Model S, which is prohibitive for most people. Tesla has a new car coming out soon—their SUV with <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx">Falcon Wing doors</a>, called the Model X—but it’s another Step 2, mid-price / mid-volume expensive car. Doesn’t solve the pricing problem.</p>
<p>It’s a <a href="http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1089555_electric-car-market-share-in-2013-understanding-the-numbers-better">rule of thumb</a> in the car world that every $5,000 decrease in car price approximately doubles the number of buyers who can afford the car. So if Tesla can somehow come out with a stellar EV for about $35,000 less than the Model S, it would double the buyer pool 7 times, or multiply it by 125-fold. Which would now mean <em>most</em> people could afford it. Let’s bring back Tesla’s Hershey’s Kiss business plan from earlier:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/pyramid2.png"></a></p>
<p>So Step 3 is what this is all about. Step 3 is why Tesla exists and if Tesla ends up changing the world, it’ll be because of Step 3.</p>
<p>That car is the Model 3, and it’s coming out in 2017. Supposedly. And it’ll cost $35,000—$27,500 after the tax credit, and after taking gas savings into account, under $20,000. Supposedly.</p>
<p>But <em>how? </em>Right now, the Model 3 battery costs around $20,000. Even if Tesla ditches the high-tech aluminum body, makes the car smaller, and ditches some of the fanciest things about the Model S, the battery pack alone makes a price like $35,000 impossible.</p>
<p><strong>How Tesla is solving the high-price problem:</strong></p>
<p>Big problems call for big solutions. To solve the range problem, Tesla is building a worldwide energy network of Superchargers. And to solve the price problem, they’re building this:<a href="#footnote2-35-3667">35</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/hero-compressor.jpg"></a></p>
<p>That’s what Musk has named the <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/gigafactory">Gigafactory</a>. It’s a $5 billion lithium-ion battery factory, currently being built in Nevada. The factory will be self-sufficient, powered entirely by on-site solar, wind, and geothermal energy, and it will employ 6,500 people.</p>
<p>Right now, the world’s combined annual output of lithium-ion batteries is 30GWh—mostly for use in laptops and mobile phones. The Gigafactory will make more than that each year, which means it will <em>more than double the total lithium-ion batteries made each year globally</em>. There are two huge benefits to doing this:</p>
<p>First, Tesla is planning to ramp up production of their cars until they’re producing 500,000 of them a year, and they’re going to need a lot of lithium-ion batteries when they do. Musk’s reasoning is simple: “I know we can’t get enough lithium-ion batteries unless we build this bloody factory, and I know no one else is building this thing.” The numbers make this necessity clear. To make enough batteries for their planned 500,000 cars a year, Tesla will need about 30GWh of lithium-ion batteries a year—the current world output—meaning that without building the Gigafactory, they’d have to use every single lithium-ion battery in the world. Tesla’s Gigafactory will just barely cover Tesla’s needs—if a day comes when every car company is making a ton of EVs, there will need to be many Gigafactories built by many companies.</p>
<p>Second, by both doubling the world supply of lithium-ion batteries and by continuing to innovate with battery technology, Tesla’s work at the Gigafactory will make batteries a lot cheaper. Musk says the price of the battery should go down by <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/05/14/the-logic-of-teslas-gigafactory-the-economics-are-a-no-brainer/">at least 30%</a>. Right now, Musk says Tesla could make their cars with a <a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/26/elon-musk-says-500-mile-ev-happen-soon/">500 mile range</a>—they don’t do it because it would increase the cost of the car. But as battery prices go down, EV ranges will go up as well.</p>
<p>I’m pretty convinced that the Model S is the best expensive car ever made. In its first year, its sales blew away its well-known direct competitors—the S-Class Mercedes, BMW 7-Series, the Lexus LS, and the Audi A8—and it’s been in the lead ever since. But those cars all play in a small space for the very rich.</p>
<p>It’s the Model 3 that will turn the industry on its head. You may not know much about Tesla today—or particularly care—but I’m pretty sure everyone will know about the Model 3 soon. Maybe that’s why Musk refuses to do any advertising—because he knows that when the Model 3 comes out, he won’t have to.</p>
<p>The market has taken notice. Tesla’s $226 million IPO in June of 2010 marks the first IPO for an American car company since Ford went public in 1956. Since then, the company’s value has soared upwards. Today, seven years after being on the brink of bankruptcy, Tesla’s <a href="https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:TSLA">market cap</a> is a massive $31 billion. To put in perspective how big a deal that is, I set Tesla’s path to that number down on a graph with the Big Three US automakers (just using straight lines to simplify):</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Car-Graphs.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The car industry forest canopy has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and for decades, no hungry underdog has been able to make a run at it. Tesla hasn’t cracked the canopy yet, but for the first time in a long time, there’s a new company bolting upwards from the ground at lightning speed.</p>
<p><strong>A Ripple Effect</strong></p>
<p>If you’re another one of the big car companies, and you’ve been around for decades, and you’re comfortably doing your thing, making slight incremental improvements each year to your existing line of cars—could <em>anything in the world</em> be more annoying than Tesla?</p>
<p>Remember, the car companies know alllll about electric cars and their benefits. Most of them made an electric car in the 1990s when California mandated that they do, and then the second the mandate went away, they confiscated and literally <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F">crushed</a> the cars. Then they whipped the cars into the dump and covered the pile with a tablecloth with a “nothing to see here folks” look on their faces. The scare was over and they could go back to their comfort zone, incrementally improving their gas vehicles.</p>
<p>Their feelings on EVs make perfect sense:</p>
<p>Dealerships make a huge amount of profit fixing gas engines, oil filters, and doing oil changes—money they’d stop making when they sold EVs with motors that rarely broke.</p>
<p>The car companies already know gas cars back and forth, and they’ve mastered the art of making a few tiny new changes to them each year so the new year’s models will be a little better than the previous year’s. But EVs are a new world for them, and they don’t know any more about how to make a good powertrain or improve battery energy density than Tesla does—in fact, they know less, as evidenced by Toyota and Mercedes both buying the Tesla powertrain for their EVs. What a pain in the ass all that R&amp;D would be.</p>
<p>Most importantly, the world already wants to buy gas cars. There’s no convincing needed—just a few standard TV ads to hone the latest phase of the brand’s image and inform customers about the latest product updates. But EVs are new and scary to customers, and there’s a hump to get over in educating the world about why they should buy one. But the <em>really </em>problematic thing about this is that in order to market an EV well, you need to do what I’m doing in this post and explain all the reasons EVs are obviously a huge step forward from gas cars—which simultaneously sends the message, “Gas cars are dirty, inconvenient, and old-fashioned.” Not a thing you want to do when your current bread and butter is selling 10 million gas cars a year.</p>
<p>And who wants to deal with all of these things when they could just skip it <i>if Tesla would just go away.</i></p>
<p>Franz von Holzhausen has worked at three of these other companies. The way he sees it, “they’re trapped in their manufacturing legacy process, trapped in gas engines being their bread and butter, trapped in their dealership model, trapped in their own history.”</p>
<p>Musk explains it as a lack of guts and originality: “The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward.”<a href="#footnote2-36-3667">36</a>
</p><p>But the Tesla tree is racing upwards, and its impending burst through the canopy has successfully scared the industry. We know this for sure, because when the first Tesla Roadster shipped in 2008, there were <em>no </em>big company EVs on the market. Today, Ford, Chevy, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Fiat, Kia, Mitsubishi, and Smart <em>all </em><a href="http://www.plugincars.com/cars">have an EV</a> on the road. Not a coincidence.</p>
<p>So what’s the deal with all of these other EVs?</p>
<p>Most notable is the <a href="http://plugincars.com/nissan-leaf">Nissan Leaf</a>, introduced in 2010, which has been the highest-selling EV in the world in recent years (though the much more expensive Tesla Model S has topped the industry in EVs sold <a href="http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/">so far in 2015</a>). The Leaf costs about $30,000 ($22,500 after tax credit) and has a range of 84 miles. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has for a while been one of the few strongly pro-EV voices in the car industry outside of Tesla. He <a href="http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095851_electric-cars-win-for-4-reasons-says-nissans-carlos-ghosn">talks about</a> the “cul-de-sac” effect that will begin to accelerate EV sales—i.e. people will be jealous that their neighbor has a more futuristic car and doesn’t have to get gas, will ask questions, and then might get one themselves.</p>
<p>The recently introduced <a href="http://plugincars.com/bmw-i3.html">BMW i3</a> is currently selling next best after the Leaf and Model S. It costs $43,000 ($35,500 after tax credit) and has a range of 81 miles. BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer has jumped on the EV train, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323854904578635543525172364">saying</a>, “You have to look into the future, 10, 15, 20 years…cars like the BMW i3 are a must.”</p>
<p>No other EV has had significant sales yet.<a href="#footnote-23-3667">23</a> I asked Musk about the Leaf and the i3. About the Leaf, he said, “The range is too low, but if they keep iterating on that, they’ll eventually get there.” On the i3: “They’re trying to do something there. The range is low, but it’s a step in the right direction, and if they keep going, they’ll get something there.”</p>
<p>This “Congrats on your first big boy toilet poop, Johnny, now next time try to get the whole thing inside the bowl and you’ll be on your way!” tone is about as effusive as Musk gets when assessing the industry’s current attempts at an EV.</p>
<p>Volkswagen just hired BMW’s ex-CEO and also <a href="http://evobsession.com/300-mile-electric-cars-vw-exec/">seems to be</a> bullish on EVs, and GM is promising big things with their upcoming EV, the Chevy Bolt.</p>
<p>Other car companies still aren’t convinced. Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche <a href="http://ecomento.com/2015/04/02/mercedes-ceo-dieter-zetsche-looks-at-the-electric-car-future/">said</a> he doesn’t expect EVs to sell well for a while, because “the customer gets a car with less range, longer refueling times, somewhat less space, and a higher price tag.” The major Japanese companies, Toyota and Honda, are both skeptical about EVs and have been pouring their future into hybrids and hydrogen cars instead. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is so anti-EV that he’s told the world <em>not </em>to buy their Fiat 500e EV, saying they’re only selling it because regulations have forced them to.</p>
<p>If EVs are the dominant car of the future, they have a long way to go to get there. As of January 2015, there were a total of <a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/28/ev-demand-growing-global-market-hits-740000-units/">740,000</a> EVs on the road worldwide. Compare that to the whole picture of over 80 million cars sold worldwide annually and over a billion total cars on the road. EVs make up only a fraction of a percent of the car industry. But they’re on the move:<a href="#footnote2-37-3667">37</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ev-fleet-count.png"></a></p>
<p>So we’re either at the cusp of a new EV-dominated car era or in the middle of another little EV bubble before they vanish from existence <em>again</em>—and as you can see from the quotes above, the car industry is currently divided in which way they’re betting.</p>
<p>I think we’ll learn a lot more soon, because the world is still yet to see its first true potential EV disruptor. The issue with Tesla right now is most people can’t afford one, and the issue with <em>every </em>other EV is the range sucks. It looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Plot.png"></a></p>
<p>The truth is, the typical American drives <a href="http://www.facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-asphalts-getting-crowded-video-">37 miles a day</a> on average, and the 80+ mile range options are probably actually plenty for most people. But 80 miles seems like an insufficient range to prospective buyers, and mass adoption won’t happen with that kind of range.</p>
<p>Tesla’s plan all along was to plant a stellar car right in that Quadrant 4 box, and that’s what they say they’re going to do in 2017 when the Model 3 comes out. A number of other carmakers, including <a href="http://www.leftlanenews.com/nissan-leaf-2017.html">Nissan</a>, <a href="http://evobsession.com/300-mile-electric-cars-vw-exec/">Volkswagen</a>, and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2015/01/14/what-mary-barras-growth-strategy-says-about-the-new-gm/">GM</a> have all declared their intention to release a not-that-expensive long-range EV soon. It’s not clear if any or all of these companies will get into Quadrant 4, but if they do…</p>
<p>If there are high-quality, affordable EVs for sale that also have a high range…</p>
<p><strong>I cannot think of <em>one </em>reason <em>anyone </em>would <em>ever </em>buy a gas car again.</strong></p>
<p>A Tesla-quality car that’s affordable to the middle class would seem to have only pros in the Pro/Con list:</p>
<p><strong>Pros of an affordable, high-quality, long-range EV over a comparable gas car:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Drives better. </strong>The instant torque of an EV is like exploding out of a gun. There’s no lag time between your foot touching the pedal and the car moving. Without gears, it accelerates perfectly smoothly. The handling is incredible. It’s silent.</li>
<li><strong>More convenient. </strong>No stops for gas. Much less need to take the car in for maintenance. No oil changes. More storage because with no engine, the hood is now the frunk (the front trunk).</li>
<li><strong>Safer. </strong>With no engine, the entire front of the car becomes a crumple zone. That’s part of why the Model S has blown away the safety ratings.</li>
<li><strong>Cheaper. </strong>No gas or oil, and less maintenance. No longer beholden to fluctuating gas prices.</li>
<li><strong>Healthier. </strong>No smog in cities, which cause <a href="http://www.healthline.com/health/dangers-smog-what-you-need-know-about-air-pollution#2">many, many health problems.</a></li>
<li><strong>Oh yeah, and the whole thing about avoiding an environmental, economic, or geopolitical catastrophe.</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Cons of an affordable, high-quality, long-range EV over a comparable gas car:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>People who love to shift the manual stick around with all their muscle because they’re a cool cat on the open road to destiny can’t do that.</li>
<li>Five days a year, when you’re on a long drive, you have to stop for 30 minutes every three hours instead of five minutes every four hours—a con that becomes moot if you would have stopped for 30 minutes anyway every few hours.</li>
</ul>
<p>EVs aren’t there yet. Right now, there are legit cons. But as the next few years pass, EVs will get cheaper, battery ranges will get longer and longer, Superchargers will pop up more and more until they’re everywhere, and charging times will just decrease as technology advances. Maybe I’m missing something, and I’m sure a bunch of seething commenters will try to make that very clear to me, but it seems like a given to me: the gas era is over and EVs are the obvious, <em>obvious </em>future.</p>
<p><strong>An Angry Giant</strong></p>
<p>The car companies, as I mentioned, aren’t happy about all of this—they’re acting like a kid with a cupcake whose parents are forcing them to eat their vegetables.</p>
<p>But how about the oil industry?</p>
<p>Unlike car companies, the oil industry can’t suck it up, get on the EV train, and after an unpleasant hump, continue to thrive. If EVs catch on in a serious way and end up being the ubiquitous type of car, oil companies are ruined. 45% of all the world’s extracted oil is used for transportation, but in the developed world, it’s much higher—in the US, 71% of extracted oil is used for transportation, and most of that is for cars.</p>
<p>So if the car industry has a cupcake and its parents are forcing it to eat vegetables, the oil industry has a cupcake but <i>its </i>parents are forcing it to eat <em>razor blades.</em> The car industry will resist the veggies and have a little tantrum before grudgingly giving in—the oil industry will <em>furiously try to gouge the parents’ eyes out in resistance </em>because for him, this is life and death.</p>
<p>And that’s how the oil industry sees EVs—horrifying razor blades. And giant industries don’t just roll over and eat razor blades without a serious fight.</p>
<p>We’ve seen this before. Tobacco companies fought tooth and nail to stay alive and strong as long as possible when the tide started to turn against them. And the oil industry itself has been fighting tooth and nail for a while now on another front—the battle to keep people confused about whether global warming is a thing.</p>
<p>Usually in these cases, the industry clawing for survival knows it’s on the way out. But in the meantime, they’re making money, and the longer it takes before the public fully gets the situation, the longer it’ll be before the public uniformly rejects them, politicians are able to regulate against them, and the money finally stops. Time is very much money in these situations.</p>
<p>The tactic to stay alive longer is always the same—put out misinformation to create confusion, and make it political so half the country feels like they’re going against “their own team” if they side against the industry.</p>
<p>The super-clever way they create confusion is by generating the public perception that there’s a genuine debate among scientists. That’s how you make a 97% consensus seem like an open question:<a href="#footnote2-38-3667">38</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/consensus_gap.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The same tactic was used a few decades ago when 98% of scientists said smoking caused lung cancer, but the tobacco industry convinced the public for a long time that “scientists disagree” about whether smoking is harmful. The book <em>Merchants of Doubt</em> details how many of the same pro-smoking “scientists” a generation later became the “global warming isn’t a thing” scientists—the actual same <em>people.</em></p>
<p>When the 1990 California Zero Emissions Mandate forced car companies to make an EV in order to continue selling cars in CA, the oil industry saw it as a small tumor they needed to swiftly nip in the bud before it grew into a serious threat. Soon, a new voice popped up, a grassroots campaign called “Californians Against Utility Company Abuse” (CAUCA). The campaign staged protests against the state’s proposed utility investments in alternative-vehicle support systems. They also mentioned that “the environmental benefits of electric cars were dubious.”<a href="#footnote2-39-3667">39</a> But as it turns out, CAUCA was created by a PR firm who was hired and funded by the oil industry. Eventually, the mandate was repealed, EVs disappeared, and the tumor was squashed.</p>
<p>Now, there’s a new tumor for the oil industry—Elon Musk. Tesla is showing the public directly that EVs are the future and funding the development of technology that’s making EVs better than anyone thought possible. A government mandate is crushable—obsessed Model S owners are not.</p>
<p>But again, oil doesn’t need to avoid an EV future to have a reason to fight—it just needs to <em>delay </em>the EV future for <em>as long as it possibly can. </em>Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” Big oil’s current mission is “to <em>delay </em>the advent of sustainable transport by making people think EVs aren’t actually better for the environment than gas cars.”</p>
<p>EVs are most definitely better for the environment—so the oil industry reaches for a key tool.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/BS-2.png"></a></p>
<p>There are now a bunch of myths floating around. I didn’t treat them like automatic myths—each time I heard an argument for why EVs are dirty, I dug in and read about it, but each time, there was little basis in fact. Some examples of myths I’ve seen floating around about EVs or Tesla in particular:</p>
<p><strong>Myth: </strong>EV battery disposal is <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/09/electric-car-subsidies-transferring-wealth-from-poor-to-rich/">hazardous</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Actually: </strong>A) Lithium-ion cells used in cars aren’t especially hazardous and are classified as landfill safe, B) They’re almost all recycled anyway, and C) They’ll continue to be recycled, because a used car battery still has a lot of value, either as a stationary battery or in the raw materials themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Myth: </strong>Manufacturing a Tesla is much dirtier than manufacturing a Prius or many other gas cars.</p>
<p><strong>Actually: </strong>Expensive cars are dirtier to manufacture than cheap ones. Comparing the manufacturing of a Tesla to a Prius is like saying “Prius’s are dirty because it’s dirtier to manufacture a Prius than a golf cart.” If you compare apples to apples, it’s no dirtier to make a Tesla than a similarly-priced luxury car.</p>
<p><strong>Myth: </strong>EVs are a huge burden on the electric grid.</p>
<p><strong>Actually: </strong>The grid is sized for the worst second of the worst day of the worst year—so there’s usually a lot of excess capacity. You could replace 70% of US gas car miles with EV miles with no changes to the grid. That percentage will also grow even higher as more homes get their power from solar panels.</p>
<p><strong>Myth: </strong>The Tesla uses a lot of graphite in their battery, which <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-14/teslas-in-california-help-bring-dirty-rain-to-china">contributes</a> to China’s pollution problem.</p>
<p><strong>Actually: </strong>The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.</p>
<p>But there’s one myth which has been more effective and more pervasive than any of these—<strong>the long tailpipe theory.</strong></p>
<p>The long tailpipe theory is everywhere. Anyone who doesn’t like EVs points it out immediately. So what’s the theory? I’ll let Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld do the honors:</p>
<p>“The entire reason for doing these stupid little cars is a lie because electricity comes from coal. In some cases, some studies show that these can produce more pollution than internal combustion engines.”<a href="#footnote2-40-3667">40</a>
</p><p>Upon first examination, this makes sense. Let’s bring back our US emissions chart to see what Greg means:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/US-Emissions-2013-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Earlier in the post, we identified the two biggest causes of CO<sub>2</sub> emissions: cars running on gas and coal making electricity. The long tailpipe theory’s logic is that all an EV does is shift energy production from the first bad category to the second bad category. Since coal is the most prominent source of electricity in the world, and coal emits about 1.5 times more carbon than oil per joule of energy produced, EVs are actually worse emissions culprits than gas cars.</p>
<p>When you read about EVs or talk to people about them, you’ll hear this theory come up <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/17/unplug-the-volt/">again</a> and <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-10/opinion/ct-oped-0810-goldberg-20100810_1_electric-cars-chevy-volt-ev1">again</a> and <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/102273164">again</a> and <a href="http://www.naturalnews.com/049504_electric_cars_ethanol_greenwashing.html#">again</a>.</p>
<p>The thing you’ll notice, though, is that every time you hear someone all mad about the long tailpipe emissions of EVs, they’re using wording like, “may be” and “often” and, in the case of Greg, “in some cases, some studies show.” That’s because you have to use words like that when you’re saying things that you wish were true but actually aren’t.</p>
<p>Taking the US as an example, here’s why they’re wrong:</p>
<p><strong>1) US electricity production is mixed, not just coal. </strong>Coal only makes up 39% of US electricity production. And that number’s going down:<a href="#footnote2-41-3667">41</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-4.56.42-PM.png"></a></p>
<p>Natural gas, which emits less than half the CO<sub>2</sub> of coal, now makes up over a quarter of US electricity production. Nuclear and renewables emit almost no CO<sub>2</sub> and now produce a third of US electricity.</p>
<p><strong>2) Energy production is more efficient in a power plant than it is in a car engine. </strong>To use an example with an identical source fuel, burning natural gas in a power plant is about <a href="http://www.npc.org/study_topic_papers/4-dtg-electricefficiency.pdf">60% efficient</a>, meaning 40% of the energy of the fuel is lost in the energy production process. In a car, burning gas is less than 25% efficient, with the vast majority of the energy lost to heat. The larger more complex system at a power plant will always be far better at capturing waste heat than a tiny car engine. The increased efficiency means that even a car running <em>purely </em>on coal-generated electricity will emit carbon at the same rate as a gas car that gets 30 miles per gallon—which would be a significantly cleaner-than-average gas car.</p>
<p>Because the breakdown of energy source is different in different states, an EV will be greener in some places than others. The US Department of Energy has a <a href="http://www.afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.php">great tool</a> to assess exactly how an EV stacks up against a gas car in any zip code in the country.</p>
<p>In the parts of the country that use very little coal, like upstate New York, an EV’s well-to-wheel emissions are <em>far </em>less than that of a gas car (on the chart, HEV = a traditional hybrid car, PHEV = a plug-in hybrid car):</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-6.05.59-PM.png"></a></p>
<p>In the heaviest coal states, like Colorado, EVs cause a lot more CO<sub>2</sub> emissions—but still less than a gas car:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-6.04.39-PM.png"></a></p>
<p>The national average is somewhere in between, putting an EV at 61% of a gas car’s emissions overall:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-6.06.20-PM.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/electric-car-global-warming-emissions-report.pdf">The Union of Concerned Scientists</a><a href="#footnote-24-3667">24</a> came up with a way to directly compare car emissions, regardless of the type of car it is—a metric called “miles per gallon equivalent,” or MPG<sub>ghg</sub> (ghg stands for greenhouse gases).</p>
<p>MPG<sub>ghg</sub> is how many miles per gallon a gas car would need to achieve in order to match the carbon emissions of an EV (in the EV’s case, the emissions come from the plant that makes the electricity). In other words, if an EV gets 40 MPG<sub>ghg</sub>, it means it emits the exact same amount of carbon as a gas car that gets 40 MPG.</p>
<p>The average new gas car gets 23 MPG. Anything above 30 MPG is really good for a gas car, and anything below 15 or 17 is bad. For reference, remember that an EV running on <em>just </em>coal-produced electricity would have an MPG<sub>ghg </sub>of 30 (so even in a hypothetical entirely coal-powered state, an EV would be the same as a highly efficient gas car), and an EV running on just natural gas-powered electricity would have an MPG<sub>ghg</sub> of 54 and just top the Toyota Prius, which runs at 50 MPG.</p>
<p>Here’s a useful map that shows the kind of MPG<sub>ghg</sub> EVs get in different parts of the US:<a href="#footnote2-42-3667">42</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/MPG-Map.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So even for the 17% of the population living in the worst coal states, an EV beats almost all gas cars. This sums it up:<a href="#footnote2-43-3667">43</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-4.52.33-PM.png"></a></p>
<p>And the thing is, each year, that already-nicely-positioned blue bar will make a little jump to the right. Because the grid is getting cleaner every year, it means an EV gets cleaner as time goes by. Gas cars are locked where they are, and they’ll be stuck watching as the future pulls away from them.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>I didn’t feel strongly about this topic before I spent a lot of recent time learning about it—and now that I have, I kind of think the only way someone could feel positive about a gas car future is if they’re misinformed, personally financially interested in gas cars, hopelessly old-fashioned, drunk with politics, or kind of just being a dick? Right? They would have to be one of those five things to be super pro-gas car—right?</p>
<p>The battle going on isn’t about gas cars vs. electric cars. That one’s already decided. This is a war about time. Oil companies will try to slow things down, and they may succeed—but they’re not winning this one. I just don’t see how they could. A company that makes lantern fuel can stay strong for a while by shielding the public from understanding what a light bulb is, but eventually, people will figure it out and lanterns will be out of business, bringing the lantern fuel company down with it. Greasy hoods are old, noisy acceleration is old, overheating engines are old, oil changes are old, and it won’t be long before everyone realizes that. A fun field trip in 2050 will be taking your grandkid to see an old 20th-century gas station and explaining how it worked.<a href="#footnote-25-3667">25</a> Driving a gas car is like littering on a camping trail, smoking on an airplane, and throwing a big stack of paper in the trash, and it’s just a matter of time until public disgust catches up to it.</p>
<p><strong>Zooming Back Out</strong></p>
<p>Learning to harness the dragon of fire launched our modern world, and still today, we live in the age of burning. But we need to move on—we need to stop plowing through the trust fund and get a job. The dog needs to let the cave go. We need to learn to make energy the adult way—sustainably.</p>
<p>The sustainable energy world of the future—the yellow zone of our <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FF-Timeline.png">timeline</a> from earlier in the post—is simple. It looks like this:</p>
<p><strong>1) Almost everything we use will run on electricity.</strong></p>
<p><strong>2) Almost all of our electricity will be produced from sustainable sources.</strong></p>
<p>That’s a world running on sunlight and electricity, and burning has no part in that world.</p>
<p>This transition will happen in steps, over time. At the beginning of the post, we identified the two problems we needed to address most urgently: 1) Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty. 2) Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty.</p>
<p>We spent the rest of the post zoomed in on Problem 2 to examine how things got that way, stayed that way, and why we may be witnessing the moment it finally changes.</p>
<p>We won’t get into Problem 1 today—but both Musk, through the US-leading solar panel installation company he co-founded, <a href="http://www.solarcity.com/">SolarCity</a>, and Tesla, with their new product, the <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall">Powerwall</a> stationary battery,<a href="#footnote-26-3667">26</a> are leading the way in this half of the energy equation too. For those interested, I put up a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/the-deal-with-solar.html">mini post</a> on solar power and SolarCity.</p>
<p>People don’t quite realize it yet, but as of this moment, a family or business has the option to individually move themselves into the sustainable future. Using products made by SolarCity and Tesla alone, you can today live in a home and drive a car that are both powered by a solar panel-connected battery and live entirely on sunlight. Musk and his companies have made a little yellow brick road right out of the Fossil Fuel Era for anyone who wants to leave. And if modern technology can allow individual people, businesses, or even whole cities to live without fossil fuels, it hints that the only era any of us has ever known might be soon coming to an end.</p>
<p><strong>How to Change the World</strong></p>
<p>A study of Tesla isn’t about a car or a car company—it’s about how change happens. And about why it often doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>Our intuition tells us that technology, social norms, movements and ideas just move forward through time, as if forward progress is a river and those things are on a raft gliding through. We so associate the passage of time with progress that we use the term “the future” to refer to a better, more advanced version of our present world.</p>
<p>In reality, if a more advanced future does happen, it’s because that future was <em>willed</em> into our lives by a few brave people. The present isn’t welcoming of an advanced future because the present is run by a thick canopy made up of the ideas, norms, and technologies of the <em>past. </em>There’ll be incremental tweaks and slight iterations on proven-to-work concepts, which may <em>seem </em>to us like moving into the future, but it’s really just a polishing up of the past.</p>
<p>When the real change arrives, you know you’re seeing it. It’s a distinct and exhilarating feeling when you witness a disrupting innovator ram its way through the canopy. I had that feeling when I watched Steve Jobs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4OEsI0Sc_s">introduce</a> the iPhone in 2007. Before that moment, I had assumed that the ubiquitous Blackberrys and Nokias and Razors of the world were cutting-edge technology—but that keynote was an epiphany about how buried in the past those phones actually were. You don’t realize your Blackberry sucks until the iPhone exists. The feeling I had watching that keynote is the same feeling I had when I was six and I saw someone type on a computer word processor for the first time, and the last word on the line would magically jump to the line below when it hit the edge. Typewriters, which had seemed normal that morning, were suddenly ancient. The same thing happened when I saw the first iPod and became instantly disgusted with my horribly clunky and inefficient big booklet of CDs.</p>
<p>I had this feeling again, last month, when I test drove a Tesla Model S. I had driven to the Tesla factory that morning in what had felt like a brand new rental car, and I left the factory in the same car, now feeling like a 1982 model. I get now why Matthew Inman <a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla_model_s">calls</a> his Model S a “magical space car”—because that’s how it felt. That’s how a new, revolutionary technology always feels. Our modern world became as advanced as it is not by floating up an inevitable advancement river, but because of a collection of moments over time when a person or company has done something that makes everyone’s jaw drop.</p>
<p>But those world-changing moments don’t just smoothly glide into the world: these leaps into the future usually have to <em>jam </em>themselves through the canopy and then battle to keep themselves there. The past, which likes to loiter casually in our present world, hates when a piece of the future bursts onto the scene, because that exposes the past for being what it really is—the past. So a new and disruptive technology is often met with hostility as it emerges, as the existing canopy does whatever it can to squash the potential disruptor out of existence before it can gain momentum and start to spread. The old guard knows that once a disruptor gets a foothold and starts quickly spreading its ideas, the entire game changes—and once that balance tips, now instead of trying to squash the disruptor, everyone has to scramble to try to <em>emulate</em> it.</p>
<p>What Tesla is doing right now is an up-close example of how that kind of change happens.</p>
<p>The idea to change the car industry started as brainwaves zipping around Elon Musk’s head, as Christie Nicholson learned the hard way, but Musk couldn’t do much about it on his own. To make the idea real, he had to <em>scale </em>those brainwaves up, and he did that by building Tesla. That brought a new player into the car industry, run by a collective super-brain made up of 11,000 Tesla employees who also happened to think a lot about electric cars.</p>
<p>Change doesn’t happen on a familiar landscape—change has to construct the landscape itself. This is part of the reason the challenges Tesla has taken on are so enormous. Henry Ford didn’t just build a car—he built a landscape, defining what a car was. Since then, car companies have worked within Ford’s landscape. Bringing back what Musk said about Ford—<em>He was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed</em>—it’s clear that this is exactly what Musk and Tesla are doing right now. If there aren’t enough charging stations for long-trips, build an energy network of Superchargers. If scalability is held back by the high price of lithium-ion batteries, build a factory that doubles the world supply of them to bring the price down. Just get it done.</p>
<p>But with a goal as ambitious as “accelerating the advent of sustainable transport” and a victory condition as far-reaching as “half of all new cars being electric,”<a href="#footnote-27-3667">27</a> building one great car company isn’t enough. To bring Musk’s original idea to the next level, Tesla would need to scale <em>itself</em>. To do that, Tesla is building a line of cars so stellar that it’s going to change the public’s expectations of what a car should be, and the whole industry will have to adjust to that new expectation.</p>
<p>And by solving so many EV problems for its own cars, it’s forging the path to an EV-dominated world for all the other companies too. A company trying to rise to the top of their industry would hold their innovation secrets close—but because Tesla’s goal is to<em> transform</em> the industry, in 2014, Tesla made <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you">all of their patents</a> available to whomever wanted them.</p>
<p>Other companies are critical to the mission, because Tesla’s goal is to ramp production up to 500,000 cars, which is only around half a percent of the total cars made each year. He explained, “The impact that Tesla will have is fairly small in and of itself. It will change people’s perception perhaps, but it will not in and of itself change the world. But if large numbers of people are choosing to buy the Model 3, and the car companies see that there’s no excuse left anymore because the car’s long range and the car’s handling and acceleration is better in every way than a gasoline car, and it’s affordable—and people are pretty sure this is what they want to buy—then that’s what will prompt car companies to invest real money into electric vehicle programs of their own, and indirectly, by spurring competition, Tesla can be the catalyst for a multi-order of magnitude shift of the entire industry towards electric.”</p>
<p>That’s how to spread the brainwaves of a single person throughout a huge industry and the global public—and by the time it’s done, everyone will think a lot about electric cars.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m wrong about something, or maybe something unexpected happens—but from what I’ve seen, read, and talked about, it really seems like Tesla is going to fulfill its mission and change the world. It’s going to <em>accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. </em>If the Model 3 ends up being as great as they say it’s gonna be, there’s no doubt in my mind that electric cars will be the norm far earlier than they would have been. Which will, in turn, mean that 50 years from now, the atmosphere’s CO<sub>2</sub> level will probably be lower than it would have otherwise been, cities will be less smoggy than they would have otherwise been, global temperatures will be lower than they would have otherwise been, the sad polar bear will get to eat seals again, along with about 12 other positive effects that will legitimately affect our lives. Pretty down-the-middle definition of changing the world.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, this is what Musk spends <em>two</em> days of his week on. With the rest of his time, he’s trying to make humanity a multi-planetary species—a goal that makes his Tesla mission seem like starting a grapefruit stand. We’ll get into all that in the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">next post</a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="http://eepurl.com/Ffj9D">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!</p>
<p>If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>Next up in this series:<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 3: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars</a></strong></p>
<p>Other posts in the series:</p>
<p><strong>Part 1: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man</a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html"><br />
</a>Part 4: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Extra Post #1: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/the-deal-with-solar.html">The Deal With Solar City</a></strong><br />
<strong> Extra Post #2: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html">The Deal With the Hyperloop<br />
</a></strong><strong>Extra Post #3: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html">SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket — The Full Story</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company:</strong> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/neuralink"><strong>Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future</strong></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-musk"></a></p>
<p><strong>Some other Musk-y Wait But Why posts:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">Putting Time in Perspective</a></p>
<p><strong>And the least Musk-y post ever:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</a></p>
<p><strong><br />
Sources:</strong></p>
<p>IPCC: <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/spm/sres-en.pdf">Special Report: Emissions Scenarios</a><br />
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – <a href="https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/">Flowcharts Archive</a><br />
McKinsey &amp; Company: <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=7&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CEcQFjAG&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mckinsey.com%2F~%2Fmedia%2FMcKinsey%2Fdotcom%2Fclient_service%2FSustainability%2FPDFs%2Froads_toward_low_carbon_future_new.ashx&amp;ei=YbRbVbKpHpDZgwTv1oHgCg&amp;usg=AFQjCNG3SEeN0mjEnhTVGWEcgP3FFGFzDg&amp;sig2=Ycq_mTE6XiZBtnFhiqOB0Q">Road toward a low-carbon future: Reducing CO<sub>2</sub> emissions from passenger vehicles in the global transportation system</a><br />
EIA: <a href="http://www.eia.doe.gov/beta/international/">International energy data and analysis</a><br />
NPC Global Oil &amp; Gas Study: <a href="http://www.npc.org/study_topic_papers/4-dtg-electricefficiency.pdf">Topic Paper #4: Electric Generation Efficiency</a><br />
BP: <a href="http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html">Statistical Review of World Energy 2014</a><br />
Documentary: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/who-killed-the-electric-car/id277048813">Who Killed the Electric Car?</a><br />
Documentary: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/revenge-of-the-electric-car/id488547126">Revenge of the Electric Car</a><br />
Shades of Green: <a href="http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Shades-of-Green-Full-Report.pdf">Electric Cars’ Carbon Emissions Around the Globe</a><br />
Scrips: <a href="http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/other_stations/global_stations_co2_concentration_trends.html">Graphics Gallery</a><br />
IEA: <a href="http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/resources2013SUM.pdf">Availability of Fossil Fuels</a><br />
Judy and Curtis Anderson: <a href="http://amzn.to/1eScF3N">Electric and Hybrid Cars: A History</a><br />
Interview: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG0ZjUfOBUs">Baidu CEO Robin Li interviews Bill Gates and Elon Musk </a><br />
BBC: <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7120770.stm">50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy</a><br />
Oxford Martin School: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1HZIQliuoA">Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport</a><br />
Andrew Pollack: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/24/us/general-motors-sues-california-over-quota-for-electric-car-sales.html">“General Motors Sues California Over Quota for Electric Car Sales.</a>” The New York Times, 2001<br />
Consumer Reports: <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2012/11/tesla-model-s-the-electric-car-that-shatters-every-myth/index.htm">Tesla Model S – The electric car that shatters every myth</a><br />
Alex Taylor, Fortune Magazine: <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/17/news/companies/mostadmired_fortune_toyota/">Toyota: the Birth of the Prius</a><br />
Rolling Stone: <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz21AfoYqt6">Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math</a><br />
NYTimes: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/business/elon-musk-says-self-driving-tesla-cars-will-be-in-the-us-by-summer.html?emc=edit_th_20150320&amp;nl=todaysheadlines&amp;nlid=58786282&amp;_r=0">Elon Musk Says Self-Driving Tesla Cars Will Be in the U.S. by Summer</a><br />
Tesla Blog: <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mission-tesla">The Mission of Tesla</a><br />
Tesla Blog: <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/tesla-approach-distributing-and-servicing-cars">The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Car</a><br />
Green Car Reports: <a href="http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098020_despite-quick-charging-toyota-exec-says-electric-cars-wont-work-for-long-ranges">Despite Quick Charging, Toyota Exec Says Electric Cars Won’t Work For Long Ranges</a><br />
Richard Muller, NYTimes: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?ref=opinion&amp;_r=0">The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic</a><br />
Yahoo Finance: <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-motors-launches-revolutionary-supercharger-032000226.html">Tesla Motors Launches Revolutionary Supercharger Enabling Convenient Long Distance Driving</a><br />
EIA: <a href="http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=41&amp;t=6">What are the products and uses of petroleum?</a><br />
EIA: <a href="http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=41&amp;t=6">How much carbon dioxide is produced when different fuels are burned?</a><br />
Bloomberg: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-14/teslas-in-california-help-bring-dirty-rain-to-china">Teslas in California Help Bring Dirty Rain to China</a><br />
TED Talks: <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity#t-1160586">Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity</a><br />
Khan Academy: <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/khan-academy-living-room-chats/v/elon-musk">Interview With Elon Musk</a><br />
SXSW: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeQMWdOMa-A">Interview with Elon Musk</a></p>
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 * 

 How Tesla Will Change The World

 June 2, 2015 By Tim Urban


 This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1.

 ____________

 PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

 ___________

 A Wait But Why post can be a few different things. One type of WBW post is the “let’s just take this whole topic and really actually get to the bottom of it so we can all completely get it from here forward.” The ideal topic for that kind of post is one that’s really important to our lives, and that tends to come up a lot, but that’s also hugely complex and confusing, often controversial with differing information coming out of different mouths, and that ends up leaving a lot of people feeling like they don’t totally get it as well as they “should.”

 The way I approach a post like that is I’ll start with the surface of the topic and ask myself what I don’t fully get—I look for those foggy spots in the story where when someone mentions it or it comes up in an article I’m reading, my mind kind of glazes over with a combination of “ugh it’s that icky term again nah go away” and “ew the adults are saying that adult thing again and I’m seven so I don’t actually understand what they’re talking about.” Then I’ll get reading about those foggy spots—but as I clear away fog from the surface, I often find more fog underneath. So then I research that new fog, and again, often come across other fog even further down. My perfectionism kicks in and I end up refusing to stop going down the rabbit hole until I hit the floor.

 For example, I kind of got the Iraq situation, but there was a lot of fog there too—so when I wrote a post about it, one fog-clearing rabbit hole took me all the way back to Muhammad in 570AD. That was the floor. Digging into another part of the story brought me to the end of World War I. Another brought me to the founding of ISIS.

 Hitting the floor is a great feeling and makes me realize that the adults weren’t actually saying anything that complicated or icky after all. And when I come across that topic again, it’s fun now, because I get it and I can nod with a serious face on and be like, “Yes, interest rates are problematic” like a real person.

 I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about. And what I usually find is that so many of the topics I’ve pegged as “boring” in my head are actually just foggy to me—like watching episode 17 of a great show, which would be boring if you didn’t have the tree trunk of the back story and characters in place.

 So when it was time to start what I had labeled in my head as “the Tesla post,” I knew this was going to be one of those posts. To understand if and why Tesla Motors matters, you have to understand both the story of cars and the story of energy—two worlds I somehow am simultaneously confused by and tremendously sick of. Just hearing someone say “climate change” or “energy crisis” or “tailpipe emissions” makes me kind of gag at this point—just too much politics, too many annoying people, too much misinformation on all sides, and it’s just hard to know how much I actually care and if there can be a solution to all of it anyway. So I did what I do when my tortoise shits when I’m out of the apartment and then spends hours walking through it and tracking it across everything, including the walls somehow—I rolled up my sleeves, took a deep breath, whispered, “Be a man, Tim,” and started scraping through layers of shit. If I have to live in a world with people arguing constantly about energy and oil and greenhouse gases and incentive programs, I might as well build myself a proper tree trunk.

 After weeks of reading and asking questions and writing, I’ve emerged from the tortoise sewage with something that toes the line between a long blog post and a short book. I could have broken this into multiple posts, but it’s all one story and I wanted to keep it all together. It’ll be a bit of a time investment, but I think you’ll come out of it with a sturdier tree trunk about all of this than you have now. And as it turns out, when it comes to this topic, we may be witnessing a very awesome moment in history without quite realizing it yet.

 Two disclaimers before we start:

 1) This is a highly politicized issue, but this post has no political agenda. I’m not political because nothing could ever possibly be more annoying than American politics. I think both parties have good points, both also have a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things, and I want nothing to do with it. So I approached this post—like I try to with every post—from a standpoint of rationality and what I think makes sense.

 2) Spoiler: The post is very pro-Tesla. Which might seem suspicious since A) Elon Musk asked me to write about this and B) I just wrote a post calling him the raddest possible man. But two things to keep in mind:

 First, this isn’t commissioned by Musk, and I’m being paid $0.00 for doing it. He suggested I take the issue on because I think he thinks there’s a lack of full tree trunks in people’s heads about it—but he never suggested that I say good things about Tesla, electric cars, or anything else.

 Second, the currency Wait But Why lives on is integrity. Without it, WBW loses its ability to make an impact. And integrity came first here, even at the expense of Musk potentially hating me at the end of it, if that’s what was necessary. If I didn’t think this would have made a great WBW topic, I wouldn’t have taken it on, and I’m pro-Tesla in the post because after a ton of learning and thinking—including as many counterarguments to Tesla and its worldview as I could find—that’s how I feel.

 And with that, let’s dive in.

 Contents

 Part 1: The Story of Energy
 Part 2: The Story of Cars
 Part 3: The Story of Tesla

 ___________

 Part 1: The Story of Energy

 Energy is important. Without energy, we’d all be like this:

 But what really is energy? The dictionary says it’s “the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform work.” And it says “work” is “the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.” Putting that together, we get energy being “the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.”

 That was pretty unfun, so for our purposes, let’s call energy “the thing that lets something do stuff.”

 But the tricky thing about energy is the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed from one form to another. And since every living thing needs energy in order to do stuff—and you can’t make your own energy—we’re all awkwardly left with no choice but to steal the energy we need from someone else.11← click these

 Almost all of the energy used by the Earth’s living things got to us in the first place from the sun.2 The sun’s energy is what makes the wind blow and the rain fall and it’s what powers the Earth’s living things—the biosphere.

 The joule is a common unit of energy—defined as the amount of energy it takes to apply a force of one newton through a distance of one meter3. While the sun’s joules can provide any animal with heat and light, the joules that power all of us from the inside enter the biosphere in the first place when the sun gives them to plants.

 That’s how food is invented—plants know how to take the sun’s joules and turn them into food.

 At that point, all hell breaks loose as everyone starts murdering everyone else so they can steal their joules.

 We use “the food chain” as a cute euphemism for this murder/theft cycle, and we use the word “eating” to refer to “stealing someone else’s joules and also murdering them too.” A “predator” is a dick who always seems to want your joules over everyone else’s, and “prey” is just some sniveling nerd you particularly like to bully and steal lunch money from. Plants are the only innocent ones who actually follow the Golden Rule, but that’s just because they have the privilege of having the sun as their sugar daddy—and humans are the biosphere’s upsetting mafia boss who just takes what he wants from anyone he wants, whenever he wants. It’s not a great system, but it works.

 And that all went on normally for a while, but in the last few hundred thousand years, humans started to realize something: while it was enjoyable to put new joules into your body, actually using those joules sucked. It’s much less fun to use a bunch of joules running fast or lifting something heavy than it is to just sit on a log pleasantly and hold onto those joules instead. So humans got clever and started to figure out ways to get joules outside their bodies to do work for them—by doing that, humans could have their joules and eat them too. Sometimes the methods would be dickish:

 But joules aren’t only in living things. There are joules floating and swirling and zooming all around us, and by inventing the concept of technology, humans figured out ways to get use out of them. They made windmills that could steal some of the wind’s joules as it went by and convert them into mechanical energy to grind food. They built sailboats that would convert wind joules into kinetic boat energy they could control. Water absorbs the sun’s radiation joules and turns them into gravitational potential energy joules when it evaporates and then kinetic energy joules when it rains and slides down land, and humans saw the opportunity to snatch some of those up by creating water wheels or dams.

 But the most exciting joule-stealing technology humans came up with was figuring out how to burn something. With wind or water, you can only capture moving joules as they go by—but when you burn something, you can take an object that has been soaking up joules for years and release them all at once. A joule explosion.

 They called this explosion fire, and because the joules that emerged were in the useful-to-humans formats of heat energy and light energy, burning things became a popular activity.

 Taming a Dragon

 We had learned to harness the joules of the wind and the water—to take those forces by the reins and make them ours—but when it came to the most joule-heavy force of all, fire, we couldn’t really figure out how to do anything with it other than hang out near it, cook some stuff, and generally benefit from its existence. Fire was a hectic dragon and no one had figured out how to grab its reins.

 And then came the breakthrough. Steam.

 Fire joules were hard to harness, but if you sent them into water, they’d get the water molecules to increasingly freak out and bounce around until finally those molecules would fully panic and start flying off the surface, evaporating upwards with the force of the raging fire below. You’d have successfully converted the thermal energy joules of the fire—which we didn’t know how to directly harness—into a powerful jet of steam we could control.

 With the muscle of steam in their toolkit, the inventors of the 18th century burst into innovation. They had some serious joules to work with now, which opened worlds of previously-unthinkable possibility. Breakthroughs led to more breakthroughs, and at the turn of the 19th century, the progress culminated in an invention that’s often called the most impactful turning point in human history: the steam engine.

 Picture your tea kettle when it gets all angry at you and starts whistling. Now imagine that instead of the steam spewing out through the nozzle, you connected the nozzle to a tube, which directs the bursting steam into an empty cylinder and then finally releases it. When the steam goes into and then out of the cylinder, it shoves a “piston” inside the cylinder on a powerful back-and-forth motion. That’s (a dramatic oversimplification of) how a steam engine works. Depending on the vehicle, the back-and-forth motion of the piston can do different things. In the example of a locomotive, the piston is attached to a rod whose back-and-forth motion turns the wheels:2

 Using the steam engine, humanity upgraded from sailboats to steamships and from animal-drawn carts to locomotives.4 Inside factories, people put steam to work too, swapping out their water wheels for much more effective steam-powered wheels.

 With the new ability to transport many more goods and materials, much farther away, much more quickly, and to far more efficient factories, the Industrial Revolution ignited in full force. People say the Industrial Revolution was powered by steam, but steam was just the middleman—after hundreds of thousands of years of existing as passive benefactors of combustion, we had tamed the dragon, and the Industrial Revolution was powered by fire.

 Striking Gold

 The one thing about having made fire our bitch is that we now wanted to burn a lot more things than we ever had before. For most of human history, when people wanted to burn something, they just went and found some wood. Easy. Except now it was the 19th century, and with our new appetite to burn, wood wouldn’t cut it anymore.

 We knew there were other things we could burn—in Britain, they would often supplement wood by burning a black rocky substance they found on their shores. They called it coal.

 The problem is that unlike wood, most of the coal in Britain wasn’t just sitting conveniently on land—it was underground. When the Industrial Revolution got going, the British started digging—they were gonna need a lot of coal. As the revolution spread through Europe and to North America, Europeans and Americans started digging too—they also were gonna need a lot of coal.

 As everyone dug, they started finding other things too. They found pockets of burnable air we call natural gas and underground lakes of thick, black burnable liquid we call crude oil. It turns out that this whole time, humans had been walking around with a vast untapped treasure of tightly packed, burnable joules right underneath them. It was like a dog digging in the woods to bury a bone and uncovering an underground cave full of pulled pork.

 And what does a dog do who finds a cave of pulled pork? Does he pause to think cautiously about how to proceed or consider consequences for his health? No—he eats the shit out of it. Mindlessly, at full speed.

 And throughout the 19th century, coal mines and oil rigs popped up everywhere. Burning this new treasure of joules made economies soar and the incentive to innovate soared along with them—and new, fantastic technologies were born.

 Like steam engine technology, the credit for the electricity revolution is owed to a collaboration of dozens of innovators spanning centuries, but it was in the 1880s that it all finally came together. In what is still probably the most significant technological shift of all time, electricity allowed the raucous power of burning to be converted into a highly tame and remarkably versatile form of energy called electrical energy. With steam as a key middleman, all those spastic combustion joules could now be sent into an organized grid of wires, transferred long distances, and delivered into residential and commercial buildings where it would wait patiently in an outlet ready to be discharged at the user’s convenience.5 At that point, the now electrical joules could be converted into almost any kind of energy—they could boil water, freeze ice, light up the room, or make a phone call. If steam had tamed the dragon, electricity had turned the dragon into a magical butler, forever at our service. And for the first time in human history, the power was on.

 Right around the time this was happening, another revolution was underway. Fire was now powering our ships, our trains, our factories, and even the new wizardry of electricity, but individual transportation was still powered by hay like it was 1775—and late 19th century humanity knew we could do better. Biological horses got super upset if you tried to power them by fire, so again, humanity got innovating, and a couple decades later, there were big, metal horses everywhere with engine cylinders full of fire.

 As coal, oil, and natural gas motivated unprecedented innovation, the resulting waves of new technologies created an unprecedented need to burn stuff—which motivated the diggers. Companies that focused on digging, sucking, and siphoning up more and more of our underground joule treasure, like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, became the world’s biggest corporate empires. It was a new world, powered by an endless cave of pulled pork, being gorged upon by the world’s happiest dog…

 ___________

 Flash forward to the present day.

 Burning our bounty of underground joule-packed fuel to power our world is now an innovation more than two centuries old—but in 2015, it’s still the main way humans get their power:3

 That’s the thing about dogs—if given something delicious, they tend to eat until the food runs out or they get sick, whichever comes first, and there aren’t too many other factors in play. The modern energy debate essentially boils down to whether it’s okay that the dog is still fully enjoying himself in the cave or whether it’s not because he might be making himself dangerously sick or risk running out of pulled pork—which would be a problem, because he has grown increasingly large since finding the cave, and he has no way outside the cave of feeding his now-immense appetite.

 As you might have noticed, there are a lot of people who have a lot of opinions for a lot of reasons saying a lot of things about this situation. And some are saying real things, but a large portion of them either don’t especially know what they’re talking about or they have some ulterior motive for saying what they’re saying. This makes an already complex, murky, multi-faceted topic even more confusing.

 So let’s lay out what we do know and try to clarify what the hell is really going on.

 To begin with—what exactly are fossil fuels and where do they come from?

 Fossil fuels are called fossil fuels because they’re the remains of ancient living things. “Ancient” in this case spans a wide range. The earliest organisms that contribute to today’s fossil fuels lived during the Precambrian Eon, before there were any plants and animals on land—the fossil organisms then would have been ocean algae. People often think fossil fuels are made of dinosaurs, but any dinosaurs in our gasoline are from the last couple hundred million years—the later stretch of the timespan—and only a small contributor. The largest portion of our fossil fuels comes from plants, animals, and algae that lived during the Carboniferous Period—a 50 million year period that ended about 300 million years ago and during which there were lots of huge, shallow swamps. The swamps were important because it made it more likely that a dead organism would be preserved. You don’t become a fossil fuel if you die in a normal place and decompose away. But by dying in a swamp and sinking to the bottom, Carboniferous organisms often ended up being quickly covered by sand and clay and were able to make it underground with their joules still intact.

 After hundreds of millions of years, all those organisms were squashed under intense heat and pressure and became converted into joule-dense solid, liquid, or gas—coal, oil, and natural gas. Quick blue box brush-up:

 Fossil Fuels Brush-Up

 Coal, a black sedimentary rock that’s found in underground layers called coal beds, is the cheapest and most plentiful of the three and is used almost entirely for making electricity. It’s also the worst culprit for CO2 emissions, releasing about 30% more CO2 than the burning of oil and about double that of natural gas when generating an equivalent amount of heat.4 The US is to coal as Saudi Arabia is to oil, possessing 22% of the world’s coal, the most of any nation. China, though, has become by far the world’s largest consumer of coal—over half of the coal burned in the world in recent years was burned in China.5

 Oil, also known as crude oil or petroleum, is a gooey black liquid normally found in deep underground reservoirs. When crude oil is extracted, it heads to the refinery, where it’s separated, using different boiling points, into a bunch of different things. Here’s how a typical barrel of US oil was broken down in 2014:6

 * 44.9% gas for cars
 * 29.8% heating oil and diesel fuels
 * 13.8% other products like wax, synthetic rubber, and plastics
 * 9.5% jet fuel (kerosene)
 * 2.0% asphalt

 The United States is by far the biggest consumer of oil in the world, consuming over 20% of the world’s oil and about double the next biggest consumer. The US is also one of the three biggest oil producers in the world, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia, who all produce roughly the same amount.6

 Natural gas, which is formed when underground oil gets to a super-high temperature and vaporizes, is found in underground pockets, usually in the vicinity of oil reserves. The “cleanest” of the three fossil fuels, it’s the gas that fires up your stove or heats your apartment (if those aren’t electricity-powered or heated by oil), and it’s one of the major sources of electricity (it makes up about 20% of electricity in the US). Natural gas is on the rise and now makes up almost a quarter of the world’s energy. One of the reasons it’s on the rise is that scientists have found a new way of extracting natural gas from the Earth called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which uses a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to create cracks in natural gas-rich shale and force out the gas. This method has been hugely effective, but it’s also controversial because of some serious environmental concerns—this video explains it well.

 As for the reasons people argue that fossil fuels are problematic, we’re going to focus on the two most common—

 ISSUE 1: Climate Change is a Thing

 Let’s ignore all the politicians and professors and CEOs and filmmakers and look at three facts:

 Fact 1) Burning Fossil Fuels Makes Atmospheric CO2 Levels Rise

 We’ll get to the data in a second, but first—why does burning fossil fuels emit CO2?

 The answer is simple: combustion is reverse photosynthesis.

 When a plant grows, it makes its own food through photosynthesis. At its most oversimplified, during photosynthesis, the plant takes CO2 from the air7 and absorbs light energy from the sun to split the CO2 into carbon (C) and oxygen (O2). The plant keeps the carbon and emits the oxygen as a waste product. The sun’s light energy stays in the plant as chemical energy the plant can use.

 So wood is essentially a block of carbon and stored chemical energy.

 When you burn a log, all you’re doing is reversing the photosynthesis. Normally, oxygen in the air just bounces off carbon molecules in wood—that’s why trees aren’t constantly on fire. But when an oxygen molecule gets moving fast enough and smashes into a log’s carbon molecule, they snap together and the oxygen and carbon are reunited again as CO2. This snapping releases chemical energy, which knocks into other nearby oxygen molecules, causing them to get going fast—and if they get going fast enough, they’ll snap together with another of the log’s carbon molecules, which releases more chemical energy. This causes a chain reaction, and the log is now on fire. So a log burning is the process of the carbon in the log combining with oxygen in the air and floating off as CO2.

 Of course, that’s all irrelevant to the person burning the log—what they care about is the energy released during all of this CO2 formation. The release of all of the log’s stored chemical energy creates a glorious blaze of heat and light. The tree spent years quietly absorbing carbon molecules and sunshine joules, and all at once, during combustion, that carbon and sunshine explode back out into the world.8

 To put it another way, photosynthesis just kidnaps carbon and sun energy out of the atmosphere, and after years of holding them hostage, combustion sets them both free—the carbon as a billowing eruption of newly reunited CO2, and the sun energy as fire—meaning that fire is essentially just tightly packed sunshine.

 But burning a log and releasing all that CO2 does not tamper with the atmosphere’s carbon levels. Why? Because the carbon that’s being released was recently in the atmosphere, and if you hadn’t set the log on fire, it would have likely decomposed, which would release the carbon back into the world anyway. The log’s carbon was only being held temporarily hostage, and releasing it through combustion has little effect.

 Carbon flows from the atmosphere into plants and animals, into the ground and water, and then back out of all those things into the atmosphere—that’s called the carbon cycle. At any given point in time, the Earth’s active carbon cycle contains a specific amount of carbon. Burning a log doesn’t change that level because the carbon cycle “expects” that carbon to be hanging around the ground, water, or air.

 But sometimes, a small portion of carbon in the cycle drops out of the cycle for the long term—it happens when a plant or animal dies but for some reason doesn’t decay normally. Instead, before it can decay and release its carbon back into the cycle, it’s buried underground. Over time, that lost carbon adds up. And today, the Earth’s fossil fuels make up a huge mass of lost carbon—carbon that long ago was taken hostage permanently, and carbon that the carbon cycle does not expect to be involved in its routine.

 When humans discovered all of this underground kidnapped carbon, you have to remember that for them, the carbon wasn’t the point. They were staring at an endless sea of 300 million-year-old, densely packed sunshine—trillions of ancient plants with their joules intact—and since there are no laws protecting the estates of Carboniferous plants, we could seize it all for ourselves. The grandest joule theft in history.

 And as we helped ourselves, we didn’t worry about the fact that extracting those joules also meant extracting carbon that had been buried as far back as the Precambrian period—there were locomotives to fuel and cars to power and buildings to heat, and the joules were irresistible.

 And those joules have gone a long way—you can thank them for the comforts and quality of your life today. But those carbon molecules have gone a long way too.

 Starting in 1958, scientist Charles Keeling started measuring atmospheric CO2 levels from an observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Those measurements are still going on today. Here’s what they show:7

 The zig-zaggy motion of the line is due to the level falling each year in the summer when plants are sucking up CO2 and rising up again during the winter when the leaves are dead. But the overarching trend is unmistakable. To put that into context, ice drilling technology9 allows scientists to collect accurate data on what CO2 levels have been throughout the last 400,000 years. Here’s what they’ve found:8

 So atmospheric CO2 levels have oscillated10 between about 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 400,000 years, never eclipsing 300, and suddenly in the last century the level has vaulted up to 400 (it’s currently at 403ppm).

 So instead of the atmosphere being .02% or .03% carbon, it’s now .04% carbon and maybe moving towards .05% and higher. But let’s not judge anything yet. All we know is Fact #1, which tells us that CO2 levels are rising quickly.

 Fact 2) Where Atmospheric CO2 Levels Go, Temperatures Follow

 The ice cores dug up by scientists don’t just reveal the CO2 levels going backwards in time—they reveal temperature too. Here’s what they show:9

 Not a hard correlation to see. The reason for this is simple—CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The way an actual greenhouse works is the glass lets in sun energy and traps a lot of it inside as heat. There are a handful of chemicals in our atmosphere that do the same thing—sun rays come in, bounce off the Earth, and they’re on their way out when the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere block some of them and spread them through the atmosphere, warming things up.

 Mars has an average temperature of -55ºC (-67ºF), which isn’t fun, but Venus is literally actual hell, with an average temperature of 462ºC (864ºF). No one is more of a dick than Venus. Why? CO2. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth so the sun’s energy easily escapes, while Venus’s atmosphere is much thicker, with 300 times the CO2 as Earth, so it traps in a ton of heat. Mercury is closer to the sun than Venus, but with no atmosphere, it’s cooler than Venus. During the day, Mercury gets almost as hot as Venus, but at night it gets freezing, while Venus is just as hot at night as it is during the day, because the heat lives permanently in its thick atmosphere.

 So it makes sense that an increase in CO2 here would increase temperature—but by how much? When compared to the Pre-Industrial average temperature, our current average temperature has risen by a little less than 1ºC. But as CO2 levels keep rising, most scientists expect temperatures to keep rising. The UN-supported Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from a bunch of different countries, came out with a report that laid out the temperature projections of a number of independent labs. This is what those labs think will happen if no action is taken to alter the current trends in CO2 emissions:10

 A small minority argue that these future projections are overblown—they point out that they ride on the largely accepted theory that water vapor in the atmosphere multiplies the effect of carbon emissions because of a “feedback” loop, whereby a small increase in temperature from extra CO2 increases water evaporation, and since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, that creates more warmth, which further increases more evaporation, and on and on. Without this feedback loop, the temperature increases resulting from CO2 emissions would be 2-3 times smaller. But even the greatest skeptics usually agree that CO2 emissions do lead to temperature increases.

 The IPCC also puts it at over 90% that the changes in both CO2 levels and temperature are caused by human activity (which is kind of like saying there’s over a 90% chance that a rain storm has been caused by cloud activity). Now the question becomes—how much does the temperature need to change to make everything shitty?

 Fact 3) The Temperature Doesn’t Need to Change Very Much to Make Everything Shitty

 18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice. That’s what 5ºC can do.11

 100 million years ago, temperatures were 6-10ºC higher than they are now—and every region of the Earth was tropical, there was no permanent ice anywhere, ocean levels were 200 meters higher, and this kind of shit was happening:12

 So we’re currently in this not-that-big window we probably should try to stay in:

 This is also even more fragile than is intuitive. First, you don’t need the average temperature to go up by a catastrophic amount to have a catastrophe—because the average temp could go up by only 3ºC but the max temp rises by a lot more. Just one day at an outlier high like 58ºC (136ºF) would wipe out most of the Earth’s crops and animals. Second, because the total range of temperature a planet can be goes all the way down to absolute zero: -273ºC (-459ºF). So a difference of 5ºC, enough to bury the northern part of the world under an ocean of ice, is really only about a 1.5% fluctuation in temperature—not something like 10%, which is what it seems like. Looking at the window on a spectrum that shows the full range emphasizes that the world we’re used to is what it is only because of a very specific and delicate balance of conditions.

 As mentioned above, right now, the average temp is edging upwards to 1ºC above the Pre-Industrial norm (the IPCC puts us at +.86ºC currently). Scientists debate how high that number can go before really dramatic changes start to happen. For the last 20 years, over 100 countries have agreed to try to limit global warming to a 2ºC increase, but there are all of these different opinions going around about that. Regarding the effects of a 2ºC increase, in my research, I came across some credible sources saying 2º is an unnecessarily low ceiling and that we can afford to safely go higher and others saying that 2º is too high a target and that we’re underestimating how catastrophic a change of 2º would be. Regarding our ability to stay under 2º, I’ve also heard varying opinions—some think we can stay under 2º with proper restrictions; others think there’s no possible way we can stay under 2º—that there’s enough upward momentum already that even if we stopped creating carbon emissions in the next few years, the Earth would keep warming past 2º.

 So what are we supposed to make of this?

 Our goal today is not to dig deep into these conflicting opinions and try to figure out the truth, because no one knows for sure anyway. We’re not going to talk about specific things like sea levels, pollution, storms, or that polar bear in the video who’s extra sad because his ice is melting. We’re just going to take our three facts and put them all together and see what happens:

 This simplifies down to:

 Interesting. But let’s not ostracize the skeptics. We can massage it into a statement that leaves plenty of room for doubt:

 If we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon.

 With this in mind, let’s now move on to the second major concern people cite regarding fossil fuels:

 ISSUE 2: Fossil Fuels Are Endful

 A couple times so far, I’ve referred to our fossil fuels supply, that succulent underground sea of dense energy, as “endless”—because that’s how it seemed in the 19th century and how it often seems today when you realize how much of it is still underground waiting to be tapped. But actually, the Earth’s fossil fuel supply is not endless—it’s endful.

 When we run out is a complicated and hazy question. You have reports like this and this making charts that suggest that if we continue as is, we’re not very far from the end:13

 Then you have sites like this citing the CIA World Factbook and reminding us that when oil and natural gas run out, the coal usage will ramp up, so we actually have even less time:14

 Other sites point out that those cited totals are just referring to proven reserves, and that each year, we’re discovering new sources of fossil fuels, like oil locked in tar sands or abundant reserves of methane hydrate under the ocean floor, and developing new technologies to reach them, like fracking or horizontal drilling. Those sources suggest we’re unlikely to run out of fossil fuels for many centuries. A common counter to those sources is that even without running out, we could face a serious problem if the extraction of the fuels becomes more and more difficult and expensive over time.

 The problem with running out, whenever it happens, is that if the world is anywhere near as reliant on fossil fuels at that point as we are now, it’ll cause an epic economic collapse. As fossil fuels grow more and more scarce, prices will skyrocket. That will cause a furious rush to develop renewable energy technology, but it may be too late at that point to prevent a worldwide economic meltdown.

 Basically, we’re currently living off of a trust fund we found underground, and we’d better learn how to get a job before it runs out.

 For our sum-up for this section, how about:

 At some point in the future, either really soon or just a little soon, we’ll have no choice but to stop running everything on fossil fuels, because they’ll either be gone or too expensive.

 This statement highlights the fact that we’re very much in what will be known as the Fossil Fuel Era of human history.

 Bringing back our first statement—if we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon—suggests that if we continue to dick around in the black zone until we’re forced out by short supply, we’re risking making the yellow zone permanently worse for humans to exist in.

 This is why Elon Musk likes to say that the indefinite extension of the Fossil Fuels Era is “the dumbest experiment in history.” He emphasized this point to me: “The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be. Given that at some point they’ll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it’ll be? We know it’s at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it’ll be really bad.”

 In other words, as it relates to the above timeline—there’s potentially huge long-term downside to staying in the black area for too long, so let’s just get ourselves to the yellow part as soon as we can. Some skeptics I read made what seemed like very valid points, but even most skeptics agreed that burning of fossil fuels causes some degree of warming and that warming might turn out to be harmful. And even if we view this as a genuine debate—when one possibility is “turns out burning fossil fuels wasn’t actually dangerous” and the other side is “turns out burning fossil fuels was horribly catastrophic,” don’t we want to play it safe??

 So how do we get from the black to the yellow?

 To help us answer that question, let’s turn to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and their useful energy charts. They update the US flowchart every year, and we’ll get there in a minute, but first, let’s check out some of the charts from their 2011 report, where they have a flow chart for every country and the world as a whole for the year 2007. (The charts look icky and confusing at first, but they’re actually really simple—just showing how much of each source is used and how that source is broken up among sectors.)

 Here’s the combined world energy flow in 2007:



 The unit, PJ, is in petajoules. 1 petajoule = 1 quadrillion joules. Some thoughts:

 – The most consistent fact I noticed about all countries is how much petroleum (i.e. crude oil) dominates the transportation sector. 94% of the world’s transportation runs on oil, and in most developed countries, the percentage is even higher.

 – Biomass use is pretty substantial, and almost all of it comes from developing countries, many of them in Africa. Biomass is typically the burning of things like wood, oil distilled down from food like corn, and manure.

 – That’s a whole lot of rejected energy on the right side. Rejected energy is energy we lose, usually in the form of heat, due to inefficiency. Especially unimpressive is the transportation performance, where engines only end up using a quarter of the fuel they burn.

 Next, let’s look at France:



 Thoughts:

 – Lots of nuclear, and as a result, very little coal. That makes France a pretty light CO2 emitter.

 – Their transportation, though, is like everyone else’s—running on oil.

 – France is an example of a factor we’re not going to discuss in this post, but an important one: fossil fuels are a bit of a geopolitical nightmare. Nation interdependence can be productive and important, but nations being dependent on other nations for their survival is never a great thing, and the need to import fossil fuels is one of the major reasons for modern nation ultra-dependency. France is totally reliant on oil for its transportation and totally reliant on other countries for oil—this puts them in a vulnerable position. The US isn’t as dependent. It relied on other nations for 60% of its oil a decade ago but has since become one of the top three oil-producing countries, and the EIA projects net oil imports to make up only 21% of the US’s 2015 oil consumption. I was also surprised to see that only a small portion of US oil imports were from the Middle East, with only 12.5% of them coming from Saudi Arabia and 20% from the entire combined Persian Gulf. Far more was from the Western Hemisphere, with Canada by far the largest at 37% of imports and Mexico and Venezuela also prominent at 9% each.

 Okay and how about China?


 China is an energy monster, mostly because they’re an industrial monster. They’re also a coal-burning beast, burning through almost half of the world’s total coal consumption each year. That 57,000 PJ of coal consumption number is insane—over five times France’s total energy flow.

 Saudi Arabia:


 Kind of a one-trick pony.

 North Korea’s energy flow is, unsurprisingly, just weird:


 You can check out the full report to see the rest of the countries.

 Now let’s move to 2013 and look at the US energy flow. The unit is different here. A quad = 1 quadrillion BTU, which is about 1,000 petajoules.

 Two things that stand out:

 – The US has become a natural gas consumption beast and by far the biggest one in the world.

 – The US is even more of an oil-consumption beast—almost double the second biggest oil-consuming country, China, and more than four times #3 on the list, Japan.

 To put in perspective how much energy the US uses, I found a country in the world that uses a similar amount of energy as each US state:

 Finally, let’s go back to the reason we started with these charts in the first place—to figure out how we’re gonna get from the black part of the timeline to the yellow and out of the fossil fuels area. The LLNL also produces a chart showing the US carbon emissions and where they come from. The US is the world’s second biggest carbon emissions culprit (China is first with 50% more than the US) and the world leader in transportation emissions—so if we can figure out what the US needs to fix, that’s a good start.

 Getting from the black to the yellow means getting rid of carbon emissions. Looking at the US emissions flowchart, I see two glaring numbers:

 There are many things that need to happen to get us into the yellow zone, but these two figures—which make up 72% of total US emissions—seem like the biggest and most urgent problems to address:

 1) Electricity production throughout the world makes up about 40% of the total energy flow, and roughly two thirds of electricity production comes from burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels, most prominently coal. Or, put simply: Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty.

 2) Transportation makes up a large chunk of the world’s energy flow, including near a third in most developed countries, and almost all the world’s transportation runs on petroleum. Put simply: Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty.

 We’ve spent this post zoomed far out on all of this. Now it’s time to zoom in, and we’ll zoom in on the second major problem listed above—transportation, and in particular, cars. Transportation covers planes, trains, ships, trucks, and cars—but cars cause more carbon emissions than the other four combined, and without major changes, car emissions are expected to rise by over 50% by 2030. By zooming in on one major piece of this puzzle—car emissions—and examining how it became a problem, why it’s still a problem, and the way we might solve that problem, we’ll get a better sense of what this entire struggle is really made of.

 Part 2: The Story of Cars

 Meet the world’s first car owner.15

 That’s the Chinese Emperor, Kangxi, in his driving clothes. He got the car in 1672, when he was 18. It was given to him by the first car-maker.16

 That’s Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit missionary who apparently didn’t have time to get his hands in a normal position before the painter had already finished. Verbiest spent his life in China, where, in 1670, he became the empire’s chief mathematician and astronomer after winning a contest against a rival over who could create the most accurate calendar—the loser would be “cut up into bits while still alive”17. In his new position, he started inventing things, one of which was the first-ever car, which he made as a toy for the emperor. It was sleek.18

 It wasn’t big enough to hold a driver, but by figuring out how to boil steam and aim it at a spinny wheel that rotated a gear that would turn the front wheels, Verbiest had created the world’s first known self-propelled vehicle.

 Verbiest’s car would remain world class until 1769, when French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot finally figured out how to improve upon it by inventing the first car that could hold a driver.19

 Next came this little sassypants:20

 That’s François Isaac de Rivaz, who in 1807 invented the world’s first internal combustion engine and a little vehicle to go along with it.21

 With a steam engine, the fire burns outside the engine and heats steam inside the engine to make it work. So it’s an external combustion engine. An internal combustion engine cuts out the steam and burns the fuel inside the engine itself to generate power.

 But it would take until 1886 for the arrival of the first actually-useful car, invented by German engineer Karl Benz, along with his wife Bertha Benz, who I might love, and his mustache.22

 Their car is considered the world’s first real automobile—the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.23

 The car cost $1,000 ($26,248 today), had three wheels, and was powered by a primitive version of a modern internal combustion engine.

 A few years later, across the world in the US state of Michigan, a young farm boy named Henry Ford, deciding that taking over his family farm would “bore his dick off [sic],” applied for a job to work for Thomas Edison. Edison’s company was busy rolling out electrical generating systems to power US cities, and working on these, Ford got good at working with the steam-powered engines the company used to make electricity. In his spare time, Ford sat in a little workshop next to his home playing around with the still-novel concept of the internal combustion engine, and in 1896, at the age of 32, he came up with what he called the Ford Quadricycle, powered by a simple internal combustion engine.24

 Becoming increasingly obsessed with building self-propelled vehicles, Ford quit his job in 1899 and first formed the Detroit Automobile Company, which failed, before forming the Henry Ford company in 1901. But Ford soon left the company over a dispute with the company’s investors, who then renamed it Cadillac Automobile Company, and in 1903, he went on to partner with a guy named Alexander Malcomson to create a company called Ford & Malcomson, Ltd., which was later renamed Ford Motor Company. Super annoying for Malcomson.

 Ford and his new company charged ahead making gas-powered cars, but at the time, gas cars were hardly the norm. Cars were a new technology, and at the beginning of the century, 40% of American cars were powered by steam and 38% were electric—gas cars only made up 22% of the American market.

 These numbers make sense. Steam-centered external combustion was the older and best-understood technology of the three and was initially the most common way to power a car. Its fancier new cousin, the internal combustion engine, powered by burning gasoline, cut out the middleman and burned fuel more efficiently. But it’s no surprise that the quickest up-and-comer type of car was the electric car. It was 1900 and electricity was at the core of all the coolest, newest technology.

 The 35 years between the mid-1860s and the turn of the century had just witnessed an electricity revolution, driven by inventors like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and George Westinghouse, during which the world went from normal to positively magical. The first magic happened in the middle of the century, when the telegraph used long-range electricity to communicate with people really far away, and in 1866, the first successful cross-Atlantic telegraph message was sent, allowing Europe and the US to magically communicate with each other instantly. The magic revolution hit full force in the late 1870s. The first telephone call happened in 1876, followed by the first time in human history someone could record sound and then play it back, in 1877. Light bulbs began to light up city streets in the early 1880s, and by 1896, the first electrical grid brought widespread electricity into people’s homes. Also in 1896, the first primitive motion picture went on display in New York, and the first wireless transmission of a human voice—the birth of the radio—went through in Brazil in 1900. Meanwhile, magical horseless cars were appearing on the streets, and only a few years later, in 1903, the Wright Brothers would take humanity’s first heavier-than-air flight. It’s hard to imagine how insanely cool a time this must have been for everyone.

 And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity.

 So if someone in the year 1900 had to bet on the outcome of the battle between external steam combustion, internal gasoline combustion, and electricity as the future standard for powering cars, they’d have probably put their money on electricity. And at the time, electricity was not only winning the battle over gasoline with far more cars on the road, but the world’s most prominent inventors, including Edison and Tesla, were pouring their efforts into an electric car future. Early in the century, the New York Times referred to the electric car as “ideal,” citing it as quieter, cleaner, and more economical than the gas car.25

 But ideal wasn’t the driving force of the early auto industry—scalable was. Cars were, up until that point, fairly impractical toys for rich people. There would be time to idealize everything later—the first step was to figure out how to make the car fast, sturdy, and most importantly, affordable. Money and brains poured into car technology from all over the world, and in 1908, Henry Ford and his five-year-old company came out with the car that launched the automotive industry into the stratosphere: The Model T.26

 Before the Model T, there had been big problems with both electric and gas vehicles. Electric had shorter ranges and longer refueling times. Gas cars were loud, hard to start, and spewed smoke like it was 1802.

 But Ford was a masterful industrialist, and by coming up with the concept of making cars by moving assembly line instead of hand-crafting them, he dramatically brought down costs and created America’s first car for the masses. In 1912, engineer Charles Kettering invented the electric car starter, eliminating the need to laboriously and dangerously hand crank your gas car on, and the newly invented muffler significantly reduced gas engine noise. Suddenly, a lot of the things that sucked about gas cars didn’t suck anymore—and they had become much cheaper than electric cars. Ford’s Model T took over America, and by 1914, 99% of new American cars ran on gas. By 1920, electric cars dropped entirely out of commercial production.27

 This was not an inevitable outcome. The future of cars had been up for grabs, and Ford had simply outsmarted his competition. Burning fuel was the way of the past and electricity was the way of the future—but Ford had created a provable, profitable business model for making cars, one that didn’t yet exist for electric cars, and it quickly became too much of an uphill battle for electric car makers to try to turn the tide. So they stopped.

 ___________

 Now it’s a century later. The most primitive local telephone call through a wire has become a person in Delhi being able to take a slab of glass out of his pocket, tap it with his finger, and instantly be talking to, and looking at, his friend in Sao Paulo. The grainiest, choppiest black-and-white silent movies have become Pixar. Mixing chemicals in a lab has become splitting atoms in the Large Hadron Collider. The Wright Brothers’ 12 second, 120-foot flight has become routine trips 250 miles up to the International Space Station.

 But instead of me finishing that paragraph with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become [something rad we can’t even imagine],” I have to finish it with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become the better gas-burning car.”

 As I said, if you were alive in 1900, you’d have probably thought the idea of an AC induction electric car motor was awesome and futuristic, and the internal combustion engine, which was only an incremental advance from the early locomotive steam engines invented a century earlier, was kind of cool but not especially futuristic. But we’re not alive in 1900, we’re alive in 2015, so when we look at the modern gas engine that’s in all of our cars, and we see pistons moving back and forth because of something hot exploding inside their cylinders—28

 —they should seem outrageously ancient. Quick aside:

 Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box

 Welcome to the Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box. Here’s the deal:

 The animation above is of a four-stroke, four-cylinder engine. The four cylinders are those four tubes the pistons are moving up and down inside of. Each time a piston slides up or down, that’s called a stroke, and the fuel-burning happens in a four-stroke cycle:

 1) The Intake Stroke: This is the part where the piston is moving down and there’s blue stuff above it. The blue stuff is air that’s being sucked in along with a small amount of gasoline that’s fired in at just the right time by the fuel injector.

 2) The Compression Stroke: This is the stroke where the piston moves up and as it does, the blue stuff turns orange. What’s happening is that the valve that let the air in on the intake stroke has now closed and as the piston moves up, there’s nowhere for the air/gas mixture to go, so it just compresses really tightly.

 3) The Power Stroke: This is the stroke I feel like passionate car men talk about with a little twinkle in their eye. In the animation, this is where the piston moves down and there’s orange above it which then turns gray by the end. The previous compression stroke has squeezed the air and gas tightly, and at the top of that stroke, the spark plug at the top of the cylinder emits a spark which ignites the compressed air and gas on fire and creates a little explosion. This explosion blows the piston back downwards. This stroke is where the power of the car engine comes from.

 4) The Exhaust Stroke: This is the part where the piston pushes the gray stuff up and out of the cylinder. The gray stuff is exhaust—i.e. smoke because you just lit a campfire in that cylinder—that then makes its way out of the car’s tailpipe. This smoke consists of mostly non-toxic gases with a little carbon monoxide and other poison mixed in for fun. Also in the exhaust is the carbon dioxide that just got created during the explosion, which allows the long-buried carbon in the gasoline to happily re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere after the most boring 300 million years ever underground.

 The furious back-and-forth motion of the pistons work together to forcefully turn what’s called a crankshaft—that metal bar contraption they’re all connected to below—which creates the turning motion that eventually turns the car’s wheel axles. I think.11

 (For more info: first two minutes of this video shows this all in action, and this is aesthetically pleasing.)

 Now. I’ll admit that car engines are cool. And I can see why some people are kind of obsessed with them. But when I look at these two animations next to each other—

 1815 locomotive engine:

 2015 car engine:

 —they look too similar to be 200 years apart.

 “Hot explosions in cylinders pushing pistons back and forth to force metal bars to turn wheels and sending the resulting smoke billowing out of a pipe” sounds like an old-fashioned technology, and it’s just very odd that we’re still using it today. We get used to the world we live in, whatever that world is like, but if you examine history and take a big step back, some things suddenly make no sense. And this is one of them.

 So the question we need to ask is why.

 If electric motors were the more advanced technology—if they were considered ideal because they were quiet, clean, and took advantage of cutting edge technology—why did the world give up on them? In 1900, neither electric nor gas cars were viable for mass adoption—both needed a few key technological breakthroughs. The key breakthroughs needed for gas cars happened first—but why was that reason for us to just settle, permanently, for the more primitive technology and the one that, over time, would make our cities smoggy and change the chemical makeup of our atmosphere? If 20th-century human invention could go from the Wright Brothers’ 12-second flight to the moon in just 66 years, surely advancing battery technology enough to bring electric car prices and charging times down while increasing range shouldn’t have been beyond our scope. Why did innovation and progress in something as important to the world as car-powering technology just stop ?

 This question could be asked about other parts of the bigger story of the Fossil Fuels Era. You could just as easily puzzle over the question, “America’s first electricity power station, Edison’s Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, first lit up in 1882, powered by burning coal—how is it possible that in 2015, burning coal is still by far the primary way humanity produces electricity even though we’ve known for decades that it’s not an optimal or sustainable long-term method?”

 The problem with the question “Why did X technology stop moving forward?” is that it’s misunderstanding how progress works. Instead of asking why technological progress sometimes stops, we have to ask the question:

 Why does technological progress ever happen at all?

 The mistake of the first question is the intuitive but incorrect notion that technology naturally moves forward on its own over time—it doesn’t. I can tell you this for sure, because my Time Warner DVR has the exact same horrible user interface it had in 2004. The way technology works is that by default, it stands still, and it moves forward only when something pushes it forward.

 We often have the same intuitive misconception when we think about evolution. Natural selection doesn’t make things “better”—it just optimizes biology to best survive in whatever environmental circumstances it finds itself. When something in that environment changes—a predator mutates and becomes faster, a certain type of food becomes scarce, an ice age rolls in—it means species that were previously optimized to the environment no longer are. The environmental change alters the natural selection criteria, which applies a pressure on the species as it is, and over time, the genetics of the species will react to the pressure by changing in order to optimize to the new environment.

 When it comes to technology, a totally free and open market is the natural environment. But unlike the world of species, which is the eternal Wild West, human societies have another factor in play—a god-type force called government. So if we’re trying to figure out what makes technology move and change, we have to look at two sources of pressure: natural market conditions that ebb and flow and apply continual new pressures on all the actors within, and the “god” on top who can artificially change the environment below to create manufactured pressures. Let’s examine both, starting with government:

 1) Pressure From Government-Induced Environment Changes

 The nature and power of a market’s government-god varies significantly throughout the world. In North Korea, it is a Biblical-style, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful ruler of the universe to the point where there is no natural market environment—just the one god created and maintains. In Scandinavia, god is a wealthy power mom and the market is nestled in her warm bosom of safety and opportunity. In Central Africa, god made a lifestyle change and got a new job, working for the wealthiest families—huge step up the ladder for him.

 In the US, god has an identity crisis, alternating between feelings of pride and self-loathing. It wants to have the best country, but it’s standing on the street corner alone yelling out in an argument with itself about the right way to do that. When the US government (or a government like it) wants to play god and alter the American natural market environment to apply certain pressures in certain places, it uses three main tools: funding, regulation, and taxes.

 Funding: In order for government funding to lead to major progress, there has to be a lot of it, and in an open democracy, that only flies when the nation needs to do something so important that everyone agrees on it—like in the 1960s, when the fear of losing global influence kicked the US government’s adrenaline in and it put a man on the moon. Likewise, significant US military funding is something the American electorate can agree on enough that it receives tremendous funding and plays an important part in advancing technology in a number of industries. In most cases, though, a divided democracy is too paralyzed by conflicting interests and political squabbling to be the main driver of a serious tech revolution.

 Regulation: Another democratic government muscle is its ability to make rules—laws, restrictions, quotas, etc. These can be effective at pushing through minor changes—the seatbelt and airbag are both products of government regulation. But at least when it comes to the car industry, I’m having a hard time thinking of instances of major technological leaps caused by government regulation.

 Tax Code: The government often uses the tax code to add its own economic pressures into the free market. Again though, while this can be effective for nudging something in a certain direction, it doesn’t tend to lead to sweeping advances.

 Of course, America is in a big fight about this, with fiscal liberals typically feeling a lot more optimistic about government’s ability to play a positive role in moving things forward than fiscal conservatives. But I think both would agree that major tech progress being forced forward by the government is more the way of places like the Soviet Union and modern-day China where government has a lot more power. The incredible innovation that often emerges from open democracies tends to come from pressures from below, in the bubbling cauldron of the free market—

 2) Pressures From Natural Market Forces

 In the natural world, to catch food and stay away from predators, animals will optimize by becoming fast and elusive runners. When food on the ground becomes scarce, species will feel the pressure of hunger and over time, their genetics will re-optimize by developing good bodies for climbing or long necks or wings. A running species that becomes a flying species hasn’t become better—just better fit for the current circumstances. In the world of species, the definition of optimization is simple because the end goals are simple: the core needs of biological creatures are always the same—to self-preserve and reproduce. So optimization in the natural world always has the same definition: to adjust in a way that makes you mostly likely to self-preserve and reproduce.

 In order to understand what optimization means in the market, we need to know what the core goals are of the actors there. Of course, people are also biological creatures, and self-preservation will always be at the top of the list—if you’re hungry, cold, or sick, fixing that will be the core goal. But for people whose base needs are being met, what are the yearning desires that then lie at the core of their motivation? What does “pursuing your self-interest” mean for them?

 Well, it depends on the culture. In certain cultures, the fear of failure is so strong that it outweighs desires like glory or great fortune, and the primary inner drive becomes to just make sure you’re passable. In others, the deepest drive of the people might be religious salvation, community or family service, a leisurely lifestyle, or spiritual enlightenment.

 When it comes to technological advancement, those motivations aren’t likely to get you there because thinking up tech innovations isn’t a helpful step on the path to optimization for those people. So if we want tech progress, what kind of yearning do we want people to feel?

 I think the ideal mix is a two-part cocktail:

 First ingredient: Greed. In a perfect, fair, open market, greed works great as the core lifeblood motivation. The way capitalism theoretically works is that the more real-world value you create, the more money you’ll make. So companies in a competitive landscape will put their effort into creating better and better products and services in order to optimize, which for them means making as much money as they possibly can. Individual people are greedy as a means to all kinds of ends—a lavish lifestyle, personal freedom, security, admiration, power, sex—but what they want is irrelevant. As long as their burning desire makes them really want stuff, their drive to optimize will move technology forward. Greed is a double-edged sword though—to be beneficial, greed has to be contained inside a high-integrity, meritocratic, free market. If it’s not, greed will turn into the enemy of progress, because the more vulnerable the system is to corruption, the more the greedy on top will be able to game the system to ensure their own long-lasting victory.

 Second ingredient: Raging ambition. Greed can lead to steady forward progress, but in order for progress to leap forward, a second ingredient is usually key: a burning desire to do something great. Again, the underlying reasons for this kind of ambition can vary. Sometimes it’ll be an ego-driven desire—to be famous and renowned, to leave one’s mark, to be thought of and posthumously remembered as great. Other times the ambition will be fueled by a borderline-insane level of confidence and optimism that gives someone the gall to be idealistic. These are the yearnings of the hungry underdog.

 An established industry full of existing winners running on greed is like the highest layer of trees in a crowded rainforest. They’ll push upward only as needed, elbowing each other for little gains and victories as they vie for sunlight, mostly just trying to keep their spot in the canopy. Greed just wants sunlight—it doesn’t care how high up it is when it gets it.

 But below, the hungry underdog burns for sunlight and will spend 100 hours a week trying to figure out how to get it. When the breakthrough comes, the underdog bursts up through the canopy into the open sky and spreads its leaves out wide. Suddenly, the trees that had been on top are blocked from the sun. Greed is then replaced by the much more powerful drive of survival, and innovation kicks into high gear as they scramble upwards for their life. The environment has changed—it’s been disrupted—and in this new world, created by the underdog disruptor, companies have to innovate in order to re-optimize. Some end up back on top, others die—and at the end of it all, technology has jolted forward. We all witnessed an example of this when Apple rocketed through the mobile phone canopy in 2007 and forced all of the other companies to make a smartphone or die. Samsung managed to get itself back into the sun. Nokia did not.

 With all this in mind, let’s go back to the car industry and our original question:

 Why hasn’t the car technology forest moved upward over the past century?

 I see two primary reasons:

 1) Insanely high barriers to entry—so no leaps forward caused by hungry underdogs

 Try to think of something ickier and harder than starting a car company.

 First, before you can sell one product, you’ll need to put down an absurd amount of capital to buy a factory, figure out how to design a car and all of its parts, build a prototype, use that to raise a lot more money, get a much bigger factory and hire thousands of people, and pump many millions of dollars into marketing to tell the world that your company exists. And you probably need to be incredibly rich and risk-tolerant yourself since very few people are zany enough to invest money in a startup car company.

 Second, in order to be profitable, you have to sell at a high volume. Cars are too expensive to make and margins are too thin to only sell a few each year. So for this to be a good idea, you not only have to create an awesome car, but one that a ton of people will want to buy.

 Third, gas cars are already well-optimized—if you want to aggressively burst through the canopy like an underdog without any brand awareness needs to, you have to create a much better type of car than what’s out there. In the case of cars, that probably means addressing the core of the car itself and the thing that’s been stressing everyone out with its billowing emissions—the engine. But since no one has really done this yet, it means you need to not only create the first successful startup car company in a long time, you need to create the first startup to ever succeed at making whatever type of car you’re creating. And since you’ll be there first to do it, you’ll have to put a huge amount of time and money into innovation research and development and bear the brunt of the invention costs for the whole industry. You’ll also have to bear the marketing costs to educate the world on why they should want this new type of car—that’s a one-time expense and once it’s done, other companies will be able to ride on the consumer demand you spent a ton of money building.

 So it’s not surprising that the last successful startup car company in America was Chrysler in 1925—90 years ago. It’s basically an impossible endeavor.

 And without any threat from below on the forest floor—from the wild innovation of scrappy entrepreneurs with nothing to lose—the car industry has had the luxury of calmly sunbathing in a tight canopy quilt, making only incremental advances, only when they’re needed. But there’s a problem here too—

 2) A glitch in the car market separates car company optimization from what’s best for the world.

 As I mentioned above, greed works nicely as an optimization criterion if the market is perfect—open, accurate, and fair.

 Greedy companies will make their decisions based on whatever the best way is to optimize to their environment—i.e. How can we make the most possible money? But a company’s drive for maximum money is only beneficial to society when the company’s profit is tightly and accurately correlated with the amount of net positive value its product or service provides to society.

 If I start a lemonade stand, every time I give someone a delicious cup of lemonade, they’ll be likely to recommend me to their friends and become a recurring customer. I provided positive value and my business’s success went up with it.

 Success = Value Provided . Incentives are aligned.

 If another customer comes to the stand and I give him a cup of lemonade with a fly in it, he won’t come back and he’ll tell his friends not to go—I caused harm and my success went down.

 Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused] . Incentives still aligned.

 But what if I then discover a chemical I can spray on my lemonade that prevents flies from landing on it. The chemical is tasteless, but I know that drinking it regularly will cause customers immense harm a few decades down the road. Customers won’t experience the harm in the present, so it won’t affect their opinion of my lemonade or the success of my business.

 Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused] .

 The harm caused is now an unaccounted-for cost, also known as a negative externality, and my incentives are no longer aligned with the customer’s best interests. If all I care about is greed and maximizing profit, I will continue to use the chemical, because I’m economically incentivized to do so.

 This kind of negative externality is how tobacco companies got away with murder for so many decades. The long-term cost to customers’ health was unaccounted for because customers were ignorant to the consequences, the negative effects were years away, and there was no regulatory penalty in place to charge for the harm. Thinking purely from a greed-optimizing perspective, cigarette companies acted completely rationally. They kicked up nicotine levels in cigarettes and added shards of glass into filters to create tiny cuts and increase nicotine absorption, which caused further harm but increased demand—but since the harm was unaccounted for, this was a pure net positive for the company. And when anti-tobacco campaigns started to educate customers on cigarette harm—which attaches the harm to the cost of scared customers and lower demand—the tobacco industry hired low-integrity scientists to discredit the negative campaigns and muddle the message. Awareness would get there eventually, but the longer they could delay and keep the harm hidden, the better off they’d be from a greed standpoint.

 People call this evil, but all it really is is an industry acting in its own best interests within the parameters of its environment. Greed is a simple motivation—it takes whatever it can get, and it’ll push all available limits it can in order to fully optimize. I used tobacco companies as an example, but you could easily tell the story with fast food, radiation-emitting consumer electronics, politician behavior, the finance industry, and many others.

 In the auto industry, CO 2 emissions are the negative externality. If you have a cheap and easy way to build cars that dump garbage into the atmosphere and no one makes you pay for it, why would you ever change anything?

 It’s the same story as cigarettes. Instead of the tobacco industry and the cigarette companies who support it, you have the oil industry and the car companies who support it. Instead of short-term emphysema, you have short term city smog. Instead of long-term harm to people’s health like lung cancer, you have long-term harm to the human way of life like underwater coastal cities.

 A lot of people have written about the hidden cost of carbon emissions, and many of them, on both sides of the political spectrum, have proposed a logical solution: a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

 A revenue-neutral carbon tax is revenue-neutral because any increase in government revenue as a result of the tax would be offset by an equal decrease in something else like income taxes. This makes it a politically moot proposal.

 The tax could be applied at any point along the supply chain from oil extraction to the gas pump and the effect would be the same—it would either become more expensive to drive a gas car, less profitable to be in the business of gas, or both. With a carbon tax in place, when you’re contributing to the carbon problem, you’re also paying for it—which incentivizes consumers and companies to explore alternatives. This wouldn’t be the government meddling in the market—it would be the government fixing a glitch in the market.

 Instead, the government offers tax breaks to people for buying an electric vehicle and subsidies for the renewable energy industry, which is like a town full of businesses who throw their trash in the street, and the government reacting by paying businesses to stop doing that, instead of just charging businesses for doing it. Other times, the government tries to force emissions downwards by forcing car companies to create a minimum number of zero-emissions cars—with limited effect. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both tried this, to some extent, and both times the next president (Reagan and Bush) removed the regulations upon taking office (ironically, the Clinton mandate for more hybrid cars accomplished nothing in the US, but it scared the shit out of Toyota, who began furiously innovating and created the Prius). Another time, in 1990, the California government tried to institute its own zero-emissions regulations, which the car and oil companies fought until they finally bullied California out of it and the regulations were removed in 2003.12 The problem is, giant companies have enough influence that any government attempt at making changes through regulation ends up being watered down to the point where it’s ineffective.

 When it comes to a carbon tax, the only explanation for not having one seems to be the power big oil has over the US government—because to me, it seems like every politician in either party should be in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Right?

 Without any negative consequence of emitting carbon, optimizing for greed pushes certain car technologies forward, like safety, comfort, and drive quality, because getting high safety and quality ratings is tied to demand—but it doesn’t change anything about carbon emissions, because the greed equation doesn’t currently include that cost.

 So the reason why, 112 years after Ford Motor Company’s founding, we’re still using harmful, old-fashioned engines is simple: none of the pressures on the car industry are pushing it to change. The car industry still needs to work hard to optimize in certain areas—that’s why cars have become safer, smoother, more comfortable, and more efficient over the years. But the most glaring flaw of the modern car—that it constantly dumps garbage into the atmosphere—remains untouched, because doing so is free, because big oil’s influence means government keeps allowing it, and because there’s no one from underneath to burst through the canopy and show customers that there’s a better way.

 It’s scary. Something really, terribly bad might be happening that could make our actual lives legitimately worse in the future, but we have a prisoner’s dilemma on our hands—it’s much, much better for all of us collectively to make a change, but for each individual CEO, lobbyist, or politician, there’s more to personally gain from maintaining the status quo. People like to say, “this is the world our children will live in and we’re botching it for them,” but for the people with the power to change something, their particular children will be best off if they make the most money possible. The situation is stuck.

 A deeply-set, stagnant industry is like a country led by a deeply-entrenched dynasty—it’s hard to penetrate the status quo. But even in the case of the most powerful caste systems, sometimes the right person comes along at the right time and starts the right movement, and a revolution can ignite.

 Part 3: The Story of Tesla

 Christie Nicholson remembers meeting Elon Musk for the first time at a party back in 1989.

 “I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was ‘I think a lot about electric cars,’” Christie said. “And then he turned to me and said, ‘Do you think about electric cars?’”13

 Electric cars seems like an odd thing to spend your time thinking about in 1989. To understand why Musk felt so strongly about them, let’s start by understanding what electric cars are and how they work.

 There are a handful of common modern types of cars considered greener than traditional gas cars—namely hybrid cars, plug-in hybrid cars, and electric cars (which we’ll call EVs for “electric vehicles”). There’s also a lot of talk about another type—hydrogen fuel cell cars, which we’ll just call hydrogen cars. The one thing these cars all have in common is an electric motor.

 There are two types of electric motors—the AC induction motor and the brushless DC electric motor. Since 98% of people reading this aren’t licking their lips to read a three-paragraph description of the difference, let it suffice to say that they’re the same basic idea:

 An electric motor is a pig in a blanket where electricity is sent into the outer bread part (called the stator), which is always stationary, and that electric current causes the hot dog part (called the rotor) to rotate. The rotor is attached to the wheel axle which turns the wheels. Like this:29

 How an AC Induction Motor Works Blue Box

 One of the two common types of electric motor is the AC induction motor (that’s what Tesla cars use). AC stands for alternating current,14 and induction means there’s no physical contact between the rotor and the stator—electricity in the stator generates a rotating magnetic field which enters the rotor through electrical induction and causes it to spin.

 The stator generates a rotating magnetic field by sending electricity through it in a three phase system:30

 So there are three different wires each with an alternating back-and-forth pull—just look at any one color and you’ll see it’s just going back and forth. But the three wires’ currents are staggered in just the right way that the point of “pull” in the stator rotates in a smooth circle. When the rotor is added in, this rotating magnetic field causes it to spin:

 The idea is that the rotor can never quite catch up to where it wants to be—it’s always “chasing” the rotating field, and that chase is what powers the car. The AC induction motor was invented by Nikola Tesla, and that’s why Tesla Motors is named after him.15

 Here are the types of cars that use an electric motor:

 Hybrids (also called HEVs for hybrid electric vehicles), like the Toyota Prius, have both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. You don’t plug a hybrid car in—the gas charges the battery. The battery also gets charge from an electric motor trick called regenerative braking. Normally, all the joules of kinetic energy a car is harnessing when it’s moving are lost when the car brakes and they’re just converted into heat. With regenerative braking, electric cars send some of that kinetic energy back into the battery, holding onto those joules to be used again later. The electric component of a hybrid replaces some of the need to burn gas, increasing the miles per gallon, decreasing the car’s emissions, and saving the driver gas money. Hybrids are a big step up in technology from normal gas cars.

 But they still kind of suck. Why? Because they’re only kind of helping the emissions problem, not solving it, and they still need to burn gas to work. As I’ve heard people say, a world 100% full of Prius drivers is still a world 100% addicted to oil.

 Plug-in hybrids (also called PHEVs) are a better option. Plug-in hybrid cars, like the Chevy Volt, the Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid, and the Ford Fusion Energi, allow you to charge the battery at home and typically drive 10-40 miles just on battery power before the gas kicks in. That’s often enough to get most people through most of their day, meaning they may rarely need to use gas.

 But if we’re gonna get so close, why not just go all the way?

 Hydrogen cars are entirely electric—but they don’t use a battery. Instead, they fill up with fuel at a station just like a gas car—except they fill up with compressed hydrogen, not gas. The hydrogen mixes with oxygen in the air to produce electricity, which it sends to the motor to power the car. They produce no tailpipe emissions because the only byproduct is clean water. Sounds great, right?

 Musk, for the life of him, cannot understand how anyone could make an argument in favor of hydrogen cars,16 but it’s confusing because lots of car companies, like Toyota, Honda, and General Motors, are currently pouring big investments into making hydrogen cars. I wanted to understand the disagreement, so I read like 12 articles in favor and opposed to the technology. At the end of it, I’m having a hard time seeing why hydrogen cars would have a more promising future than electric vehicles. For those who want details, here’s a footnote.17

 Finally, there are electric cars, or EVs, like the Nissan Leaf, the BMW i3, the Ford Focus Electric, and the Tesla Model S. These are simple—there’s a big battery, which you charge, and it powers the electric motor. No liquid involved.

 Now, in theory, EVs make a lot of sense. Forgetting the rest of the car for a second, let’s look at some of the advantages of the electric motor over the internal combustion gas engine:

 Electric motors are more convenient than gas engines most of the time. Gas cars have to go to the gas station; EV owners plug their car in every night the same way they charge their phone—no stopping for gas. A gas engine is a lot more complicated than an electric motor, with over 200 parts; an electric motor has fewer than 10. A gas engine requires a transmission, a tailpipe, gears, and a bunch of other grease-covered shit; an EV has none of those things—when you open the hood, it’s more storage space, like the trunk. Gas engines need oil, which means they need oil changes; EVs don’t. The extra complexity means gas cars end up needing a lot more maintenance than EVs.

 It costs a lot less to power an electric motor than a gas engine. The extra costs gas car owners incur for oil changes and car repairs aside, the gas engine’s fuel—gas—is much more expensive than the electric motor’s fuel—electricity. Let’s look at the math:

 The average electric car gets about 3 miles per kWh18 of electricity, and the US national average electricity rate is 12 cents per kWh. That means that driving a mile in an electric car costs about 4 cents.

 The cost of driving a gas car is harder, because gas prices and car fuel efficiency widely vary. The best case scenario for a gas car is unusually cheap gas (let’s say $1.40/gallon) coupled with unusually high fuel efficiency (let’s say it’s a rare gas car that gets 35 mpg). That would produce the same 4 cents/mile that electric cars get. But very few gas car owners ever pay 4 cents/mile. Without being crazy extreme, for the worse case scenario, let’s say a high $4.00/gallon gas and a below-average 15 mpg—in that case, a mile in a gas car costs 27 cents per mile. At a pretty typical 12,000 miles/year, that means at absolute best, gas is tied with electric for cost, and at worst, it costs over $3,000/year more to drive on gas.

 The gas engine is one of the two major causes of the energy/climate crisis. We’ve already discussed this—transportation burning oil makes up a third of the world emissions, pollutes cities, and makes nations over-dependent on other nations. The electric motor emits nothing. Yes, it may run on electricity that was produced in a dirty way—but we’ll get to that later.

 So that’s why Musk told Christie Nicholson that he thinks a lot about electric cars. The electric motor is clearly the easier, cheaper, and more sensible long-term plan for powering cars.

 But when the electric motor made its first appearance over 100 years ago, there were serious drawbacks that prevented it from becoming the norm—and since electric cars went out of production back then, little time or money has been spent trying to fix those issues. There tend to be three age-old concerns about the viability of the electric car:

 EV Concern 1) Range. This is really three issues rolled into one:

 A) Will the battery life be too short for long drives, limiting an EV to a car only for local driving?

 B) If I’m out and about and need to recharge my battery on the road, is there anywhere to do it? Or will I end up stranded?

 C) If I do find a charging station while on the road, will I have to sit there for five hours while it charges?

 These issues are such a prevalent concern among potential EV-owners that they have their own term: range anxiety.

 EV Concern 2) Performance. The most common electric vehicle you’ll see around today is the golf cart. Which doesn’t excite car owners very much. No one wants a car that drives like shit, and when people think about zooming acceleration, they tend to think about powerful gas engines, not electric motors.

 EV Concern 3) Price. Ever since the beginning, EVs have cost more than gas cars, mainly because of the high cost of the battery.

 Back in 1910, people cited these exact same three concerns over electric cars, and they’re part of the reason gas cars won the day. Gas cars had had their own major problems, but Ford had figured out how to make them viable—something no one has yet done for the electric car.

 I asked Musk about his opinion on Henry Ford. He said, “Ford was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed.”

 When he decided in 2003 to stop thinking about electric cars and start making them, the odds weren’t in Musk’s favor. There were the high barriers to entry that had prevented any startup car company from succeeding in almost a century; there was the unaccounted for cost of carbon emissions, which made starting an EV company like trying to stand out on a basketball court as a rookie when all the players except you can foul with no penalty; there was the gargantuan oil industry, which would do everything in its power to stomp on any effort to make it obsolete; and on top of that, the EV was a new kind of car whose development had essentially been on pause ever since EV makers threw in the towel a century earlier, and a daunting and costly catch-up process would lay ahead—the three concerns listed above would all need to somehow be addressed for this to have a chance.

 The overarching question was, had electric cars never had their day because of irreconcilable issues? Or had the right person—the Henry Ford of EVs—just not come along yet?

 ___________

 Car companies aren’t supposed to start in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley startups aren’t supposed to make cars.

 But the electric car industry is not your grandfather’s car industry. And in 2003, it wasn’t anyone’s car industry. After the brief bubble of new electric cars in California in the 1990s between the year the state passed the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate and the year they were bullied into repealing it, the electric car industry had withered into the oblivion of the scattered California garages and tech labs of car geeks. But big things have emerged out of small groups of cutting-edge California geek labs. Apple. Microsoft. Google. So why not the modern electric car industry?

 One of these little car technology companies was AC Propulsion, and while carmakers in Detroit, Tokyo, and Munich continued to not realize that electric cars were clearly the future, the guys at AC Propulsion were experimenting away, quietly making one giant EV breakthrough after another.

 One day last week, I cold called AC Propulsion and accosted their CTO, Paul Carosa, who had been there since the beginning. He was too polite to figure out how to get off the phone with me, so he told me about those years in the late 90s and early 2000s when they created their fanciest car to date—the tzero (pronounced t-zero). AC Propulsion had figured out two huge things:

 First, the tzero was fast—it went 0 to 60 in 4.9 seconds, which was crazy fast for an electric car and put it on par with the fast gas cars.

 Second, they had made big progress on an enormous EV shortcoming by getting innovative with the battery. Previous EVs had used lead-acid batteries, which were heavy and limited. AC Propulsion realized that the laptop and mobile phone industry had been pouring development into making small 18650 lithium-ion batteries increasingly efficient, and that those batteries had gotten really advanced. 18650 batteries look like AA batteries, which seems like an odd match for a car, but by lining up a few thousand of them in a big battery case, they had just created by far the world’s best ever car battery. EVs had always been limited to a 60 or 80 or maybe a 120-mile range. The tzero could go 250 miles on a single charge.

 In 2003, a California engineer named JB Straubel was then tinkering around with EVs himself, met Musk to ask for funding for a car project he was working on. Soon after that, Straubel brought Musk by the AC Propulsion office to see the tzero. Musk was blown away. Musk had suspected for a while that EVs were the way of the future, and now that he saw the possibilities with his own eyes, he was convinced.

 At the time, he was already running SpaceX and trying to colonize Mars, so launching a startup car company wasn’t something he could really fit into his calendar. He really wanted the world to see the tzero because he was sure it would excite people and help to stoke a new wave of EV interest—and he tried to convince the AC Propulsion guys to bring the tzero to market, with his funding, but they didn’t want to deal with that because it sounded icky. Instead, AC Propulsion introduced Musk to a group of three other entrepreneurs who had also recently approached them with a similar idea and had also been rebuffed. Those three guys, who included Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, had come up with the idea of licensing AC Propulsion’s technology and bringing it to market themselves as a new company called Tesla Motors19—but to make any of this real, they needed money. It was a perfect match, so they decided to make a run at it together. Musk, who could only dedicate part time to the project, could fund the effort, become Chairman and maintain a strong influence, but by making Eberhard CEO, he could focus on SpaceX with the bulk of his time. And Tesla was on its way.

 The group formed a team and started figuring out how to be a car company. One big problem they had was that this was a new technology, and the R&D costs early on for a new technology drive up the price of the product—that’s the same reason the very first cell phones and computers started out really expensive. Except in those cases, they were the first of their kind, so the product could be super expensive and still sell. Because perfectly good, affordable gas cars already exist, it wouldn’t work to come out with the equivalent quality of a $25,000 gas car for $100,000+. So this became the business plan:

 Step 1: High-priced, low-volume car for the super rich. Come out with the expensive first product, but make the car so fancy that it’s worth that price—i.e. just make it a legit Ferrari competitor and then it’s okay to charge over $100,000 for it.

 Step 2: Mid-priced, mid-volume car for the pretty rich. Use the profits from Step 1 to develop the Step 2 car. It would still be expensive, but more like a $75,000 Mercedes or BMW competitor instead of Ferrari.

 Step 3: Low-priced, high-volume car for the masses. Use the profits from Step 2 to develop a $35,000-ish car that, after the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit and the savings on gas, would be affordable to the middle class.

 It’s kind of a Hershey’s Kiss business plan:

 The overarching mission wasn’t to build the biggest car company in the world. It was to solve a bunch of long-standing EV shortcomings and build such an insanely great car that it could change everyone’s perception of what an EV could be and force the world’s big car companies to have to develop their own line of great EVs. Their end goal, and the company’s official mission, was “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” In other words, EVs are gonna happen, but we’re gonna make them happen a lot sooner. Sooner, in this case, is important, because it means carbon emissions decrease earlier and the long term effects of them are much less damaging.

 So they got working. And four years later, they had their Step 1 car, the Roadster:31

 With the Roadster, Tesla wasn’t trying to make their long term car (one Tesla employee told me that from the beginning, Musk would make sure everyone knew that the company’s long-term mission “was not to make toys for rich people.”) They just wanted to build something awesome to A) show the world how great an EV could be, and B) generate revenue to develop their Step 2 car. So they didn’t start from scratch on the body design, instead basing it on a Lotus Elise.

 The Roadster didn’t change the world—no $110,000 car ever could—but it sent a message to the industry that Tesla was for real. You may not have heard of the Roadster when it was announced in 2006 or when it started shipping in 2008, but some of the major car companies took notice—Nissan soon launched the all-electric Leaf and GM launched the plug-in electric Chevy Volt soon after the Roadster’s appearance (Bob Lutz, who was Chairman of GM at the time, openly credits Tesla for their decision to make the Volt, saying that after the Roadster unveiling, he went to the GM board and asked, “If a little company in California can do this, why can’t we?”).

 But there were some pretty big problems with the first product. Finishing the car was taking way longer than planned, the cost of making each Roadster was way higher than planned, and the early shipments often had defects. This made Musk sad, so he and the board fired Eberhard as CEO, which made Eberhard sad.20 Just as this was going down, the most inconvenient thing ever happened—the 2008 recession—which made the entire car industry sad, but especially Tesla, who didn’t yet have brand recognition and wasn’t yet profitable because of all the upfront investment they had been pouring in. A crippling recession is never helpful, but it was really, really bad timing for Tesla.

 Musk had hired a second CEO, but a year in, in late 2008, the company was in one of those movie scenes where the person’s been badly wounded and clearly about to die and there’s this dramatic dialogue scene and the dying person is saying some last words and every time they pause for a second the audience is like, “Is that it? Are they dead? Oh no they just talked again I guess there’s one more line.” Musk, who wasn’t enjoying the drama of the scene, finally was like, “PAUSE THE MOVIE QUICKLY PAUSE IT PAUSE IT” and took over as CEO,21going into full adrenaline mode to try to keep the company alive. And as mentioned in the last post, SpaceX was in the same movie at the same time playing the same role, so Musk’s life was like this:

 But enough people had been impressed enough by Tesla that a couple key investments at critical moments came in and kept the company alive, and at the end of the whole mess, Tesla was now a new company. Musk was CEO, and the Jonathan Ive of the car industry, star car designer Franz von Holzhausen, who had been the Design Director at GM and then Mazda, had decided to bet his career on the barely-standing Tesla and became their chief designer.

 A few weeks ago, when I stepped into the Tesla design studio to meet von Holzhausen, I was excited to meet the uber-flamboyant diva celebrity car designer, just hoping I would understand what he was saying through his unbelievably thick German accent—and was horribly disappointed to meet an extremely normal-acting American man.

 The studio, which I described in the last post, is a shiny playroom of art and physics. Von Holzhausen showed me a full-size clay car that was simultaneously testing two different possible designs for the upcoming Model 3 by making the two halves of the model different. He explained how precise everything about car design is and how “a difference of a quarter millimeter can spread itself across the entire car.”

 I asked him what it was like to come to Tesla after having spent years at more established car companies. He described the difference like this: “A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around—the product is successful when it’s great, and the company becomes great because of that.” (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: “The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company’s done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO—it’s done. Game over.”) Von Holzhausen went on, saying, “Another difference is that at other companies, engineering comes first—a design package is prescribed on the designer and they’re told to make it beautiful. At Tesla, design and engineering are assigned equal value, and Elon keeps them opposed to each other.” Now that von Holzhausen has gotten used to his freedom to be obsessed with the product at Tesla, he says he “would dread to go back to pre-historic ways.”

 Von Holzhausen’s first mission at Tesla was to design their Step 2 car—the mid-priced, mid-volume one—that would be called the Model S. The Roadster was based on existing design and was a springboard for the company more than a long-term product. The Model S would be Tesla’s first flagship product, and it was their chance to reinvent the concept of a car, from scratch. Von Holzhausen said, “When we started Model S, it was a clean sheet of paper.”

 This all sounded uncannily similar to how Steve Jobs had done things at Apple. He obsessed over making “insanely great products,” and he never paid attention to what other companies were doing, always coming at things from a clean sheet of paper perspective. When Apple decided to make a phone, they didn’t try to make a better Blackberry—they asked, “What should a mobile phone be?”

 Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse—and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there’s often a huge opportunity there.

 When the iPhone came out, it turned the phone industry on its head. So should we be surprised that when the Tesla Model S came out, Consumer Reports anointed it the best car that had ever been made with an unheard of 99/100 rating, and that Tesla owners are across-the-board obsessed with the car? No, because it’s like the iPhone—it’s a 15-year leap into the future.32

 The Model S is the fastest 4-door sedan in history, with 3.2-second 0-60 time. It saves battery power by being insanely aerodynamic with the industry’s lowest drag coefficient (.24). A bunch of engineering innovations have combined to give it the highest NHTSA safety rating of any car ever tested by the US government, 5.4 stars.

 The Model S is already driving itself and soon, it’ll be able to drive itself to meet you out in the driveway in the morning with the temperature already set and the right music on; at night, you’ll be able to pull up to the house and just get out of the car and the car will park itself into the garage and plug itself in. They did away with model years (i.e. the 2014 Toyota Camry, the 2015 Toyota Camry, etc.), so instead of holding all the year’s new features until the new release, they just put features in as they go. Someone who buys a Tesla today might have a slightly different car than someone who bought one two weeks ago. And they’re constantly rolling out fixes and new features through automatic wifi software updates—owners often wake up in the morning to discover the car has a new capability.

 In a bunch of cases, Tesla has wanted to do something that wasn’t technically possible with the current world or industry limitations—so they’d build what they needed to build to change those limitations:

 The Tesla battery is heavy and they wanted to make the body super light to offset some of that weight—so they turned to SpaceX and used its advanced rocket technology to make Tesla the only North American car with an all aluminum body.

 Musk and von Holzhausen’s22 team had spent all this time perfecting the design of the car before it was time to put the door handles on, and they got really used to it that way. When it was time for handles, they didn’t want to ruin how it was, so they figured out how to make the handles lay flush with the door.

 They didn’t like the dealership model and wanted to sell directly to customers, but many states don’t allow that, so one by one, they’re fighting the states that won’t and slowly overturning direct car sales bans.

 They wanted to get rid of buttons altogether and have all controls on a huge, 17″ touchscreen—but when their first car came out, there was no iPad yet, and 17″ touchscreens suitable for a car didn’t exist. So they built their own.33

 Innovations like these helped make the Tesla a standout car, but there were still questions around the major shortcomings of EV cars. Of the three EV concerns we listed earlier, AC Propulsion had made significant headway on two—performance and battery range—and the Tesla team had picked it up from there and had continued to improve both. Performance was now the best in the world for a sedan and the battery range—between 208 and 270 miles per charge, depending on the model—was excellent.

 But there were still two problematic questions that needed to be addressed:

 Can you take a road trip? And can anyone afford the car? Tesla is working on both.

 How Tesla is solving the road trip problem:

 With a 200+ range, the Tesla battery has plenty of juice to get most people through the day on any normal day. Even a busy day of commuting and errands and exploration rarely gets close to 200 miles driving. But on long city-to-city drives or road trips, EVs have always had an issue. So Musk came up with a solution:

 Build a worldwide energy network. Tesla came up with the Supercharger—a high-caliber, on-the-road charger—and there would be public stations that would contain a whole row of Superchargers, just like a row of gas pumps at a gas station. A normal garage charger takes either 5 or 10 hours to fully charge the Model S battery, depending on which type of in-car charging system you opted for. Clearly no one wants to stop for multiple hours while on the road to accomplish what a gas car can by stopping for five minutes—so the Supercharger goes much faster. It can charge a Model S at a rate that gives it about 60 miles of range for every 10 minutes of charging time. So if you’re driving between Boston and New York (215 miles), you might make it with no stopping, but if you did need to stop, you could just charge up for 5 or 10 minutes—not that much more than a stop for gas. Driving from LA to San Francisco (382 miles), you’d need to stop for 20 or 30 minutes.

 And the thing is—on a 4-hour drive from Boston to New York, isn’t a 5-10 minute stop desirable anyway? On a 6-7 hour drive from LA to SF, wouldn’t most people stop for 20-30 minutes to get some food and go to the bathroom anyway?

 The more I thought about this, the more I realized how little of an issue range is for an EV with a good battery like the Tesla. Just say you do a long drive five days a year. That means on 360 of the 365 days, you have to do nothing. You just drive, and you never need to stop at a gas station. And the other five days? You’d probably just need to stop for about as long as you would stop on a long drive anyway.

 Seems like a perfect solution, but you need to have a Supercharger along your drive if it’s going to work. Here’s where Superchargers are today in the US:34

 And they’re building them at a furious pace—here’s where they’ll be by the end of 2016:

 Europe and Asia will be equally well-covered.

 For now, only Teslas can use the Supercharger stations, and only the Tesla can really make long-distance drives right now anyway. But down the road, Musk plans to partner with other EV car companies so any EV can stop at one.

 A couple other things about Superchargers: they’re all free to use, and soon, they’ll all be entirely solar-powered. Musk jokes that if there’s a zombie apocalypse, Tesla owners will be fine because they won’t need the grid to fuel their car. And it means that if you had friends to stay with, you could technically drive across the US without taking a wallet.

 This is also going to become even easier with time, because Tesla is making new innovations every year. For example, the Roadster now has a 350 mile range battery and you can just about do LA to SF without stopping—it’s only a matter of time before their cheaper cars have a similar range. Tesla also recently unveiled a new Supercharger feature—the battery swap. A Tesla driver will be able to pull up to a little rectangle and stop the car. The ground opens up and a machine comes out and takes the car’s battery off, brings up a fresh battery and puts it on, and you’re good to go—all in 90 seconds. This would cost $60-80, or as much as an expensive tank of gas—so Tesla drivers would now have the option of “fast or free.”

 So with that problem very close to being out of the way, Tesla seems to only have one issue left:

 Who the hell can afford a $75,000 car?

 The starting price of a Tesla Model S is technically $69,900. But if you want the higher-range cars and the faster charging battery, the price jumps up. There are a bunch of other “well shit now that you mention it yeah I do want that too” features, and a Model S can quickly work its way toward the $100,000 mark.

 Musk is always quick to point out that for the moment, the US offers a $7,500 tax credit for buying an EV of sufficient range. He also points out what I mentioned above about the $2,000-ish a year gas savings. Sure—but even subtracting all that, we’re around $55,000 for a Tesla Model S, which is prohibitive for most people. Tesla has a new car coming out soon—their SUV with Falcon Wing doors, called the Model X—but it’s another Step 2, mid-price / mid-volume expensive car. Doesn’t solve the pricing problem.

 It’s a rule of thumb in the car world that every $5,000 decrease in car price approximately doubles the number of buyers who can afford the car. So if Tesla can somehow come out with a stellar EV for about $35,000 less than the Model S, it would double the buyer pool 7 times, or multiply it by 125-fold. Which would now mean most people could afford it. Let’s bring back Tesla’s Hershey’s Kiss business plan from earlier:

 So Step 3 is what this is all about. Step 3 is why Tesla exists and if Tesla ends up changing the world, it’ll be because of Step 3.

 That car is the Model 3, and it’s coming out in 2017. Supposedly. And it’ll cost $35,000—$27,500 after the tax credit, and after taking gas savings into account, under $20,000. Supposedly.

 But how? Right now, the Model 3 battery costs around $20,000. Even if Tesla ditches the high-tech aluminum body, makes the car smaller, and ditches some of the fanciest things about the Model S, the battery pack alone makes a price like $35,000 impossible.

 How Tesla is solving the high-price problem:

 Big problems call for big solutions. To solve the range problem, Tesla is building a worldwide energy network of Superchargers. And to solve the price problem, they’re building this:35

 That’s what Musk has named the Gigafactory. It’s a $5 billion lithium-ion battery factory, currently being built in Nevada. The factory will be self-sufficient, powered entirely by on-site solar, wind, and geothermal energy, and it will employ 6,500 people.

 Right now, the world’s combined annual output of lithium-ion batteries is 30GWh—mostly for use in laptops and mobile phones. The Gigafactory will make more than that each year, which means it will more than double the total lithium-ion batteries made each year globally. There are two huge benefits to doing this:

 First, Tesla is planning to ramp up production of their cars until they’re producing 500,000 of them a year, and they’re going to need a lot of lithium-ion batteries when they do. Musk’s reasoning is simple: “I know we can’t get enough lithium-ion batteries unless we build this bloody factory, and I know no one else is building this thing.” The numbers make this necessity clear. To make enough batteries for their planned 500,000 cars a year, Tesla will need about 30GWh of lithium-ion batteries a year—the current world output—meaning that without building the Gigafactory, they’d have to use every single lithium-ion battery in the world. Tesla’s Gigafactory will just barely cover Tesla’s needs—if a day comes when every car company is making a ton of EVs, there will need to be many Gigafactories built by many companies.

 Second, by both doubling the world supply of lithium-ion batteries and by continuing to innovate with battery technology, Tesla’s work at the Gigafactory will make batteries a lot cheaper. Musk says the price of the battery should go down by at least 30%. Right now, Musk says Tesla could make their cars with a 500 mile range—they don’t do it because it would increase the cost of the car. But as battery prices go down, EV ranges will go up as well.

 I’m pretty convinced that the Model S is the best expensive car ever made. In its first year, its sales blew away its well-known direct competitors—the S-Class Mercedes, BMW 7-Series, the Lexus LS, and the Audi A8—and it’s been in the lead ever since. But those cars all play in a small space for the very rich.

 It’s the Model 3 that will turn the industry on its head. You may not know much about Tesla today—or particularly care—but I’m pretty sure everyone will know about the Model 3 soon. Maybe that’s why Musk refuses to do any advertising—because he knows that when the Model 3 comes out, he won’t have to.

 The market has taken notice. Tesla’s $226 million IPO in June of 2010 marks the first IPO for an American car company since Ford went public in 1956. Since then, the company’s value has soared upwards. Today, seven years after being on the brink of bankruptcy, Tesla’s market cap is a massive $31 billion. To put in perspective how big a deal that is, I set Tesla’s path to that number down on a graph with the Big Three US automakers (just using straight lines to simplify):

 The car industry forest canopy has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and for decades, no hungry underdog has been able to make a run at it. Tesla hasn’t cracked the canopy yet, but for the first time in a long time, there’s a new company bolting upwards from the ground at lightning speed.

 A Ripple Effect

 If you’re another one of the big car companies, and you’ve been around for decades, and you’re comfortably doing your thing, making slight incremental improvements each year to your existing line of cars—could anything in the world be more annoying than Tesla?

 Remember, the car companies know alllll about electric cars and their benefits. Most of them made an electric car in the 1990s when California mandated that they do, and then the second the mandate went away, they confiscated and literally crushed the cars. Then they whipped the cars into the dump and covered the pile with a tablecloth with a “nothing to see here folks” look on their faces. The scare was over and they could go back to their comfort zone, incrementally improving their gas vehicles.

 Their feelings on EVs make perfect sense:

 Dealerships make a huge amount of profit fixing gas engines, oil filters, and doing oil changes—money they’d stop making when they sold EVs with motors that rarely broke.

 The car companies already know gas cars back and forth, and they’ve mastered the art of making a few tiny new changes to them each year so the new year’s models will be a little better than the previous year’s. But EVs are a new world for them, and they don’t know any more about how to make a good powertrain or improve battery energy density than Tesla does—in fact, they know less, as evidenced by Toyota and Mercedes both buying the Tesla powertrain for their EVs. What a pain in the ass all that R&D would be.

 Most importantly, the world already wants to buy gas cars. There’s no convincing needed—just a few standard TV ads to hone the latest phase of the brand’s image and inform customers about the latest product updates. But EVs are new and scary to customers, and there’s a hump to get over in educating the world about why they should buy one. But the really problematic thing about this is that in order to market an EV well, you need to do what I’m doing in this post and explain all the reasons EVs are obviously a huge step forward from gas cars—which simultaneously sends the message, “Gas cars are dirty, inconvenient, and old-fashioned.” Not a thing you want to do when your current bread and butter is selling 10 million gas cars a year.

 And who wants to deal with all of these things when they could just skip it if Tesla would just go away.

 Franz von Holzhausen has worked at three of these other companies. The way he sees it, “they’re trapped in their manufacturing legacy process, trapped in gas engines being their bread and butter, trapped in their dealership model, trapped in their own history.”

 Musk explains it as a lack of guts and originality: “The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward.”36

 But the Tesla tree is racing upwards, and its impending burst through the canopy has successfully scared the industry. We know this for sure, because when the first Tesla Roadster shipped in 2008, there were no big company EVs on the market. Today, Ford, Chevy, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Fiat, Kia, Mitsubishi, and Smart all have an EV on the road. Not a coincidence.

 So what’s the deal with all of these other EVs?

 Most notable is the Nissan Leaf, introduced in 2010, which has been the highest-selling EV in the world in recent years (though the much more expensive Tesla Model S has topped the industry in EVs sold so far in 2015). The Leaf costs about $30,000 ($22,500 after tax credit) and has a range of 84 miles. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has for a while been one of the few strongly pro-EV voices in the car industry outside of Tesla. He talks about the “cul-de-sac” effect that will begin to accelerate EV sales—i.e. people will be jealous that their neighbor has a more futuristic car and doesn’t have to get gas, will ask questions, and then might get one themselves.

 The recently introduced BMW i3 is currently selling next best after the Leaf and Model S. It costs $43,000 ($35,500 after tax credit) and has a range of 81 miles. BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer has jumped on the EV train, saying, “You have to look into the future, 10, 15, 20 years…cars like the BMW i3 are a must.”

 No other EV has had significant sales yet.23 I asked Musk about the Leaf and the i3. About the Leaf, he said, “The range is too low, but if they keep iterating on that, they’ll eventually get there.” On the i3: “They’re trying to do something there. The range is low, but it’s a step in the right direction, and if they keep going, they’ll get something there.”

 This “Congrats on your first big boy toilet poop, Johnny, now next time try to get the whole thing inside the bowl and you’ll be on your way!” tone is about as effusive as Musk gets when assessing the industry’s current attempts at an EV.

 Volkswagen just hired BMW’s ex-CEO and also seems to be bullish on EVs, and GM is promising big things with their upcoming EV, the Chevy Bolt.

 Other car companies still aren’t convinced. Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche said he doesn’t expect EVs to sell well for a while, because “the customer gets a car with less range, longer refueling times, somewhat less space, and a higher price tag.” The major Japanese companies, Toyota and Honda, are both skeptical about EVs and have been pouring their future into hybrids and hydrogen cars instead. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is so anti-EV that he’s told the world not to buy their Fiat 500e EV, saying they’re only selling it because regulations have forced them to.

 If EVs are the dominant car of the future, they have a long way to go to get there. As of January 2015, there were a total of 740,000 EVs on the road worldwide. Compare that to the whole picture of over 80 million cars sold worldwide annually and over a billion total cars on the road. EVs make up only a fraction of a percent of the car industry. But they’re on the move:37

 So we’re either at the cusp of a new EV-dominated car era or in the middle of another little EV bubble before they vanish from existence again—and as you can see from the quotes above, the car industry is currently divided in which way they’re betting.

 I think we’ll learn a lot more soon, because the world is still yet to see its first true potential EV disruptor. The issue with Tesla right now is most people can’t afford one, and the issue with every other EV is the range sucks. It looks like this:

 The truth is, the typical American drives 37 miles a day on average, and the 80+ mile range options are probably actually plenty for most people. But 80 miles seems like an insufficient range to prospective buyers, and mass adoption won’t happen with that kind of range.

 Tesla’s plan all along was to plant a stellar car right in that Quadrant 4 box, and that’s what they say they’re going to do in 2017 when the Model 3 comes out. A number of other carmakers, including Nissan, Volkswagen, and GM have all declared their intention to release a not-that-expensive long-range EV soon. It’s not clear if any or all of these companies will get into Quadrant 4, but if they do…

 If there are high-quality, affordable EVs for sale that also have a high range…

 I cannot think of one reason anyone would ever buy a gas car again.

 A Tesla-quality car that’s affordable to the middle class would seem to have only pros in the Pro/Con list:

 Pros of an affordable, high-quality, long-range EV over a comparable gas car:

 * Drives better. The instant torque of an EV is like exploding out of a gun. There’s no lag time between your foot touching the pedal and the car moving. Without gears, it accelerates perfectly smoothly. The handling is incredible. It’s silent.
 * More convenient. No stops for gas. Much less need to take the car in for maintenance. No oil changes. More storage because with no engine, the hood is now the frunk (the front trunk).
 * Safer. With no engine, the entire front of the car becomes a crumple zone. That’s part of why the Model S has blown away the safety ratings.
 * Cheaper. No gas or oil, and less maintenance. No longer beholden to fluctuating gas prices.
 * Healthier. No smog in cities, which cause many, many health problems.
 * Oh yeah, and the whole thing about avoiding an environmental, economic, or geopolitical catastrophe.

 Cons of an affordable, high-quality, long-range EV over a comparable gas car:

 * People who love to shift the manual stick around with all their muscle because they’re a cool cat on the open road to destiny can’t do that.
 * Five days a year, when you’re on a long drive, you have to stop for 30 minutes every three hours instead of five minutes every four hours—a con that becomes moot if you would have stopped for 30 minutes anyway every few hours.

 EVs aren’t there yet. Right now, there are legit cons. But as the next few years pass, EVs will get cheaper, battery ranges will get longer and longer, Superchargers will pop up more and more until they’re everywhere, and charging times will just decrease as technology advances. Maybe I’m missing something, and I’m sure a bunch of seething commenters will try to make that very clear to me, but it seems like a given to me: the gas era is over and EVs are the obvious, obvious future.

 An Angry Giant

 The car companies, as I mentioned, aren’t happy about all of this—they’re acting like a kid with a cupcake whose parents are forcing them to eat their vegetables.

 But how about the oil industry?

 Unlike car companies, the oil industry can’t suck it up, get on the EV train, and after an unpleasant hump, continue to thrive. If EVs catch on in a serious way and end up being the ubiquitous type of car, oil companies are ruined. 45% of all the world’s extracted oil is used for transportation, but in the developed world, it’s much higher—in the US, 71% of extracted oil is used for transportation, and most of that is for cars.

 So if the car industry has a cupcake and its parents are forcing it to eat vegetables, the oil industry has a cupcake but its parents are forcing it to eat razor blades. The car industry will resist the veggies and have a little tantrum before grudgingly giving in—the oil industry will furiously try to gouge the parents’ eyes out in resistance because for him, this is life and death.

 And that’s how the oil industry sees EVs—horrifying razor blades. And giant industries don’t just roll over and eat razor blades without a serious fight.

 We’ve seen this before. Tobacco companies fought tooth and nail to stay alive and strong as long as possible when the tide started to turn against them. And the oil industry itself has been fighting tooth and nail for a while now on another front—the battle to keep people confused about whether global warming is a thing.

 Usually in these cases, the industry clawing for survival knows it’s on the way out. But in the meantime, they’re making money, and the longer it takes before the public fully gets the situation, the longer it’ll be before the public uniformly rejects them, politicians are able to regulate against them, and the money finally stops. Time is very much money in these situations.

 The tactic to stay alive longer is always the same—put out misinformation to create confusion, and make it political so half the country feels like they’re going against “their own team” if they side against the industry.

 The super-clever way they create confusion is by generating the public perception that there’s a genuine debate among scientists. That’s how you make a 97% consensus seem like an open question:38

 The same tactic was used a few decades ago when 98% of scientists said smoking caused lung cancer, but the tobacco industry convinced the public for a long time that “scientists disagree” about whether smoking is harmful. The book Merchants of Doubt details how many of the same pro-smoking “scientists” a generation later became the “global warming isn’t a thing” scientists—the actual same people.

 When the 1990 California Zero Emissions Mandate forced car companies to make an EV in order to continue selling cars in CA, the oil industry saw it as a small tumor they needed to swiftly nip in the bud before it grew into a serious threat. Soon, a new voice popped up, a grassroots campaign called “Californians Against Utility Company Abuse” (CAUCA). The campaign staged protests against the state’s proposed utility investments in alternative-vehicle support systems. They also mentioned that “the environmental benefits of electric cars were dubious.”39 But as it turns out, CAUCA was created by a PR firm who was hired and funded by the oil industry. Eventually, the mandate was repealed, EVs disappeared, and the tumor was squashed.

 Now, there’s a new tumor for the oil industry—Elon Musk. Tesla is showing the public directly that EVs are the future and funding the development of technology that’s making EVs better than anyone thought possible. A government mandate is crushable—obsessed Model S owners are not.

 But again, oil doesn’t need to avoid an EV future to have a reason to fight—it just needs to delay the EV future for as long as it possibly can. Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” Big oil’s current mission is “to delay the advent of sustainable transport by making people think EVs aren’t actually better for the environment than gas cars.”

 EVs are most definitely better for the environment—so the oil industry reaches for a key tool.

 There are now a bunch of myths floating around. I didn’t treat them like automatic myths—each time I heard an argument for why EVs are dirty, I dug in and read about it, but each time, there was little basis in fact. Some examples of myths I’ve seen floating around about EVs or Tesla in particular:

 Myth: EV battery disposal is hazardous.

 Actually: A) Lithium-ion cells used in cars aren’t especially hazardous and are classified as landfill safe, B) They’re almost all recycled anyway, and C) They’ll continue to be recycled, because a used car battery still has a lot of value, either as a stationary battery or in the raw materials themselves.

 Myth: Manufacturing a Tesla is much dirtier than manufacturing a Prius or many other gas cars.

 Actually: Expensive cars are dirtier to manufacture than cheap ones. Comparing the manufacturing of a Tesla to a Prius is like saying “Prius’s are dirty because it’s dirtier to manufacture a Prius than a golf cart.” If you compare apples to apples, it’s no dirtier to make a Tesla than a similarly-priced luxury car.

 Myth: EVs are a huge burden on the electric grid.

 Actually: The grid is sized for the worst second of the worst day of the worst year—so there’s usually a lot of excess capacity. You could replace 70% of US gas car miles with EV miles with no changes to the grid. That percentage will also grow even higher as more homes get their power from solar panels.

 Myth: The Tesla uses a lot of graphite in their battery, which contributes to China’s pollution problem.

 Actually: The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.

 But there’s one myth which has been more effective and more pervasive than any of these—the long tailpipe theory.

 The long tailpipe theory is everywhere. Anyone who doesn’t like EVs points it out immediately. So what’s the theory? I’ll let Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld do the honors:

 “The entire reason for doing these stupid little cars is a lie because electricity comes from coal. In some cases, some studies show that these can produce more pollution than internal combustion engines.”40

 Upon first examination, this makes sense. Let’s bring back our US emissions chart to see what Greg means:

 Earlier in the post, we identified the two biggest causes of CO2 emissions: cars running on gas and coal making electricity. The long tailpipe theory’s logic is that all an EV does is shift energy production from the first bad category to the second bad category. Since coal is the most prominent source of electricity in the world, and coal emits about 1.5 times more carbon than oil per joule of energy produced, EVs are actually worse emissions culprits than gas cars.

 When you read about EVs or talk to people about them, you’ll hear this theory come up again and again and again and again.

 The thing you’ll notice, though, is that every time you hear someone all mad about the long tailpipe emissions of EVs, they’re using wording like, “may be” and “often” and, in the case of Greg, “in some cases, some studies show.” That’s because you have to use words like that when you’re saying things that you wish were true but actually aren’t.

 Taking the US as an example, here’s why they’re wrong:

 1) US electricity production is mixed, not just coal. Coal only makes up 39% of US electricity production. And that number’s going down:41

 Natural gas, which emits less than half the CO2 of coal, now makes up over a quarter of US electricity production. Nuclear and renewables emit almost no CO2 and now produce a third of US electricity.

 2) Energy production is more efficient in a power plant than it is in a car engine. To use an example with an identical source fuel, burning natural gas in a power plant is about 60% efficient, meaning 40% of the energy of the fuel is lost in the energy production process. In a car, burning gas is less than 25% efficient, with the vast majority of the energy lost to heat. The larger more complex system at a power plant will always be far better at capturing waste heat than a tiny car engine. The increased efficiency means that even a car running purely on coal-generated electricity will emit carbon at the same rate as a gas car that gets 30 miles per gallon —which would be a significantly cleaner-than-average gas car.

 Because the breakdown of energy source is different in different states, an EV will be greener in some places than others. The US Department of Energy has a great tool to assess exactly how an EV stacks up against a gas car in any zip code in the country.

 In the parts of the country that use very little coal, like upstate New York, an EV’s well-to-wheel emissions are far less than that of a gas car (on the chart, HEV = a traditional hybrid car, PHEV = a plug-in hybrid car):

 In the heaviest coal states, like Colorado, EVs cause a lot more CO2 emissions—but still less than a gas car:

 The national average is somewhere in between, putting an EV at 61% of a gas car’s emissions overall:

 The Union of Concerned Scientists24 came up with a way to directly compare car emissions, regardless of the type of car it is—a metric called “miles per gallon equivalent,” or MPGghg (ghg stands for greenhouse gases).

 MPGghg is how many miles per gallon a gas car would need to achieve in order to match the carbon emissions of an EV (in the EV’s case, the emissions come from the plant that makes the electricity). In other words, if an EV gets 40 MPGghg, it means it emits the exact same amount of carbon as a gas car that gets 40 MPG.

 The average new gas car gets 23 MPG. Anything above 30 MPG is really good for a gas car, and anything below 15 or 17 is bad. For reference, remember that an EV running on just coal-produced electricity would have an MPGghg of 30 (so even in a hypothetical entirely coal-powered state, an EV would be the same as a highly efficient gas car), and an EV running on just natural gas-powered electricity would have an MPGghg of 54 and just top the Toyota Prius, which runs at 50 MPG.

 Here’s a useful map that shows the kind of MPGghg EVs get in different parts of the US:42

 So even for the 17% of the population living in the worst coal states, an EV beats almost all gas cars. This sums it up:43

 And the thing is, each year, that already-nicely-positioned blue bar will make a little jump to the right. Because the grid is getting cleaner every year, it means an EV gets cleaner as time goes by. Gas cars are locked where they are, and they’ll be stuck watching as the future pulls away from them.

 ___________

 I didn’t feel strongly about this topic before I spent a lot of recent time learning about it—and now that I have, I kind of think the only way someone could feel positive about a gas car future is if they’re misinformed, personally financially interested in gas cars, hopelessly old-fashioned, drunk with politics, or kind of just being a dick? Right? They would have to be one of those five things to be super pro-gas car—right?

 The battle going on isn’t about gas cars vs. electric cars. That one’s already decided. This is a war about time. Oil companies will try to slow things down, and they may succeed—but they’re not winning this one. I just don’t see how they could. A company that makes lantern fuel can stay strong for a while by shielding the public from understanding what a light bulb is, but eventually, people will figure it out and lanterns will be out of business, bringing the lantern fuel company down with it. Greasy hoods are old, noisy acceleration is old, overheating engines are old, oil changes are old, and it won’t be long before everyone realizes that. A fun field trip in 2050 will be taking your grandkid to see an old 20th-century gas station and explaining how it worked.25 Driving a gas car is like littering on a camping trail, smoking on an airplane, and throwing a big stack of paper in the trash, and it’s just a matter of time until public disgust catches up to it.

 Zooming Back Out

 Learning to harness the dragon of fire launched our modern world, and still today, we live in the age of burning. But we need to move on—we need to stop plowing through the trust fund and get a job. The dog needs to let the cave go. We need to learn to make energy the adult way—sustainably.

 The sustainable energy world of the future—the yellow zone of our timeline from earlier in the post—is simple. It looks like this:

 1) Almost everything we use will run on electricity.

 2) Almost all of our electricity will be produced from sustainable sources.

 That’s a world running on sunlight and electricity, and burning has no part in that world.

 This transition will happen in steps, over time. At the beginning of the post, we identified the two problems we needed to address most urgently: 1) Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty. 2) Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty.

 We spent the rest of the post zoomed in on Problem 2 to examine how things got that way, stayed that way, and why we may be witnessing the moment it finally changes.

 We won’t get into Problem 1 today—but both Musk, through the US-leading solar panel installation company he co-founded, SolarCity, and Tesla, with their new product, the Powerwall stationary battery,26 are leading the way in this half of the energy equation too. For those interested, I put up a mini post on solar power and SolarCity.

 People don’t quite realize it yet, but as of this moment, a family or business has the option to individually move themselves into the sustainable future. Using products made by SolarCity and Tesla alone, you can today live in a home and drive a car that are both powered by a solar panel-connected battery and live entirely on sunlight. Musk and his companies have made a little yellow brick road right out of the Fossil Fuel Era for anyone who wants to leave. And if modern technology can allow individual people, businesses, or even whole cities to live without fossil fuels, it hints that the only era any of us has ever known might be soon coming to an end.

 How to Change the World

 A study of Tesla isn’t about a car or a car company—it’s about how change happens. And about why it often doesn’t happen.

 Our intuition tells us that technology, social norms, movements and ideas just move forward through time, as if forward progress is a river and those things are on a raft gliding through. We so associate the passage of time with progress that we use the term “the future” to refer to a better, more advanced version of our present world.

 In reality, if a more advanced future does happen, it’s because that future was willed into our lives by a few brave people. The present isn’t welcoming of an advanced future because the present is run by a thick canopy made up of the ideas, norms, and technologies of the past. There’ll be incremental tweaks and slight iterations on proven-to-work concepts, which may seem to us like moving into the future, but it’s really just a polishing up of the past.

 When the real change arrives, you know you’re seeing it. It’s a distinct and exhilarating feeling when you witness a disrupting innovator ram its way through the canopy. I had that feeling when I watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone in 2007. Before that moment, I had assumed that the ubiquitous Blackberrys and Nokias and Razors of the world were cutting-edge technology—but that keynote was an epiphany about how buried in the past those phones actually were. You don’t realize your Blackberry sucks until the iPhone exists. The feeling I had watching that keynote is the same feeling I had when I was six and I saw someone type on a computer word processor for the first time, and the last word on the line would magically jump to the line below when it hit the edge. Typewriters, which had seemed normal that morning, were suddenly ancient. The same thing happened when I saw the first iPod and became instantly disgusted with my horribly clunky and inefficient big booklet of CDs.

 I had this feeling again, last month, when I test drove a Tesla Model S. I had driven to the Tesla factory that morning in what had felt like a brand new rental car, and I left the factory in the same car, now feeling like a 1982 model. I get now why Matthew Inman calls his Model S a “magical space car”—because that’s how it felt. That’s how a new, revolutionary technology always feels. Our modern world became as advanced as it is not by floating up an inevitable advancement river, but because of a collection of moments over time when a person or company has done something that makes everyone’s jaw drop.

 But those world-changing moments don’t just smoothly glide into the world: these leaps into the future usually have to jam themselves through the canopy and then battle to keep themselves there. The past, which likes to loiter casually in our present world, hates when a piece of the future bursts onto the scene, because that exposes the past for being what it really is—the past. So a new and disruptive technology is often met with hostility as it emerges, as the existing canopy does whatever it can to squash the potential disruptor out of existence before it can gain momentum and start to spread. The old guard knows that once a disruptor gets a foothold and starts quickly spreading its ideas, the entire game changes—and once that balance tips, now instead of trying to squash the disruptor, everyone has to scramble to try to emulate it.

 What Tesla is doing right now is an up-close example of how that kind of change happens.

 The idea to change the car industry started as brainwaves zipping around Elon Musk’s head, as Christie Nicholson learned the hard way, but Musk couldn’t do much about it on his own. To make the idea real, he had to scale those brainwaves up, and he did that by building Tesla. That brought a new player into the car industry, run by a collective super-brain made up of 11,000 Tesla employees who also happened to think a lot about electric cars.

 Change doesn’t happen on a familiar landscape—change has to construct the landscape itself. This is part of the reason the challenges Tesla has taken on are so enormous. Henry Ford didn’t just build a car—he built a landscape, defining what a car was. Since then, car companies have worked within Ford’s landscape. Bringing back what Musk said about Ford—He was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed—it’s clear that this is exactly what Musk and Tesla are doing right now. If there aren’t enough charging stations for long-trips, build an energy network of Superchargers. If scalability is held back by the high price of lithium-ion batteries, build a factory that doubles the world supply of them to bring the price down. Just get it done.

 But with a goal as ambitious as “accelerating the advent of sustainable transport” and a victory condition as far-reaching as “half of all new cars being electric,”27 building one great car company isn’t enough. To bring Musk’s original idea to the next level, Tesla would need to scale itself. To do that, Tesla is building a line of cars so stellar that it’s going to change the public’s expectations of what a car should be, and the whole industry will have to adjust to that new expectation.

 And by solving so many EV problems for its own cars, it’s forging the path to an EV-dominated world for all the other companies too. A company trying to rise to the top of their industry would hold their innovation secrets close—but because Tesla’s goal is to transform the industry, in 2014, Tesla made all of their patents available to whomever wanted them.

 Other companies are critical to the mission, because Tesla’s goal is to ramp production up to 500,000 cars, which is only around half a percent of the total cars made each year. He explained, “The impact that Tesla will have is fairly small in and of itself. It will change people’s perception perhaps, but it will not in and of itself change the world. But if large numbers of people are choosing to buy the Model 3, and the car companies see that there’s no excuse left anymore because the car’s long range and the car’s handling and acceleration is better in every way than a gasoline car, and it’s affordable—and people are pretty sure this is what they want to buy—then that’s what will prompt car companies to invest real money into electric vehicle programs of their own, and indirectly, by spurring competition, Tesla can be the catalyst for a multi-order of magnitude shift of the entire industry towards electric.”

 That’s how to spread the brainwaves of a single person throughout a huge industry and the global public—and by the time it’s done, everyone will think a lot about electric cars.

 Maybe I’m wrong about something, or maybe something unexpected happens—but from what I’ve seen, read, and talked about, it really seems like Tesla is going to fulfill its mission and change the world. It’s going to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. If the Model 3 ends up being as great as they say it’s gonna be, there’s no doubt in my mind that electric cars will be the norm far earlier than they would have been. Which will, in turn, mean that 50 years from now, the atmosphere’s CO2 level will probably be lower than it would have otherwise been, cities will be less smoggy than they would have otherwise been, global temperatures will be lower than they would have otherwise been, the sad polar bear will get to eat seals again, along with about 12 other positive effects that will legitimately affect our lives. Pretty down-the-middle definition of changing the world.

 Meanwhile, this is what Musk spends two days of his week on. With the rest of his time, he’s trying to make humanity a multi-planetary species—a goal that makes his Tesla mission seem like starting a grapefruit stand. We’ll get into all that in the next post.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!

 If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 Next up in this series:

 Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

 Other posts in the series:

 Part 1: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
 Part 4: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce

 Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
 Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop
 Extra Post #3: SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket — The Full Story

 And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company: Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

 ___________

 Some other Musk-y Wait But Why posts:

 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

 The Fermi Paradox

 Putting Time in Perspective

 And the least Musk-y post ever:

 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate


 Sources:

 IPCC: Special Report: Emissions Scenarios
 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – Flowcharts Archive
 McKinsey & Company: Road toward a low-carbon future: Reducing CO2 emissions from passenger vehicles in the global transportation system
 EIA: International energy data and analysis
 NPC Global Oil & Gas Study: Topic Paper #4: Electric Generation Efficiency
 BP: Statistical Review of World Energy 2014
 Documentary: Who Killed the Electric Car?
 Documentary: Revenge of the Electric Car
 Shades of Green: Electric Cars’ Carbon Emissions Around the Globe
 Scrips: Graphics Gallery
 IEA: Availability of Fossil Fuels
 Judy and Curtis Anderson: Electric and Hybrid Cars: A History
 Interview: Baidu CEO Robin Li interviews Bill Gates and Elon Musk
 BBC: 50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy
 Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport
 Andrew Pollack: “General Motors Sues California Over Quota for Electric Car Sales.” The New York Times, 2001
 Consumer Reports: Tesla Model S – The electric car that shatters every myth
 Alex Taylor, Fortune Magazine: Toyota: the Birth of the Prius
 Rolling Stone: Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
 NYTimes: Elon Musk Says Self-Driving Tesla Cars Will Be in the U.S. by Summer
 Tesla Blog: The Mission of Tesla
 Tesla Blog: The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Car
 Green Car Reports: Despite Quick Charging, Toyota Exec Says Electric Cars Won’t Work For Long Ranges
 Richard Muller, NYTimes: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
 Yahoo Finance: Tesla Motors Launches Revolutionary Supercharger Enabling Convenient Long Distance Driving
 EIA: What are the products and uses of petroleum?
 EIA: How much carbon dioxide is produced when different fuels are burned?
 Bloomberg: Teslas in California Help Bring Dirty Rain to China
 TED Talks: Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
 Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk
 SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk

 1. I come across much more in my research than I have room to fit in these posts, so I’ll tuck extra tidbits and related thoughts into these blue circle footnotes throughout the post. Click these if you have time.↩

 2. As for how the sun got its energy in the first place, it’s a very physics-y explanation. The sun is full of particles that have mass. Mass has gravitational potential energy. When so many particles are gathered in one place like they are in the sun, they squish together unpleasantly until they combine with each other, which is called nuclear fusion, and it’s an intense process that releases a ton of energy. So to say it boringly, the gravitational potential energy of the sun’s particles ignites fusion, which generates radiation energy, and that’s the energy we receive from the sun on Earth. I’m regretful that this was the first footnote, because people are likely to click on the first one to see whether footnotes are actually interesting or not and then plan accordingly from there—and this was a kind of dull first footnote.↩

 3. A calorie is about 4 joules. When you see capital-C “Calories” on the back of a nutrition label, though, it’s a kilocalorie (1,000 calories). So a food Calorie is 4,184 joules.↩

 4. People would indicate the power of a particular steam engine by how many horses it could replace—the origin of the term “horsepower.”↩

 5. When you see power lines on the street, all they’re doing is delivering the joules of a far-away fire to people’s homes. Kind of an obvious point, but I never quite thought of it that way.↩

 6. As far as reserves of traditional oil, the Middle East is king. I found this map (from this source) interesting, because it shows how little of the land you actually need to be over oil fields in order to be an oil-rich country.↩

 7. Interesting that we all think plants grow up from the ground, when in fact the stuff of the plant—carbon—actually comes from the air.↩

 8. To keep things simple, I left water out of all of this, but water is absorbed into the tree as a key part of photosynthesis, and during combustion, water vapor is one of the emitted products. Wood and fossil fuels aren’t just carbon, they’re hydrocarbon, and the hydrogen comes from water absorbed by the plant’s roots.↩

 9. By drilling deep down in the Antarctic ice and extracting a column, scientists can analyze the trapped air inside—the farther down in the column, the farther back in time the bubbles were trapped. Using this technique, scientists are able to determine A) the CO2 levels in the atmosphere at each time, and B) the air temperature levels at each time.↩

 10. The oscillation is due to the fact that we’re in the midst of a 5 million year long ice age with roughly 100,000 year long cycles. Between each 100,000 year ice cycle is a roughly 10,000 year “interglacial” period, during which there’s still ice on the poles but temperatures are moderate. We’re in one of those little interglacial periods right now.↩

 11. On hour three of the “how a car engine works” rabbit hole, I finally had to acknowledge that I was going to die at some point in the future and stopped myself.↩

 12. This is a whole, long, complicated story. General Motors actually had made a great electric car in the 90s that customers loved, called the EV1. But GM realized that if the car caught on too much, the California mandate would look like a huge success and other states might decide to do it too. Meanwhile, customers might also decide they all wanted electric cars. None of this would be ideal, considering that GM makes 10 million new cars a year, 99.9% of them run on gas, and it would suck if GM’s entire inventory was suddenly seen as outdated. So GM and the other companies did their best not to sell their electric cars, to show how little the world wanted them and how big a failure the California mandate was. After using all the muscle they had to shut down the mandate (with the help of the Bush administration, whose Chief of Staff, Andy Card, was CEO of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association previously), car companies whisked the new electric vehicles they had made off the roads. GM, who had only leased the EV1 to customers, demanded each one returned, against the pleading wishes of their lessees, and then had all of them crushed like the mafia offing a bad apple they wanted to make disappear. EV1 lovers staged a funeral for the cars. Not many instances in history when a company has torn a product away from paying customers who cared so much about it they’d read eulogies about it. The well-made documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, made in 2006, tells the whole story (the sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, made in 2011, tells the story of Tesla and the recent resurgence of the electric vehicle market).↩

 13. Musk reportedly did not get laid that night.↩

 14. Alternating current is the type of current that comes out of your home outlets and it generates power by electrons moving back and forth in a quick vibration in the wire. This is opposed to DC, or direct current, which is the more intuitive type, used with batteries, where electrons flow through a wire in a single direction (since electric cars use batteries, the battery produces direct current, which then has to be converted into alternating current through a box in the car called an inverter). Back in the 1880s, Thomas Edison, who was heavily invested in DC, engaged in a battle with George Westinghouse, who had teamed up with Nikola Tesla to push AC, over the best way to power homes. This was called The War of Currents. Tesla’s AC won because it could travel over much larger distances without overheating—Edison’s way would have needed lots of small power stations so that each home was relatively close to one of them, while AC could be produced in a huge power plant and then travel far away through a grid.↩

 15. Faraday, who discovered induction, was their second choice.↩

 16. I cued up this video to where you can hear Musk call hydrogen cars “bullshit” and then go on a little rant about them.↩

 17. Among many reasons hydrogen cars seem inferior to EVs, here are four:

 1) Hydrogen cars seem beholden to natural gas, a fossil fuel, in order to extract the hydrogen fuel, while electric cars get cleaner over time as electricity production gets cleaner.

 2) When it comes to energy density, driving range, and cost, the best case scenario for hydrogen cells is similar to where EV batteries are now, and EV batteries will get better with time.

 3) Hydrogen is a somewhat dangerous and difficult-to-handle substance that’s a nightmare compared to the simple wall-outlet electricity EVs use.

 4) Down the road, when the norm is to charge the car up in your garage, it’s going to seem primitive to have to go to a station to fuel up.

 In an email exchange I had with Musk about hydrogen cars, he explained it like this:

 If you take electricity coming from a solar panel and charge a battery, you can get ~90% efficiency. Simple and cheap. Instead, if you use that electricity to split water, separate the hydrogen with extreme purity, pressurize it to crazy levels (or, even worse, liquefy), transfer it to a giant (even in liquid form) hydrogen storage tank in the car and then recombine it with oxygen to generate electricity, you would be lucky to get ~20% efficiency. Expensive, complex, bulky and super inefficient. It loses on every dimension, including refuel time when pack swap is factored in.

 Cost is bad for fuel cells, but that is only one of many bad dimensions. If fuel cells were in any way better than lithium batteries, they would at least be used in satellites, some of which cost over $500 million. They are not.

 Finally, if I wasn’t already convinced, this highly-detailed, fairly devastating takedown of the argument hydrogen cars left me feeling eternally puzzled about why the Japanese companies would want to go further down that road.↩

 18. When you click a footnote next to “kWh,” you’re signing up to learn what a kWh is. Here we go:

 A watt isn’t a unit of energy, it’s a rate of energy usage—which is a unit of power. The unit of energy is the joule (which itself is the energy required to move one newton one meter). 1 watt = 1 joule/second. 1 kilowatt is 1,000 joules/second. A megawatt is 1 million joules/second, and a gigawatt is 1 billion joules/second. They’re units of power.

 But a watt-hour, like a joule, is a unit of energy. It’s the amount of energy needed to run something at a rate of one watt for one hour. When we talk about car batteries, we don’t use joules because the numbers would be too big and inconvenient. Instead, we use kWh. 1 kWh = 1,000 joules/second over an entire hour = 3,600,000 joules.↩

 19. At the time, they didn’t own the rights to the name yet—some guy in Sacramento did.↩

 20. They were both so sad about this that they still aren’t on speaking terms today.↩

 21. Musk’s thoughts on the role of CEO: “The CEO receives the distillation of all the worst problems in the company, only spending time on the things that are going wrong, and you get all the stuff other people can’t take care of, so you have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company.”↩

 22. I’m sick of writing von Holzhausen with the little v and the upsetting spelling and I wish he had a different name.↩

 23. In the almost-an-EV world of plug-in hybrids, the Chevy Volt ($35,000, 38 mile range before gas kicks in) and the Toyota Prius Plug-In ($31,000, 11 mi range before gas) are the clear leaders.↩

 24. No one in the world sounds less fun to hang out with than a group of concerned scientists.↩

 25. This Nissan commercial does a good job of hammering home the message.↩

 26. You can watch Musk explain everything about the Powerwall here.↩

 27. Musk has a bet going with someone that that will happen by 2027.↩

 1. Gray square footnotes are as boring as you’d think a gray square footnote would be. Just sources—only bother with these if you want to see the source of a quote or fact or find out where you can read more about the topic.↩

 2. GIF source: trumpetb.net↩

 3. Image: Wikimedia Commons.↩

 4. EIA: How much carbon dioxide is produced when different fuels are burned?↩

 5. EIA: Coal Stats↩

 6. EIA: Petroleum Stats↩

 7. Image: Wikimedia Commons.↩

 8. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 9. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 10. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 11. Image: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/story2.html↩

 12. Image: UPI↩

 13. Image: Knoema↩

 14. Image: Ecotricity↩

 15. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 16. Image: USF Ricci↩

 17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Verbiest↩

 18. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 19. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 20. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 21. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 22. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 23. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 24. Image: Wikimedia Commons↩

 25. “Electric Vehicles Attract Attention”. New York Times. Nov 12, 1911.↩

 26. Image: Bold Ride↩

 27. http://www.duke-energy.com/plugin/pev-history.asp↩

 28. GIF: It’s Okay to be Smart↩

 29. GIF: Ajit Vadakayil.↩

 30. Motor GIFs from TD Flash Zone.↩

 31. Image: HD Car Wallpaper↩

 32. Image: Car and Driver↩

 33. Ashlee Vance: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, 307.↩

 34. Image: Tesla.com↩

 35. Image: Tesla.com↩

 36. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, 353.↩

 37. Image: International Business Times↩

 38. Image: http://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-cook-et-al-2013.html↩

 39. Who Killed the Electric Car?↩

 40. Fox News, The Five, 1/27/12, via Nexis↩

 41. Image: Union of Concerned Scientists, The Natural Gas Gamble, 2015.↩

 42. Image: Union of Concerned Scientists, State of Charge, 2012.↩

 43. Image: Union of Concerned Scientists, State of Charge, 2012.↩

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 * 
This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved,   start with Part 1. 
____________
 PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:
     
___________
A Wait But Why post can be a few different things. One type of WBW post is the “let’s just take this whole topic and really actually get to the bottom of it so we can all completely get it from here forward.” The ideal topic for that kind of post is one that’s really important to our lives, and that tends to come up a lot, but that’s also hugely complex and confusing, often controversial with differing information coming out of different mouths, and that ends up leaving a lot of people feeling like they don’t totally get it as well as they “should.”
The way I approach a post like that is I’ll start with the surface of the topic and ask myself what I don’t fully get—I look for those foggy spots in the story where when someone mentions it or it comes up in an article I’m reading, my mind kind of glazes over with a combination of “ugh it’s that icky term again nah go away” and “ew the adults are saying that adult thing again and I’m seven so I don’t actually understand what they’re talking about.” Then I’ll get reading about those foggy spots—but as I clear away fog from the surface, I often find more fog underneath. So then I research that new fog, and again, often come across other fog even further down. My perfectionism kicks in and I end up refusing to stop going down the rabbit hole until I hit the floor.
For example, I kind of got the Iraq situation, but there was a lot of fog there too—so when I wrote a post about it, one fog-clearing rabbit hole took me all the way back to Muhammad in 570AD. That was the floor. Digging into another part of the story brought me to the end of World War I. Another brought me to the founding of ISIS.
Hitting the floor is a great feeling and makes me realize that the adults weren’t actually saying anything that complicated or icky after all. And when I come across that topic again, it’s fun now, because I get it and I can nod with a serious face on and be like, “Yes, interest rates are problematic” like a real person.
I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about. And what I usually find is that so many of the topics I’ve pegged as “boring” in my head are actually just foggy to me—like watching episode 17 of a great show, which would be boring if you didn’t have the tree trunk of the back story and characters in place.
So when it was time to start what I had labeled in my head as “the Tesla post,” I knew this was going to be one of those posts. To understand if and why Tesla Motors matters, you have to understand both the story of cars and the story of energy—two worlds I somehow am simultaneously confused by and tremendously sick of. Just hearing someone say “climate change” or “energy crisis” or “tailpipe emissions” makes me kind of gag at this point—just too much politics, too many annoying people, too much misinformation on all sides, and it’s just hard to know how much I actually care and if there can be a solution to all of it anyway. So I did what I do when my tortoise shits when I’m out of the apartment and then spends hours walking through it and tracking it across everything, including the walls somehow—I rolled up my sleeves, took a deep breath, whispered, “Be a man, Tim,” and started scraping through layers of shit. If I have to live in a world with people arguing constantly about energy and oil and greenhouse gases and incentive programs, I might as well build myself a proper tree trunk.
After weeks of reading and asking questions and writing, I’ve emerged from the tortoise sewage with something that toes the line between a long blog post and a short book. I could have broken this into multiple posts, but it’s all one story and I wanted to keep it all together. It’ll be a bit of a time investment, but I think you’ll come out of it with a sturdier tree trunk about all of this than you have now. And as it turns out, when it comes to this topic, we may be witnessing a very awesome moment in history without quite realizing it yet.
Two disclaimers before we start:
1) This is a highly politicized issue, but this post has no political agenda. I’m not political because nothing could ever possibly be more annoying than American politics. I think both parties have good points, both also have a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things, and I want nothing to do with it. So I approached this post—like I try to with every post—from a standpoint of rationality and what I think makes sense.
2) Spoiler: The post is very pro-Tesla. Which might seem suspicious since A) Elon Musk asked me to write about this and B) I just wrote a post calling him the raddest possible man. But two things to keep in mind:
First, this isn’t commissioned by Musk, and I’m being paid $0.00 for doing it. He suggested I take the issue on because I think he thinks there’s a lack of full tree trunks in people’s heads about it—but he never suggested that I say good things about Tesla, electric cars, or anything else.
Second, the currency Wait But Why lives on is integrity. Without it, WBW loses its ability to make an impact. And integrity came first here, even at the expense of Musk potentially hating me at the end of it, if that’s what was necessary. If I didn’t think this would have made a great WBW topic, I wouldn’t have taken it on, and I’m pro-Tesla in the post because after a ton of learning and thinking—including as many counterarguments to Tesla and its worldview as I could find—that’s how I feel.
And with that, let’s dive in.
Contents
  Part 1: The Story of Energy  
 Part 2: The Story of Cars  
 Part 3: The Story of Tesla
  
___________
   Part 1: The Story of Energy 
   
Energy is important. Without energy, we’d all be like this:
   
But what really is energy? The dictionary says it’s “the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform work.” And it says “work” is “the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.” Putting that together, we get energy being “the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.”
That was pretty unfun, so for our purposes, let’s call energy “the thing that lets something do stuff.”
But the tricky thing about energy is the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed from one form to another. And since every living thing needs energy in order to do stuff—and you can’t make your own energy—we’re all awkwardly left with no choice but to steal the energy we need from someone else.1 1 ← click these 
Almost all of the energy used by the Earth’s living things got to us in the first place from the sun.2 The sun’s energy is what makes the wind blow and the rain fall and it’s what powers the Earth’s living things—the biosphere.
The joule is a common unit of energy—defined as the amount of energy it takes to apply a force of one newton through a distance of one meter3. While the sun’s joules can provide any animal with heat and light, the joules that power all of us from the inside enter the biosphere in the first place when the sun gives them to plants.
   
That’s how food is invented—plants know how to take the sun’s joules and turn them into food.
At that point, all hell breaks loose as everyone starts murdering everyone else so they can steal their joules.
We use “the food chain” as a cute euphemism for this murder/theft cycle, and we use the word “eating” to refer to “stealing someone else’s joules and also murdering them too.” A “predator” is a dick who always seems to want your joules over everyone else’s, and “prey” is just some sniveling nerd you particularly like to bully and steal lunch money from. Plants are the only innocent ones who actually follow the Golden Rule, but that’s just because they have the privilege of having the sun as their sugar daddy—and humans are the biosphere’s upsetting mafia boss who just takes what he wants from anyone he wants, whenever he wants. It’s not a great system, but it works.
And that all went on normally for a while, but in the last few hundred thousand years, humans started to realize something: while it was enjoyable to put new joules into your body, actually using those joules sucked. It’s much less fun to use a bunch of joules running fast or lifting something heavy than it is to just sit on a log pleasantly and hold onto those joules instead. So humans got clever and started to figure out ways to get joules outside their bodies to do work for them—by doing that, humans could have their joules and eat them too. Sometimes the methods would be dickish:
   
But joules aren’t only in living things. There are joules floating and swirling and zooming all around us, and by inventing the concept of technology, humans figured out ways to get use out of them. They made windmills that could steal some of the wind’s joules as it went by and convert them into mechanical energy to grind food. They built sailboats that would convert wind joules into kinetic boat energy they could control. Water absorbs the sun’s radiation joules and turns them into gravitational potential energy joules when it evaporates and then kinetic energy joules when it rains and slides down land, and humans saw the opportunity to snatch some of those up by creating water wheels or dams.
But the most exciting joule-stealing technology humans came up with was figuring out how to burn something. With wind or water, you can only capture moving joules as they go by—but when you burn something, you can take an object that has been soaking up joules for years and release them all at once. A joule explosion.
They called this explosion fire, and because the joules that emerged were in the useful-to-humans formats of heat energy and light energy, burning things became a popular activity.
 Taming a Dragon 
We had learned to harness the joules of the wind and the water—to take those forces by the reins and make them ours—but when it came to the most joule-heavy force of all, fire, we couldn’t really figure out how to do anything with it other than hang out near it, cook some stuff, and generally benefit from its existence. Fire was a hectic dragon and no one had figured out how to grab its reins.
And then came the breakthrough. Steam.
Fire joules were hard to harness, but if you sent them into water, they’d get the water molecules to increasingly freak out and bounce around until finally those molecules would fully panic and start flying off the surface, evaporating upwards with the force of the raging fire below. You’d have successfully converted the thermal energy joules of the fire—which we didn’t know how to directly harness—into a powerful jet of steam we could control.
With the muscle of steam in their toolkit, the inventors of the 18th century burst into innovation. They had some serious joules to work with now, which opened worlds of previously-unthinkable possibility. Breakthroughs led to more breakthroughs, and at the turn of the 19th century, the progress culminated in an invention that’s often called the most impactful turning point in human history: the steam engine.
Picture your tea kettle when it gets all angry at you and starts whistling. Now imagine that instead of the steam spewing out through the nozzle, you connected the nozzle to a tube, which directs the bursting steam into an empty cylinder and then finally releases it. When the steam goes into and then out of the cylinder, it shoves a “piston” inside the cylinder on a powerful back-and-forth motion. That’s (a dramatic oversimplification of) how a steam engine works. Depending on the vehicle, the back-and-forth motion of the piston can do different things. In the example of a locomotive, the piston is attached to a rod whose back-and-forth motion turns the wheels:2
    
Using the steam engine, humanity upgraded from sailboats to steamships and from animal-drawn carts to locomotives.4 Inside factories, people put steam to work too, swapping out their water wheels for much more effective steam-powered wheels.
With the new ability to transport many more goods and materials, much farther away, much more quickly, and to far more efficient factories, the Industrial Revolution ignited in full force. People say the Industrial Revolution was powered by steam, but steam was just the middleman—after hundreds of thousands of years of existing as passive benefactors of combustion, we had tamed the dragon, and the Industrial Revolution was powered by fire. 
 Striking Gold 
The one thing about having made fire our bitch is that we now wanted to burn a lot more things than we ever had before. For most of human history, when people wanted to burn something, they just went and found some wood. Easy. Except now it was the 19th century, and with our new appetite to burn, wood wouldn’t cut it anymore.
We knew there were other things we could burn—in Britain, they would often supplement wood by burning a black rocky substance they found on their shores. They called it coal.
The problem is that unlike wood, most of the coal in Britain wasn’t just sitting conveniently on land—it was underground. When the Industrial Revolution got going, the British started digging—they were gonna need a lot of coal. As the revolution spread through Europe and to North America, Europeans and Americans started digging too—they also were gonna need a lot of coal.
As everyone dug, they started finding other things too. They found pockets of burnable air we call natural gas and underground lakes of thick, black burnable liquid we call crude oil. It turns out that this whole time, humans had been walking around with a vast untapped treasure of tightly packed, burnable joules right underneath them. It was like a dog digging in the woods to bury a bone and uncovering an underground cave full of pulled pork.
And what does a dog do who finds a cave of pulled pork? Does he pause to think cautiously about how to proceed or consider consequences for his health? No—he eats the shit out of it. Mindlessly, at full speed.
And throughout the 19th century, coal mines and oil rigs popped up everywhere. Burning this new treasure of joules made economies soar and the incentive to innovate soared along with them—and new, fantastic technologies were born.
Like steam engine technology, the credit for the electricity revolution is owed to a collaboration of dozens of innovators spanning centuries, but it was in the 1880s that it all finally came together. In what is still probably the most significant technological shift of all time, electricity allowed the raucous power of burning to be converted into a highly tame and remarkably versatile form of energy called electrical energy. With steam as a key middleman, all those spastic combustion joules could now be sent into an organized grid of wires, transferred long distances, and delivered into residential and commercial buildings where it would wait patiently in an outlet ready to be discharged at the user’s convenience.5 At that point, the now electrical joules could be converted into almost any kind of energy—they could boil water, freeze ice, light up the room, or make a phone call. If steam had tamed the dragon, electricity had turned the dragon into a magical butler, forever at our service. And for the first time in human history, the power was on.
Right around the time this was happening, another revolution was underway. Fire was now powering our ships, our trains, our factories, and even the new wizardry of electricity, but individual transportation was still powered by hay like it was 1775—and late 19th century humanity knew we could do better. Biological horses got super upset if you tried to power them by fire, so again, humanity got innovating, and a couple decades later, there were big, metal horses everywhere with engine cylinders full of fire.
As coal, oil, and natural gas motivated unprecedented innovation, the resulting waves of new technologies created an unprecedented need to burn stuff—which motivated the diggers. Companies that focused on digging, sucking, and siphoning up more and more of our underground joule treasure, like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, became the world’s biggest corporate empires. It was a new world, powered by an endless cave of pulled pork, being gorged upon by the world’s happiest dog…
___________
Flash forward to the present day.
Burning our bounty of underground joule-packed fuel to power our world is now an innovation more than two centuries old—but in 2015, it’s still the main way humans get their power:3
    
That’s the thing about dogs—if given something delicious, they tend to eat until the food runs out or they get sick, whichever comes first, and there aren’t too many other factors in play. The modern energy debate essentially boils down to whether it’s okay that the dog is still fully enjoying himself in the cave or whether it’s not because he might be making himself dangerously sick or risk running out of pulled pork—which would be a problem, because he has grown increasingly large since finding the cave, and he has no way outside the cave of feeding his now-immense appetite.
As you might have noticed, there are a lot of people who have a lot of opinions for a lot of reasons saying a lot of things about this situation. And some are saying real things, but a large portion of them either don’t especially know what they’re talking about or they have some ulterior motive for saying what they’re saying. This makes an already complex, murky, multi-faceted topic even more confusing.
So let’s lay out what we do know and try to clarify what the hell is really going on.
To begin with—what exactly are fossil fuels and where do they come from?
Fossil fuels are called fossil fuels because they’re the remains of ancient living things. “Ancient” in this case spans a wide range. The earliest organisms that contribute to today’s fossil fuels lived during the Precambrian Eon, before there were any plants and animals on land—the fossil organisms then would have been ocean algae. People often think fossil fuels are made of dinosaurs, but any dinosaurs in our gasoline are from the last couple hundred million years—the later stretch of the timespan—and only a small contributor. The largest portion of our fossil fuels comes from plants, animals, and algae that lived during the Carboniferous Period—a 50 million year period that ended about 300 million years ago and during which there were lots of huge, shallow swamps. The swamps were important because it made it more likely that a dead organism would be preserved. You don’t become a fossil fuel if you die in a normal place and decompose away. But by dying in a swamp and sinking to the bottom, Carboniferous organisms often ended up being quickly covered by sand and clay and were able to make it underground with their joules still intact.
After hundreds of millions of years, all those organisms were squashed under intense heat and pressure and became converted into joule-dense solid, liquid, or gas—coal, oil, and natural gas. Quick blue box brush-up:
 Fossil Fuels Brush-Up 
 Coal, a black sedimentary rock that’s found in underground layers called coal beds, is the cheapest and most plentiful of the three and is used almost entirely for making electricity. It’s also the worst culprit for CO2 emissions, releasing about 30% more CO2 than the burning of oil and about double that of natural gas when generating an equivalent amount of heat.4 The US is to coal as Saudi Arabia is to oil, possessing 22% of the world’s coal, the most of any nation. China, though, has become by far the world’s largest consumer of coal—over half of the coal burned in the world in recent years was burned in China.5
  Oil, also known as crude oil or petroleum, is a gooey black liquid normally found in deep underground reservoirs. When crude oil is extracted, it heads to the refinery, where it’s separated, using different boiling points, into a bunch of different things. Here’s how a typical barrel of US oil was broken down in 2014:6
 
44.9% gas for cars
29.8% heating oil and diesel fuels
13.8% other products like wax, synthetic rubber, and plastics
9.5% jet fuel (kerosene)
2.0% asphalt
The United States is by far the biggest consumer of oil in the world, consuming over 20% of the world’s oil and about double the next biggest consumer. The US is also one of the three biggest oil producers in the world, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia, who all produce roughly the same amount.6
  Natural gas, which is formed when underground oil gets to a super-high temperature and vaporizes, is found in underground pockets, usually in the vicinity of oil reserves. The “cleanest” of the three fossil fuels, it’s the gas that fires up your stove or heats your apartment (if those aren’t electricity-powered or heated by oil), and it’s one of the major sources of electricity (it makes up about 20% of electricity in the US). Natural gas is on the rise and now makes up almost a quarter of the world’s energy. One of the reasons it’s on the rise is that scientists have found a new way of extracting natural gas from the Earth called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which uses a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to create cracks in natural gas-rich shale and force out the gas. This method has been hugely effective, but it’s also controversial because of some serious environmental concerns—this video explains it well.
As for the reasons people argue that fossil fuels are problematic, we’re going to focus on the two most common—
 ISSUE 1: Climate Change is a Thing 
Let’s ignore all the politicians and professors and CEOs and filmmakers and look at three facts:
 Fact 1) Burning Fossil Fuels Makes Atmospheric CO2 Levels Rise 
We’ll get to the data in a second, but first—why does burning fossil fuels emit CO2?
The answer is simple: combustion is reverse photosynthesis. 
When a plant grows, it makes its own food through photosynthesis. At its most oversimplified, during photosynthesis, the plant takes CO2 from the air7 and absorbs light energy from the sun to split the CO2 into carbon (C) and oxygen (O2). The plant keeps the carbon and emits the oxygen as a waste product. The sun’s light energy stays in the plant as chemical energy the plant can use.
So wood is essentially a block of carbon and stored chemical energy.
When you burn a log, all you’re doing is reversing the photosynthesis. Normally, oxygen in the air just bounces off carbon molecules in wood—that’s why trees aren’t constantly on fire. But when an oxygen molecule gets moving fast enough and smashes into a log’s carbon molecule, they snap together and the oxygen and carbon are reunited again as CO2. This snapping releases chemical energy, which knocks into other nearby oxygen molecules, causing them to get going fast—and if they get going fast enough, they’ll snap together with another of the log’s carbon molecules, which releases more chemical energy. This causes a chain reaction, and the log is now on fire. So a log burning is the process of the carbon in the log combining with oxygen in the air and floating off as CO2.
Of course, that’s all irrelevant to the person burning the log—what they care about is the energy released during all of this CO2 formation. The release of all of the log’s stored chemical energy creates a glorious blaze of heat and light. The tree spent years quietly absorbing carbon molecules and sunshine joules, and all at once, during combustion, that carbon and sunshine explode back out into the world.8
 To put it another way, photosynthesis just kidnaps carbon and sun energy out of the atmosphere, and after years of holding them hostage, combustion sets them both free—the carbon as a billowing eruption of newly reunited CO2, and the sun energy as fire—meaning that fire is essentially just tightly packed sunshine.
But burning a log and releasing all that CO2 does not tamper with the atmosphere’s carbon levels. Why? Because the carbon that’s being released was recently in the atmosphere, and if you hadn’t set the log on fire, it would have likely decomposed, which would release the carbon back into the world anyway. The log’s carbon was only being held temporarily hostage, and releasing it through combustion has little effect.
Carbon flows from the atmosphere into plants and animals, into the ground and water, and then back out of all those things into the atmosphere—that’s called the carbon cycle. At any given point in time, the Earth’s active carbon cycle contains a specific amount of carbon. Burning a log doesn’t change that level because the carbon cycle “expects” that carbon to be hanging around the ground, water, or air.
But sometimes, a small portion of carbon in the cycle drops out of the cycle for the long term—it happens when a plant or animal dies but for some reason doesn’t decay normally. Instead, before it can decay and release its carbon back into the cycle, it’s buried underground. Over time, that lost carbon adds up. And today, the Earth’s fossil fuels make up a huge mass of lost carbon—carbon that long ago was taken hostage permanently, and carbon that the carbon cycle does not expect to be involved in its routine.
When humans discovered all of this underground kidnapped carbon, you have to remember that for them, the carbon wasn’t the point. They were staring at an endless sea of 300 million-year-old, densely packed sunshine—trillions of ancient plants with their joules  intact—and since there are no laws protecting the estates of Carboniferous plants, we could seize it all for ourselves. The grandest joule theft in history.
And as we helped ourselves, we didn’t worry about the fact that extracting those joules also meant extracting carbon that had been buried as far back as the Precambrian period—there were locomotives to fuel and cars to power and buildings to heat, and the joules were irresistible.
And those joules have gone a long way—you can thank them for the comforts and quality of your life today. But those carbon molecules have gone a long way too.
Starting in 1958, scientist Charles Keeling started measuring atmospheric CO2 levels from an observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Those measurements are still going on today. Here’s what they show:7
    
The zig-zaggy motion of the line is due to the level falling each year in the summer when plants are sucking up CO2 and rising up again during the winter when the leaves are dead. But the overarching trend is unmistakable. To put that into context, ice drilling technology9 allows scientists to collect accurate data on what CO2 levels have been throughout the last 400,000 years. Here’s what they’ve found:8
    
So atmospheric CO2 levels have oscillated10 between about 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 400,000 years, never eclipsing 300, and suddenly in the last century the level has vaulted up to 400 (it’s currently at 403ppm).
So instead of the atmosphere being .02% or .03% carbon, it’s now .04% carbon and maybe moving towards .05% and higher. But let’s not judge anything yet. All we know is Fact #1, which tells us that CO2 levels are rising quickly.
 Fact 2) Where Atmospheric CO2 Levels Go, Temperatures Follow 
The ice cores dug up by scientists don’t just reveal the CO2 levels going backwards in time—they reveal temperature too. Here’s what they show:9
    
Not a hard correlation to see. The reason for this is simple—CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The way an actual greenhouse works is the glass lets in sun energy and traps a lot of it inside as heat. There are a handful of chemicals in our atmosphere that do the same thing—sun rays come in, bounce off the Earth, and they’re on their way out when the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere block some of them and spread them through the atmosphere, warming things up.
Mars has an average temperature of -55ºC (-67ºF), which isn’t fun, but Venus is literally actual hell, with an average temperature of 462ºC (864ºF). No one is more of a dick than Venus. Why? CO2. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth so the sun’s energy easily escapes, while Venus’s atmosphere is much thicker, with 300 times the CO2 as Earth, so it traps in a ton of heat. Mercury is closer to the sun than Venus, but with no atmosphere, it’s cooler than Venus. During the day, Mercury gets almost as hot as Venus, but at night it gets freezing, while Venus is just as hot at night as it is during the day, because the heat lives permanently in its thick atmosphere.
So it makes sense that an increase in CO2 here would increase temperature—but by how much? When compared to the Pre-Industrial average temperature, our current average temperature has risen by a little less than 1ºC. But as CO2 levels keep rising, most scientists expect temperatures to keep rising. The UN-supported Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from a bunch of different countries, came out with a report that laid out the temperature projections of a number of independent labs. This is what those labs think will happen if no action is taken to alter the current trends in CO2 emissions:10
    
A small minority argue that these future projections are overblown—they point out that they ride on the largely accepted theory that water vapor in the atmosphere multiplies the effect of carbon emissions because of a “feedback” loop, whereby a small increase in temperature from extra CO2 increases water evaporation, and since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, that creates more warmth, which further increases more evaporation, and on and on. Without this feedback loop, the temperature increases resulting from CO2 emissions would be 2-3 times smaller. But even the greatest skeptics usually agree that CO2 emissions do lead to temperature increases.
The IPCC also puts it at over 90% that the changes in both CO2 levels and temperature are caused by human activity (which is kind of like saying there’s over a 90% chance that a rain storm has been caused by cloud activity). Now the question becomes—how much does the temperature need to change to make everything shitty?
 Fact 3) The Temperature Doesn’t Need to Change Very Much to Make Everything Shitty 
18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice. That’s what 5ºC can do.11
  
100 million years ago, temperatures were 6-10ºC higher than they are now—and every region of the Earth was tropical, there was no permanent ice anywhere, ocean levels were 200 meters higher, and this kind of shit was happening:12
    
So we’re currently in this not-that-big window we probably should try to stay in:
   
This is also even more fragile than is intuitive. First, you don’t need the average temperature to go up by a catastrophic amount to have a catastrophe—because the average temp could go up by only 3ºC but the max temp rises by a lot more. Just one day at an outlier high like 58ºC (136ºF) would wipe out most of the Earth’s crops and animals. Second, because the total range of temperature a planet can be goes all the way down to absolute zero: -273ºC (-459ºF). So a difference of 5ºC, enough to bury the northern part of the world under an ocean of ice, is really only about a 1.5% fluctuation in temperature—not something like 10%, which is what it seems like. Looking at the window on a spectrum that shows the full range emphasizes that the world we’re used to is what it is only because of a very specific and delicate balance of conditions.
   
As mentioned above, right now, the average temp is edging upwards to 1ºC above the Pre-Industrial norm (the IPCC puts us at +.86ºC currently). Scientists debate how high that number can go before really dramatic changes start to happen. For the last 20 years, over 100 countries have agreed to try to limit global warming to a 2ºC increase, but there are all of these different opinions going around about that. Regarding the effects of a 2ºC increase, in my research, I came across some credible sources saying 2º is an unnecessarily low ceiling and that we can afford to safely go higher and others saying that 2º is too high a target and that we’re underestimating how catastrophic a change of 2º would be. Regarding our ability to stay under 2º, I’ve also heard varying opinions—some think we can stay under 2º with proper restrictions; others think there’s no possible way we can stay under 2º—that there’s enough upward momentum already that even if we stopped creating carbon emissions in the next few years, the Earth would keep warming past 2º.
So what are we supposed to make of this?
Our goal today is not to dig deep into these conflicting opinions and try to figure out the truth, because no one knows for sure anyway. We’re not going to talk about specific things like sea levels, pollution, storms, or that polar bear in the video who’s extra sad because his ice is melting. We’re just going to take our three facts and put them all together and see what happens:
   
This simplifies down to:
   
Interesting. But let’s not ostracize the skeptics. We can massage it into a statement that leaves plenty of room for doubt:
 If we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon. 
With this in mind, let’s now move on to the second major concern people cite regarding fossil fuels:
 ISSUE 2: Fossil Fuels Are Endful 
A couple times so far, I’ve referred to our fossil fuels supply, that succulent underground sea of dense energy, as “endless”—because that’s how it seemed in the 19th century and how it often seems today when you realize how much of it is still underground waiting to be tapped. But actually, the Earth’s fossil fuel supply is not endless—it’s endful.
 When we run out is a complicated and hazy question. You have reports like this and this making charts that suggest that if we continue as is, we’re not very far from the end:13
    
Then you have sites like this citing the CIA World Factbook and reminding us that when oil and natural gas run out, the coal usage will ramp up, so we actually have even less time:14
    
 Other sites point out that those cited totals are just referring to proven reserves, and that each year, we’re discovering new sources of fossil fuels, like oil locked in tar sands or abundant reserves of methane hydrate under the ocean floor, and developing new technologies to reach them, like fracking or horizontal drilling. Those sources suggest we’re unlikely to run out of fossil fuels for many centuries. A common counter to those sources is that even without running out, we could face a serious problem if the extraction of the fuels becomes more and more difficult and expensive over time.
The problem with running out, whenever it happens, is that if the world is anywhere near as reliant on fossil fuels at that point as we are now, it’ll cause an epic economic collapse. As fossil fuels grow more and more scarce, prices will skyrocket. That will cause a furious rush to develop renewable energy technology, but it may be too late at that point to prevent a worldwide economic meltdown.
Basically, we’re currently living off of a trust fund we found underground, and we’d better learn how to get a job before it runs out.
For our sum-up for this section, how about:
 At some point in the future, either really soon or just a little soon, we’ll have no choice but to stop running everything on fossil fuels, because they’ll either be gone or too expensive. 
This statement highlights the fact that we’re very much in what will be known as the Fossil Fuel Era of human history.
   
Bringing back our first statement—if we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon—suggests that if we continue to dick around in the black zone until we’re forced out by short supply, we’re risking making the yellow zone permanently worse for humans to exist in.  
This is why Elon Musk likes to say that the indefinite extension of the Fossil Fuels Era is “the dumbest experiment in history.” He emphasized this point to me: “The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be. Given that at some point they’ll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it’ll be? We know it’s at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it’ll be really bad.”
In other words, as it relates to the above timeline—there’s potentially huge long-term downside to staying in the black area for too long, so let’s just get ourselves to the yellow part as soon as we can. Some skeptics I read made what seemed like very valid points, but even most skeptics agreed that burning of fossil fuels causes some degree of warming and that warming might turn out to be harmful. And even if we view this as a genuine debate—when one possibility is “turns out burning fossil fuels wasn’t actually dangerous” and the other side is “turns out burning fossil fuels was horribly catastrophic,” don’t we want to play it safe??
So how do we get from the black to the yellow?
To help us answer that question, let’s turn to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and their useful energy charts. They update the US flowchart every year, and we’ll get there in a minute, but first, let’s check out some of the charts from their 2011 report, where they have a flow chart for every country and the world as a whole for the year 2007. (The charts look icky and confusing at first, but they’re actually really simple—just showing how much of each source is used and how that source is broken up among sectors.)
Here’s the combined world energy flow in 2007:
    
 
The unit, PJ, is in petajoules. 1 petajoule = 1 quadrillion joules. Some thoughts:
– The most consistent fact I noticed about all countries is how much petroleum (i.e. crude oil) dominates the transportation sector. 94% of the world’s transportation runs on oil, and in most developed countries, the percentage is even higher.
– Biomass use is pretty substantial, and almost all of it comes from developing countries, many of them in Africa. Biomass is typically the burning of things like wood, oil distilled down from food like corn, and manure.
– That’s a whole lot of rejected energy on the right side. Rejected energy is energy we lose, usually in the form of heat, due to inefficiency. Especially unimpressive is the transportation performance, where engines only end up using a quarter of the fuel they burn.
Next, let’s look at France: 
    
 
Thoughts:
– Lots of nuclear, and as a result, very little coal. That makes France a pretty light CO2 emitter.
– Their transportation, though, is like everyone else’s—running on oil.
– France is an example of a factor we’re not going to discuss in this post, but an important one: fossil fuels are a bit of a geopolitical nightmare. Nation interdependence can be productive and important, but nations being dependent on other nations for their survival is never a great thing, and the need to import fossil fuels is one of the major reasons for modern nation ultra-dependency. France is totally reliant on oil for its transportation and totally reliant on other countries for oil—this puts them in a vulnerable position. The US isn’t as dependent. It relied on other nations for 60% of its oil a decade ago but has since become one of the top three oil-producing countries, and the EIA projects net oil imports to make up only 21% of the US’s 2015 oil consumption. I was also surprised to see that only a small portion of US oil imports were from the Middle East, with only 12.5% of them coming from Saudi Arabia and 20% from the entire combined Persian Gulf. Far more was from the Western Hemisphere, with Canada by far the largest at 37% of imports and Mexico and Venezuela also prominent at 9% each.
Okay and how about China? 
   
China is an energy monster, mostly because they’re an industrial monster. They’re also a coal-burning beast, burning through almost half of the world’s total coal consumption each year. That 57,000 PJ of coal consumption number is insane—over five times France’s total energy flow.
 Saudi Arabia: 
   
Kind of a one-trick pony.
North Korea’s energy flow is, unsurprisingly, just weird:
   
You can check out the full report to see the rest of the countries.
Now let’s move to 2013 and look at the US energy flow. The unit is different here. A quad = 1 quadrillion BTU, which is about 1,000 petajoules.
  
Two things that stand out:
– The US has become a natural gas consumption beast and by far the biggest one in the world.
– The US is even more of an oil-consumption beast—almost double the second biggest oil-consuming country, China, and more than four times #3 on the list, Japan.
To put in perspective how much energy the US uses, I found a country in the world that uses a similar amount of energy as each US state:
   
Finally, let’s go back to the reason we started with these charts in the first place—to figure out how we’re gonna get from the black part of the timeline to the yellow and out of the fossil fuels area. The LLNL also produces a chart showing the US carbon emissions and where they come from. The US is the world’s second biggest carbon emissions culprit (China is first with 50% more than the US) and the world leader in transportation emissions—so if we can figure out what the US needs to fix, that’s a good start.
Getting from the black to the yellow means getting rid of carbon emissions. Looking at the US emissions flowchart, I see two glaring numbers:
   
There are many things that need to happen to get us into the yellow zone, but these two figures—which make up 72% of total US emissions—seem like the biggest and most urgent problems to address:
1) Electricity production throughout the world makes up about 40% of the total energy flow, and roughly two thirds of electricity production comes from burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels, most prominently coal. Or, put simply: Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty. 
2) Transportation makes up a large chunk of the world’s energy flow, including near a third in most developed countries, and almost all the world’s transportation runs on petroleum. Put simply: Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty. 
We’ve spent this post zoomed far out on all of this. Now it’s time to zoom in, and we’ll zoom in on the second major problem listed above—transportation, and in particular, cars. Transportation covers planes, trains, ships, trucks, and cars—but cars cause more carbon emissions than the other four combined, and without major changes, car emissions are expected to rise by over 50% by 2030. By zooming in on one major piece of this puzzle—car emissions—and examining how it became a problem, why it’s still a problem, and the way we might solve that problem, we’ll get a better sense of what this entire struggle is really made of.
   Part 2: The Story of Cars 
   
Meet the world’s first car owner.15
    
That’s the Chinese Emperor, Kangxi, in his driving clothes. He got the car in 1672, when he was 18. It was given to him by the first car-maker.16
    
That’s Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit missionary who apparently didn’t have time to get his hands in a normal position before the painter had already finished. Verbiest spent his life in China, where, in 1670, he became the empire’s chief mathematician and astronomer after winning a contest against a rival over who could create the most accurate calendar—the loser would be “cut up into bits while still alive”17. In his new position, he started inventing things, one of which was the first-ever car, which he made as a toy for the emperor. It was sleek.18
    
It wasn’t big enough to hold a driver, but by figuring out how to boil steam and aim it at a spinny wheel that rotated a gear that would turn the front wheels, Verbiest had created the world’s first known self-propelled vehicle.
Verbiest’s car would remain world class until 1769, when French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot finally figured out how to improve upon it by inventing the first car that could hold a driver.19
    
Next came this little sassypants:20
    
That’s François Isaac de Rivaz, who in 1807 invented the world’s first internal combustion engine and a little vehicle to go along with it.21
    
With a steam engine, the fire burns outside the engine and heats steam inside the engine to make it work. So it’s an external combustion engine. An internal combustion engine cuts out the steam and burns the fuel inside the engine itself to generate power.
But it would take until 1886 for the arrival of the first actually-useful car, invented by German engineer Karl Benz, along with his wife Bertha Benz, who I might love, and his mustache.22
    
Their car is considered the world’s first real automobile—the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.23
      
The car cost $1,000 ($26,248 today), had three wheels, and was powered by a primitive version of a modern internal combustion engine.
A few years later, across the world in the US state of Michigan, a young farm boy named Henry Ford, deciding that taking over his family farm would “bore his dick off [sic],” applied for a job to work for Thomas Edison. Edison’s company was busy rolling out electrical generating systems to power US cities, and working on these, Ford got good at working with the steam-powered engines the company used to make electricity. In his spare time, Ford sat in a little workshop next to his home playing around with the still-novel concept of the internal combustion engine, and in 1896, at the age of 32, he came up with what he called the Ford Quadricycle, powered by a simple internal combustion engine.24
    
Becoming increasingly obsessed with building self-propelled vehicles, Ford quit his job in 1899 and first formed the Detroit Automobile Company, which failed, before forming the Henry Ford company in 1901. But Ford soon left the company over a dispute with the company’s investors, who then renamed it Cadillac Automobile Company, and in 1903, he went on to partner with a guy named Alexander Malcomson to create a company called Ford &amp; Malcomson, Ltd., which was later renamed Ford Motor Company. Super annoying for Malcomson.
Ford and his new company charged ahead making gas-powered cars, but at the time, gas cars were hardly the norm. Cars were a new technology, and at the beginning of the century, 40% of American cars were powered by steam and 38% were electric—gas cars only made up 22% of the American market.
These numbers make sense. Steam-centered external combustion was the older and best-understood technology of the three and was initially the most common way to power a car. Its fancier new cousin, the internal combustion engine, powered by burning gasoline, cut out the middleman and burned fuel more efficiently. But it’s no surprise that the quickest up-and-comer type of car was the electric car. It was 1900 and electricity was at the core of all the coolest, newest technology.
The 35 years between the mid-1860s and the turn of the century had just witnessed an electricity revolution, driven by inventors like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and George Westinghouse, during which the world went from normal to positively magical. The first magic happened in the middle of the century, when the telegraph used long-range electricity to communicate with people really far away, and in 1866, the first successful cross-Atlantic telegraph message was sent, allowing Europe and the US to magically communicate with each other instantly. The magic revolution hit full force in the late 1870s. The first telephone call happened in 1876, followed by the first time in human history someone could record sound and then play it back, in 1877. Light bulbs began to light up city streets in the early 1880s, and by 1896, the first electrical grid brought widespread electricity into people’s homes. Also in 1896, the first primitive motion picture went on display in New York, and the first wireless transmission of a human voice—the birth of the radio—went through in Brazil in 1900. Meanwhile, magical horseless cars were appearing on the streets, and only a few years later, in 1903, the Wright Brothers would take humanity’s first heavier-than-air flight. It’s hard to imagine how insanely cool a time this must have been for everyone.
And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity.
So if someone in the year 1900 had to bet on the outcome of the battle between external steam combustion, internal gasoline combustion, and electricity as the future standard for powering cars, they’d have probably put their money on electricity. And at the time, electricity was not only winning the battle over gasoline with far more cars on the road, but the world’s most prominent inventors, including Edison and Tesla, were pouring their efforts into an electric car future. Early in the century, the New York Times referred to the electric car as “ideal,” citing it as quieter, cleaner, and more economical than the gas car.25
 But ideal wasn’t the driving force of the early auto industry—scalable was. Cars were, up until that point, fairly impractical toys for rich people. There would be time to idealize everything later—the first step was to figure out how to make the car fast, sturdy, and most importantly, affordable. Money and brains poured into car technology from all over the world, and in 1908, Henry Ford and his five-year-old company came out with the car that launched the automotive industry into the stratosphere: The Model T.26
    
Before the Model T, there had been big problems with both electric and gas vehicles. Electric had shorter ranges and longer refueling times. Gas cars were loud, hard to start, and spewed smoke like it was 1802.
But Ford was a masterful industrialist, and by coming up with the concept of making cars by moving assembly line instead of hand-crafting them, he dramatically brought down costs and created America’s first car for the masses. In 1912, engineer Charles Kettering invented the electric car starter, eliminating the need to laboriously and dangerously hand crank your gas car on, and the newly invented muffler significantly reduced gas engine noise. Suddenly, a lot of the things that sucked about gas cars didn’t suck anymore—and they had become much cheaper than electric cars. Ford’s Model T took over America, and by 1914, 99% of new American cars ran on gas. By 1920, electric cars dropped entirely out of commercial production.27
 This was not an inevitable outcome. The future of cars had been up for grabs, and Ford had simply outsmarted his competition. Burning fuel was the way of the past and electricity was the way of the future—but Ford had created a provable, profitable business model for making cars, one that didn’t yet exist for electric cars, and it quickly became too much of an uphill battle for electric car makers to try to turn the tide. So they stopped.
___________
Now it’s a century later. The most primitive local telephone call through a wire has become a person in Delhi being able to take a slab of glass out of his pocket, tap it with his finger, and instantly be talking to, and looking at, his friend in Sao Paulo. The grainiest, choppiest black-and-white silent movies have become Pixar. Mixing chemicals in a lab has become splitting atoms in the Large Hadron Collider. The Wright Brothers’ 12 second, 120-foot flight has become routine trips 250 miles up to the International Space Station.
But instead of me finishing that paragraph with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become [something rad we can’t even imagine],” I have to finish it with, “The primitive gas-burning car has become the better gas-burning car.”
As I said, if you were alive in 1900, you’d have probably thought the idea of an AC induction electric car motor was awesome and futuristic, and the internal combustion engine, which was only an incremental advance from the early locomotive steam engines invented a century earlier, was kind of cool but not especially futuristic. But we’re not alive in 1900, we’re alive in 2015, so when we look at the modern gas engine that’s in all of our cars, and we see pistons moving back and forth because of something hot exploding inside their cylinders—28
    
—they should seem outrageously ancient. Quick aside:
 Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box 
Welcome to the Tim Makes Passionate Car People Even More Furious By Describing How a Car Engine Works in a Clearly-Non-Car-Person Way Blue Box. Here’s the deal:
The animation above is of a four-stroke, four-cylinder engine. The four cylinders are those four tubes the pistons are moving up and down inside of. Each time a piston slides up or down, that’s called a stroke, and the fuel-burning happens in a four-stroke cycle:
 1) The Intake Stroke: This is the part where the piston is moving down and there’s blue stuff above it. The blue stuff is air that’s being sucked in along with a small amount of gasoline that’s fired in at just the right time by the fuel injector.
 2) The Compression Stroke: This is the stroke where the piston moves up and as it does, the blue stuff turns orange. What’s happening is that the valve that let the air in on the intake stroke has now closed and as the piston moves up, there’s nowhere for the air/gas mixture to go, so it just compresses really tightly.
 3) The Power Stroke: This is the stroke I feel like passionate car men talk about with a little twinkle in their eye. In the animation, this is where the piston moves down and there’s orange above it which then turns gray by the end. The previous compression stroke has squeezed the air and gas tightly, and at the top of that stroke, the spark plug at the top of the cylinder emits a spark which ignites the compressed air and gas on fire and creates a little explosion. This explosion blows the piston back downwards. This stroke is where the power of the car engine comes from.
 4) The Exhaust Stroke: This is the part where the piston pushes the gray stuff up and out of the cylinder. The gray stuff is exhaust—i.e. smoke because you just lit a campfire in that cylinder—that then makes its way out of the car’s tailpipe. This smoke consists of mostly non-toxic gases with a little carbon monoxide and other poison mixed in for fun. Also in the exhaust is the carbon dioxide that just got created during the explosion, which allows the long-buried carbon in the gasoline to happily re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere after the most boring 300 million years ever underground.
The furious back-and-forth motion of the pistons work together to forcefully turn what’s called a crankshaft—that metal bar contraption they’re all connected to below—which creates the turning motion that eventually turns the car’s wheel axles. I think.11
 (For more info: first two minutes of this video shows this all in action, and this is aesthetically pleasing.)
Now. I’ll admit that car engines are cool. And I can see why some people are kind of obsessed with them. But when I look at these two animations next to each other—
 1815 locomotive engine: 
   
 2015 car engine: 
   
 —they look too similar to be 200 years apart. 
“Hot explosions in cylinders pushing pistons back and forth to force metal bars to turn wheels and sending the resulting smoke billowing out of a pipe” sounds like an old-fashioned technology, and it’s just very odd that we’re still using it today. We get used to the world we live in, whatever that world is like, but if you examine history and take a big step back, some things suddenly make no sense. And this is one of them.
So the question we need to ask is why.
If electric motors were the more advanced technology—if they were considered ideal because they were quiet, clean, and took advantage of cutting edge technology—why did the world give up on them? In 1900, neither electric nor gas cars were viable for mass adoption—both needed a few key technological breakthroughs. The key breakthroughs needed for gas cars happened first—but why was that reason for us to just settle, permanently, for the more primitive technology and the one that, over time, would make our cities smoggy and change the chemical makeup of our atmosphere? If 20th-century human invention could go from the Wright Brothers’ 12-second flight to the moon in just 66 years, surely advancing battery technology enough to bring electric car prices and charging times down while increasing range shouldn’t have been beyond our scope. Why did innovation and progress in something as important to the world as car-powering technology just stop?
This question could be asked about other parts of the bigger story of the Fossil Fuels Era. You could just as easily puzzle over the question, “America’s first electricity power station, Edison’s Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, first lit up in 1882, powered by burning coal—how is it possible that in 2015, burning coal is still by far the primary way humanity produces electricity even though we’ve known for decades that it’s not an optimal or sustainable long-term method?”
The problem with the question “Why did X technology stop moving forward?” is that it’s misunderstanding how progress works. Instead of asking why technological progress sometimes stops, we have to ask the question:
 Why does technological progress ever happen at all?  
The mistake of the first question is the intuitive but incorrect notion that technology naturally moves forward on its own over time—it doesn’t. I can tell you this for sure, because my Time Warner DVR has the exact same horrible user interface it had in 2004. The way technology works is that by default, it stands still, and it moves forward only when something pushes it forward.
We often have the same intuitive misconception when we think about evolution. Natural selection doesn’t make things “better”—it just optimizes biology to best survive in whatever environmental circumstances it finds itself. When something in that environment changes—a predator mutates and becomes faster, a certain type of food becomes scarce, an ice age rolls in—it means species that were previously optimized to the environment no longer are. The environmental change alters the natural selection criteria, which applies a pressure on the species as it is, and over time, the genetics of the species will react to the pressure by changing in order to optimize to the new environment.
When it comes to technology, a totally free and open market is the natural environment. But unlike the world of species, which is the eternal Wild West, human societies have another factor in play—a god-type force called government. So if we’re trying to figure out what makes technology move and change, we have to look at two sources of pressure: natural market conditions that ebb and flow and apply continual new pressures on all the actors within, and the “god” on top who can artificially change the environment below to create manufactured pressures. Let’s examine both, starting with government:
 1) Pressure From Government-Induced Environment Changes 
The nature and power of a market’s government-god varies significantly throughout the world. In North Korea, it is a Biblical-style, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful ruler of the universe to the point where there is no natural market environment—just the one god created and maintains. In Scandinavia, god is a wealthy power mom and the market is nestled in her warm bosom of safety and opportunity. In Central Africa, god made a lifestyle change and got a new job, working for the wealthiest families—huge step up the ladder for him.
In the US, god has an identity crisis, alternating between feelings of pride and self-loathing. It wants to have the best country, but it’s standing on the street corner alone yelling out in an argument with itself about the right way to do that. When the US government (or a government like it) wants to play god and alter the American natural market environment to apply certain pressures in certain places, it uses three main tools: funding, regulation, and taxes.
 Funding: In order for government funding to lead to major progress, there has to be a lot of it, and in an open democracy, that only flies when the nation needs to do something so important that everyone agrees on it—like in the 1960s, when the fear of losing global influence kicked the US government’s adrenaline in and it put a man on the moon. Likewise, significant US military funding is something the American electorate can agree on enough that it receives tremendous funding and plays an important part in advancing technology in a number of industries. In most cases, though, a divided democracy is too paralyzed by conflicting interests and political squabbling to be the main driver of a serious tech revolution.
 Regulation: Another democratic government muscle is its ability to make rules—laws, restrictions, quotas, etc. These can be effective at pushing through minor changes—the seatbelt and airbag are both products of government regulation. But at least when it comes to the car industry, I’m having a hard time thinking of instances of major technological leaps caused by government regulation.
 Tax Code: The government often uses the tax code to add its own economic pressures into the free market. Again though, while this can be effective for nudging something in a certain direction, it doesn’t tend to lead to sweeping advances.
Of course, America is in a big fight about this, with fiscal liberals typically feeling a lot more optimistic about government’s ability to play a positive role in moving things forward than fiscal conservatives. But I think both would agree that major tech progress being forced forward by the government is more the way of places like the Soviet Union and modern-day China where government has a lot more power. The incredible innovation that often emerges from open democracies tends to come from pressures from below, in the bubbling cauldron of the free market—
 2) Pressures From Natural Market Forces 
In the natural world, to catch food and stay away from predators, animals will optimize by becoming fast and elusive runners. When food on the ground becomes scarce, species will feel the pressure of hunger and over time, their genetics will re-optimize by developing good bodies for climbing or long necks or wings. A running species that becomes a flying species hasn’t become better—just better fit for the current circumstances. In the world of species, the definition of optimization is simple because the end goals are simple: the core needs of biological creatures are always the same—to self-preserve and reproduce. So optimization in the natural world always has the same definition: to adjust in a way that makes you mostly likely to self-preserve and reproduce.
In order to understand what optimization means in the market, we need to know what the core goals are of the actors there. Of course, people are also biological creatures, and self-preservation will always be at the top of the list—if you’re hungry, cold, or sick, fixing that will be the core goal. But for people whose base needs are being met, what are the yearning desires that then lie at the core of their motivation? What does “pursuing your self-interest” mean for them?
Well, it depends on the culture. In certain cultures, the fear of failure is so strong that it outweighs desires like glory or great fortune, and the primary inner drive becomes to just make sure you’re passable. In others, the deepest drive of the people might be religious salvation, community or family service, a leisurely lifestyle, or spiritual enlightenment.
When it comes to technological advancement, those motivations aren’t likely to get you there because thinking up tech innovations isn’t a helpful step on the path to optimization for those people. So if we want tech progress, what kind of yearning do we want people to feel?
I think the ideal mix is a two-part cocktail:
 First ingredient: Greed. In a perfect, fair, open market, greed works great as the core lifeblood motivation. The way capitalism theoretically works is that the more real-world value you create, the more money you’ll make. So companies in a competitive landscape will put their effort into creating better and better products and services in order to optimize, which for them means making as much money as they possibly can. Individual people are greedy as a means to all kinds of ends—a lavish lifestyle, personal freedom, security, admiration, power, sex—but what they want is irrelevant. As long as their burning desire makes them really want stuff, their drive to optimize will move technology forward. Greed is a double-edged sword though—to be beneficial, greed has to be contained inside a high-integrity, meritocratic, free market. If it’s not, greed will turn into the enemy of progress, because the more vulnerable the system is to corruption, the more the greedy on top will be able to game the system to ensure their own long-lasting victory.
 Second ingredient: Raging ambition. Greed can lead to steady forward progress, but in order for progress to leap forward, a second ingredient is usually key: a burning desire to do something great. Again, the underlying reasons for this kind of ambition can vary. Sometimes it’ll be an ego-driven desire—to be famous and renowned, to leave one’s mark, to be thought of and posthumously remembered as great. Other times the ambition will be fueled by a borderline-insane level of confidence and optimism that gives someone the gall to be idealistic. These are the yearnings of the hungry underdog.  
An established industry full of existing winners running on greed is like the highest layer of trees in a crowded rainforest. They’ll push upward only as needed, elbowing each other for little gains and victories as they vie for sunlight, mostly just trying to keep their spot in the canopy. Greed just wants sunlight—it doesn’t care how high up it is when it gets it.
But below, the hungry underdog burns for sunlight and will spend 100 hours a week trying to figure out how to get it. When the breakthrough comes, the underdog bursts up through the canopy into the open sky and spreads its leaves out wide. Suddenly, the trees that had been on top are blocked from the sun. Greed is then replaced by the much more powerful drive of survival, and innovation kicks into high gear as they scramble upwards for their life. The environment has changed—it’s been disrupted—and in this new world, created by the underdog disruptor, companies have to innovate in order to re-optimize. Some end up back on top, others die—and at the end of it all, technology has jolted forward. We all witnessed an example of this when Apple rocketed through the mobile phone canopy in 2007 and forced all of the other companies to make a smartphone or die. Samsung managed to get itself back into the sun. Nokia did not.
With all this in mind, let’s go back to the car industry and our original question:
 Why hasn’t the car technology forest moved upward over the past century? 
I see two primary reasons:
 1) Insanely high barriers to entry—so no leaps forward caused by hungry underdogs 
Try to think of something ickier and harder than starting a car company.
First, before you can sell one product, you’ll need to put down an absurd amount of capital to buy a factory, figure out how to design a car and all of its parts, build a prototype, use that to raise a lot more money, get a much bigger factory and hire thousands of people, and pump many millions of dollars into marketing to tell the world that your company exists. And you probably need to be incredibly rich and risk-tolerant yourself since very few people are zany enough to invest money in a startup car company.
Second, in order to be profitable, you have to sell at a high volume. Cars are too expensive to make and margins are too thin to only sell a few each year. So for this to be a good idea, you not only have to create an awesome car, but one that a ton of people will want to buy.
Third, gas cars are already well-optimized—if you want to aggressively burst through the canopy like an underdog without any brand awareness needs to, you have to create a much better type of car than what’s out there. In the case of cars, that probably means addressing the core of the car itself and the thing that’s been stressing everyone out with its billowing emissions—the engine. But since no one has really done this yet, it means you need to not only create the first successful startup car company in a long time, you need to create the first startup to ever succeed at making whatever type of car you’re creating. And since you’ll be there first to do it, you’ll have to put a huge amount of time and money into innovation research and development and bear the brunt of the invention costs for the whole industry. You’ll also have to bear the marketing costs to educate the world on why they should want this new type of car—that’s a one-time expense and once it’s done, other companies will be able to ride on the consumer demand you spent a ton of money building.
So it’s not surprising that the last successful startup car company in America was Chrysler in 1925—90 years ago. It’s basically an impossible endeavor.
And without any threat from below on the forest floor—from the wild innovation of scrappy entrepreneurs with nothing to lose—the car industry has had the luxury of calmly sunbathing in a tight canopy quilt, making only incremental advances, only when they’re needed. But there’s a problem here too—
 2) A glitch in the car market separates car company optimization from what’s best for the world. 
As I mentioned above, greed works nicely as an optimization criterion if the market is perfect—open, accurate, and fair.
Greedy companies will make their decisions based on whatever the best way is to optimize to their environment—i.e. How can we make the most possible money? But a company’s drive for maximum money is only beneficial to society when the company’s profit is tightly and accurately correlated with the amount of net positive value its product or service provides to society.
If I start a lemonade stand, every time I give someone a delicious cup of lemonade, they’ll be likely to recommend me to their friends and become a recurring customer. I provided positive value and my business’s success went up with it.
 Success = Value Provided. Incentives are aligned.
If another customer comes to the stand and I give him a cup of lemonade with a fly in it, he won’t come back and he’ll tell his friends not to go—I caused harm and my success went down.
 Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused]. Incentives still aligned.
But what if I then discover a chemical I can spray on my lemonade that prevents flies from landing on it. The chemical is tasteless, but I know that drinking it regularly will cause customers immense harm a few decades down the road. Customers won’t experience the harm in the present, so it won’t affect their opinion of my lemonade or the success of my business.
 Success = [Value Provided] – [Harm Caused] .  
The harm caused is now an unaccounted-for cost, also known as a negative externality, and my incentives are no longer aligned with the customer’s best interests. If all I care about is greed and maximizing profit, I will continue to use the chemical, because I’m economically incentivized to do so.
This kind of negative externality is how tobacco companies got away with murder for so many decades. The long-term cost to customers’ health was unaccounted for because customers were ignorant to the consequences, the negative effects were years away, and there was no regulatory penalty in place to charge for the harm. Thinking purely from a greed-optimizing perspective, cigarette companies acted completely rationally. They kicked up nicotine levels in cigarettes and added shards of glass into filters to create tiny cuts and increase nicotine absorption, which caused further harm but increased demand—but since the harm was unaccounted for, this was a pure net positive for the company. And when anti-tobacco campaigns started to educate customers on cigarette harm—which attaches the harm to the cost of scared customers and lower demand—the tobacco industry hired low-integrity scientists to discredit the negative campaigns and muddle the message. Awareness would get there eventually, but the longer they could delay and keep the harm hidden, the better off they’d be from a greed standpoint.
People call this evil, but all it really is is an industry acting in its own best interests within the parameters of its environment. Greed is a simple motivation—it takes whatever it can get, and it’ll push all available limits it can in order to fully optimize. I used tobacco companies as an example, but you could easily tell the story with fast food, radiation-emitting consumer electronics, politician behavior, the finance industry, and many others.
In the auto industry, CO2 emissions are the negative externality. If you have a cheap and easy way to build cars that dump garbage into the atmosphere and no one makes you pay for it, why would you ever change anything?
It’s the same story as cigarettes. Instead of the tobacco industry and the cigarette companies who support it, you have the oil industry and the car companies who support it. Instead of short-term emphysema, you have short term city smog. Instead of long-term harm to people’s health like lung cancer, you have long-term harm to the human way of life like underwater coastal cities.
A lot of people have written about the hidden cost of carbon emissions, and many of them, on both sides of the political spectrum, have proposed a logical solution: a revenue-neutral carbon tax. 
A revenue-neutral carbon tax is revenue-neutral because any increase in government revenue as a result of the tax would be offset by an equal decrease in something else like income taxes. This makes it a politically moot proposal.
The tax could be applied at any point along the supply chain from oil extraction to the gas pump and the effect would be the same—it would either become more expensive to drive a gas car, less profitable to be in the business of gas, or both. With a carbon tax in place, when you’re contributing to the carbon problem, you’re also paying for it—which incentivizes consumers and companies to explore alternatives. This wouldn’t be the government meddling in the market—it would be the government fixing a glitch in the market.
Instead, the government offers tax breaks to people for buying an electric vehicle and subsidies for the renewable energy industry, which is like a town full of businesses who throw their trash in the street, and the government reacting by paying businesses to stop doing that, instead of just charging businesses for doing it. Other times, the government tries to force emissions downwards by forcing car companies to create a minimum number of zero-emissions cars—with limited effect. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both tried this, to some extent, and both times the next president (Reagan and Bush) removed the regulations upon taking office (ironically, the Clinton mandate for more hybrid cars accomplished nothing in the US, but it scared the shit out of Toyota, who began furiously innovating and created the Prius). Another time, in 1990, the California government tried to institute its own zero-emissions regulations, which the car and oil companies fought until they finally bullied California out of it and the regulations were removed in 2003.12 The problem is, giant companies have enough influence that any government attempt at making changes through regulation ends up being watered down to the point where it’s ineffective.
When it comes to a carbon tax, the only explanation for not having one seems to be the power big oil has over the US government—because to me, it seems like every politician in either party should be in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Right?
Without any negative consequence of emitting carbon, optimizing for greed pushes certain car technologies forward, like safety, comfort, and drive quality, because getting high safety and quality ratings is tied to demand—but it doesn’t change anything about carbon emissions, because the greed equation doesn’t currently include that cost.
So the reason why, 112 years after Ford Motor Company’s founding, we’re still using harmful, old-fashioned engines is simple: none of the pressures on the car industry are pushing it to change. The car industry still needs to work hard to optimize in certain areas—that’s why cars have become safer, smoother, more comfortable, and more efficient over the years. But the most glaring flaw of the modern car—that it constantly dumps garbage into the atmosphere—remains untouched, because doing so is free, because big oil’s influence means government keeps allowing it, and because there’s no one from underneath to burst through the canopy and show customers that there’s a better way.
It’s scary. Something really, terribly bad might be happening that could make our actual lives legitimately worse in the future, but we have a prisoner’s dilemma on our hands—it’s much, much better for all of us collectively to make a change, but for each individual CEO, lobbyist, or politician, there’s more to personally gain from maintaining the status quo. People like to say, “this is the world our children will live in and we’re botching it for them,” but for the people with the power to change something, their particular children will be best off if they make the most money possible. The situation is stuck.
A deeply-set, stagnant industry is like a country led by a deeply-entrenched dynasty—it’s hard to penetrate the status quo. But even in the case of the most powerful caste systems, sometimes the right person comes along at the right time and starts the right movement, and a revolution can ignite.
   Part 3: The Story of Tesla 
   
Christie Nicholson remembers meeting Elon Musk for the first time at a party back in 1989.
“I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was ‘I think a lot about electric cars,’” Christie said. “And then he turned to me and said, ‘Do you think about electric cars?’”13
 Electric cars seems like an odd thing to spend your time thinking about in 1989. To understand why Musk felt so strongly about them, let’s start by understanding what electric cars are and how they work.
There are a handful of common modern types of cars considered greener than traditional gas cars—namely hybrid cars, plug-in hybrid cars, and electric cars (which we’ll call EVs for “electric vehicles”). There’s also a lot of talk about another type—hydrogen fuel cell cars, which we’ll just call hydrogen cars. The one thing these cars all have in common is an electric motor.
There are two types of electric motors—the AC induction motor and the brushless DC electric motor. Since 98% of people reading this aren’t licking their lips to read a three-paragraph description of the difference, let it suffice to say that they’re the same basic idea:
An electric motor is a pig in a blanket where electricity is sent into the outer bread part (called the stator), which is always stationary, and that electric current causes the hot dog part (called the rotor) to rotate. The rotor is attached to the wheel axle which turns the wheels. Like this:29
    
 How an AC Induction Motor Works Blue Box 
One of the two common types of electric motor is the AC induction motor (that’s what Tesla cars use). AC stands for alternating current,14 and induction means there’s no physical contact between the rotor and the stator—electricity in the stator generates a rotating magnetic field which enters the rotor through electrical induction and causes it to spin.
The stator generates a rotating magnetic field by sending electricity through it in a three phase system:30
    
So there are three different wires each with an alternating back-and-forth pull—just look at any one color and you’ll see it’s just going back and forth. But the three wires’ currents are staggered in just the right way that the point of “pull” in the stator rotates in a smooth circle. When the rotor is added in, this rotating magnetic field causes it to spin:
   
The idea is that the rotor can never quite catch up to where it wants to be—it’s always “chasing” the rotating field, and that chase is what powers the car. The AC induction motor was invented by Nikola Tesla, and that’s why Tesla Motors is named after him.15
 
Here are the types of cars that use an electric motor:
 Hybrids (also called HEVs for hybrid electric vehicles), like the Toyota Prius, have both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. You don’t plug a hybrid car in—the gas charges the battery. The battery also gets charge from an electric motor trick called regenerative braking. Normally, all the joules of kinetic energy a car is harnessing when it’s moving are lost when the car brakes and they’re just converted into heat. With regenerative braking, electric cars send some of that kinetic energy back into the battery, holding onto those joules to be used again later. The electric component of a hybrid replaces some of the need to burn gas, increasing the miles per gallon, decreasing the car’s emissions, and saving the driver gas money. Hybrids are a big step up in technology from normal gas cars.
But they still kind of suck. Why? Because they’re only kind of helping the emissions problem, not solving it, and they still need to burn gas to work. As I’ve heard people say, a world 100% full of Prius drivers is still a world 100% addicted to oil.
 Plug-in hybrids (also called PHEVs) are a better option. Plug-in hybrid cars, like the Chevy Volt, the Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid, and the Ford Fusion Energi, allow you to charge the battery at home and typically drive 10-40 miles just on battery power before the gas kicks in. That’s often enough to get most people through most of their day, meaning they may rarely need to use gas.
But if we’re gonna get so close, why not just go all the way?
 Hydrogen cars are entirely electric—but they don’t use a battery. Instead, they fill up with fuel at a station just like a gas car—except they fill up with compressed hydrogen, not gas. The hydrogen mixes with oxygen in the air to produce electricity, which it sends to the motor to power the car. They produce no tailpipe emissions because the only byproduct is clean water. Sounds great, right?
Musk, for the life of him, cannot understand how anyone could make an argument in favor of hydrogen cars,16 but it’s confusing because lots of car companies, like Toyota, Honda, and General Motors, are currently pouring big investments into making hydrogen cars. I wanted to understand the disagreement, so I read like 12 articles in favor and opposed to the technology. At the end of it, I’m having a hard time seeing why hydrogen cars would have a more promising future than electric vehicles. For those who want details, here’s a footnote.17
 Finally, there are electric cars, or EVs, like the Nissan Leaf, the BMW i3, the Ford Focus Electric, and the Tesla Model S. These are simple—there’s a big battery, which you charge, and it powers the electric motor. No liquid involved.
Now, in theory, EVs make a lot of sense. Forgetting the rest of the car for a second, let’s look at some of the advantages of the electric motor over the internal combustion gas engine:
 Electric motors are more convenient than gas engines most of the time. Gas cars have to go to the gas station; EV owners plug their car in every night the same way they charge their phone—no stopping for gas. A gas engine is a lot more complicated than an electric motor, with over 200 parts; an electric motor has fewer than 10. A gas engine requires a transmission, a tailpipe, gears, and a bunch of other grease-covered shit; an EV has none of those things—when you open the hood, it’s more storage space, like the trunk. Gas engines need oil, which means they need oil changes; EVs don’t. The extra complexity means gas cars end up needing a lot more maintenance than EVs.
 It costs a lot less to power an electric motor than a gas engine. The extra costs gas car owners incur for oil changes and car repairs aside, the gas engine’s fuel—gas—is much more expensive than the electric motor’s fuel—electricity. Let’s look at the math:
The average electric car gets about 3 miles per kWh18 of electricity, and the US national average electricity rate is 12 cents per kWh. That means that driving a mile in an electric car costs about 4 cents. 
The cost of driving a gas car is harder, because gas prices and car fuel efficiency widely vary. The best case scenario for a gas car is unusually cheap gas (let’s say $1.40/gallon) coupled with unusually high fuel efficiency (let’s say it’s a rare gas car that gets 35 mpg). That would produce the same 4 cents/mile that electric cars get. But very few gas car owners ever pay 4 cents/mile. Without being crazy extreme, for the worse case scenario, let’s say a high $4.00/gallon gas and a below-average 15 mpg—in that case, a mile in a gas car costs 27 cents per mile. At a pretty typical 12,000 miles/year, that means at absolute best, gas is tied with electric for cost, and at worst, it costs over $3,000/year more to drive on gas.
 The gas engine is one of the two major causes of the energy/climate crisis. We’ve already discussed this—transportation burning oil makes up a third of the world emissions, pollutes cities, and makes nations over-dependent on other nations. The electric motor emits nothing. Yes, it may run on electricity that was produced in a dirty way—but we’ll get to that later.
So that’s why Musk told Christie Nicholson that he thinks a lot about electric cars. The electric motor is clearly the easier, cheaper, and more sensible long-term plan for powering cars.
But when the electric motor made its first appearance over 100 years ago, there were serious drawbacks that prevented it from becoming the norm—and since electric cars went out of production back then, little time or money has been spent trying to fix those issues. There tend to be three age-old concerns about the viability of the electric car:
 EV Concern 1) Range. This is really three issues rolled into one:
A) Will the battery life be too short for long drives, limiting an EV to a car only for local driving?
B) If I’m out and about and need to recharge my battery on the road, is there anywhere to do it? Or will I end up stranded?
C) If I do find a charging station while on the road, will I have to sit there for five hours while it charges?
These issues are such a prevalent concern among potential EV-owners that they have their own term: range anxiety.
 EV Concern 2) Performance. The most common electric vehicle you’ll see around today is the golf cart. Which doesn’t excite car owners very much. No one wants a car that drives like shit, and when people think about zooming acceleration, they tend to think about powerful gas engines, not electric motors.
 EV Concern 3) Price. Ever since the beginning, EVs have cost more than gas cars, mainly because of the high cost of the battery.
Back in 1910, people cited these exact same three concerns over electric cars, and they’re part of the reason gas cars won the day. Gas cars had had their own major problems, but Ford had figured out how to make them viable—something no one has yet done for the electric car.
I asked Musk about his opinion on Henry Ford. He said, “Ford was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed.”
When he decided in 2003 to stop thinking about electric cars and start making them, the odds weren’t in Musk’s favor. There were the high barriers to entry that had prevented any startup car company from succeeding in almost a century; there was the unaccounted for cost of carbon emissions, which made starting an EV company like trying to stand out on a basketball court as a rookie when all the players except you can foul with no penalty; there was the gargantuan oil industry, which would do everything in its power to stomp on any effort to make it obsolete; and on top of that, the EV was a new kind of car whose development had essentially been on pause ever since EV makers threw in the towel a century earlier, and a daunting and costly catch-up process would lay ahead—the three concerns listed above would all need to somehow be addressed for this to have a chance.
The overarching question was, had electric cars never had their day because of irreconcilable issues? Or had the right person—the Henry Ford of EVs—just not come along yet?
___________
Car companies aren’t supposed to start in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley startups aren’t supposed to make cars.
But the electric car industry is not your grandfather’s car industry. And in 2003, it wasn’t anyone’s car industry. After the brief bubble of new electric cars in California in the 1990s between the year the state passed the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate and the year they were bullied into repealing it, the electric car industry had withered into the oblivion of the scattered California garages and tech labs of car geeks. But big things have emerged out of small groups of cutting-edge California geek labs. Apple. Microsoft. Google. So why not the modern electric car industry?
One of these little car technology companies was AC Propulsion, and while carmakers in Detroit, Tokyo, and Munich continued to not realize that electric cars were clearly the future, the guys at AC Propulsion were experimenting away, quietly making one giant EV breakthrough after another.
One day last week, I cold called AC Propulsion and accosted their CTO, Paul Carosa, who had been there since the beginning. He was too polite to figure out how to get off the phone with me, so he told me about those years in the late 90s and early 2000s when they created their fanciest car to date—the tzero (pronounced t-zero). AC Propulsion had figured out two huge things:
First, the tzero was fast—it went 0 to 60 in 4.9 seconds, which was crazy fast for an electric car and put it on par with the fast gas cars.
Second, they had made big progress on an enormous EV shortcoming by getting innovative with the battery. Previous EVs had used lead-acid batteries, which were heavy and limited. AC Propulsion realized that the laptop and mobile phone industry had been pouring development into making small 18650 lithium-ion batteries increasingly efficient, and that those batteries had gotten really  advanced. 18650 batteries look like AA batteries, which seems like an odd match for a car, but by lining up a few thousand of them in a big battery case, they had just created by far the world’s best ever car battery. EVs had always been limited to a 60 or 80 or maybe a 120-mile range. The tzero could go 250 miles on a single charge.
In 2003, a California engineer named JB Straubel was then tinkering around with EVs himself, met Musk to ask for funding for a car project he was working on. Soon after that, Straubel brought Musk by the AC Propulsion office to see the tzero. Musk was blown away. Musk had suspected for a while that EVs were the way of the future, and now that he saw the possibilities with his own eyes, he was convinced.
At the time, he was already running SpaceX and trying to colonize Mars, so launching a startup car company wasn’t something he could really fit into his calendar. He really wanted the world to see the tzero because he was sure it would excite people and help to stoke a new wave of EV interest—and he tried to convince the AC Propulsion guys to bring the tzero to market, with his funding, but they didn’t want to deal with that because it sounded icky. Instead, AC Propulsion introduced Musk to a group of three other entrepreneurs who had also recently approached them with a similar idea and had also been rebuffed. Those three guys, who included Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, had come up with the idea of licensing AC Propulsion’s technology and bringing it to market themselves as a new company called Tesla Motors19—but to make any of this real, they needed money. It was a perfect match, so they decided to make a run at it together. Musk, who could only dedicate part time to the project, could fund the effort, become Chairman and maintain a strong influence, but by making Eberhard CEO, he could focus on SpaceX with the bulk of his time. And Tesla was on its way.
The group formed a team and started figuring out how to be a car company. One big problem they had was that this was a new technology, and the R&amp;D costs early on for a new technology drive up the price of the product—that’s the same reason the very first cell phones and computers started out really expensive. Except in those cases, they were the first of their kind, so the product could be super expensive and still sell. Because perfectly good, affordable gas cars already exist, it wouldn’t work to come out with the equivalent quality of a $25,000 gas car for $100,000+. So this became the business plan:
 Step 1: High-priced, low-volume car for the super rich. Come out with the expensive first product, but make the car so fancy that it’s worth that price—i.e. just make it a legit Ferrari competitor and then it’s okay to charge over $100,000 for it.
 Step 2: Mid-priced, mid-volume car for the pretty rich. Use the profits from Step 1 to develop the Step 2 car. It would still be expensive, but more like a $75,000 Mercedes or BMW competitor instead of Ferrari.
 Step 3: Low-priced, high-volume car for the masses. Use the profits from Step 2 to develop a $35,000-ish car that, after the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit and the savings on gas, would be affordable to the middle class.
It’s kind of a Hershey’s Kiss business plan:
   
The overarching mission wasn’t to build the biggest car company in the world. It was to solve a bunch of long-standing EV shortcomings and build such an insanely great car that it could change everyone’s perception of what an EV could be and force the world’s big car companies to have to develop their own line of great EVs. Their end goal, and the company’s official mission, was “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” In other words, EVs are gonna happen, but we’re gonna make them happen a lot sooner. Sooner, in this case, is important, because it means carbon emissions decrease earlier and the long term effects of them are much less damaging.
So they got working. And four years later, they had their Step 1 car, the Roadster: 31
    
With the Roadster, Tesla wasn’t trying to make their long term car (one Tesla employee told me that from the beginning, Musk would make sure everyone knew that the company’s long-term mission “was not to make toys for rich people.”) They just wanted to build something awesome to A) show the world how great an EV could be, and B) generate revenue to develop their Step 2 car. So they didn’t start from scratch on the body design, instead basing it on a Lotus Elise.
The Roadster didn’t change the world—no $110,000 car ever could—but it sent a message to the industry that Tesla was for real. You may not have heard of the Roadster when it was announced in 2006 or when it started shipping in 2008, but some of the major car companies took notice—Nissan soon launched the all-electric Leaf and GM launched the plug-in electric Chevy Volt soon after the Roadster’s appearance (Bob Lutz, who was Chairman of GM at the time, openly credits Tesla for their decision to make the Volt, saying that after the Roadster unveiling, he went to the GM board and asked, “If a little company in California can do this, why can’t we?”).
But there were some pretty big problems with the first product. Finishing the car was taking way longer than planned, the cost of making each Roadster was way higher than planned, and the early shipments often had defects. This made Musk sad, so he and the board fired Eberhard as CEO, which made Eberhard sad.20 Just as this was going down, the most inconvenient thing ever happened—the 2008 recession—which made the entire car industry sad, but especially Tesla, who didn’t yet have brand recognition and wasn’t yet profitable because of all the upfront investment they had been pouring in. A crippling recession is never helpful, but it was really, really bad timing for Tesla.
Musk had hired a second CEO, but a year in, in late 2008, the company was in one of those movie scenes where the person’s been badly wounded and clearly about to die and there’s this dramatic dialogue scene and the dying person is saying some last words and every time they pause for a second the audience is like, “Is that it? Are they dead? Oh no they just talked again I guess there’s one more line.” Musk, who wasn’t enjoying the drama of the scene, finally was like, “PAUSE THE MOVIE QUICKLY PAUSE IT PAUSE IT” and took over as CEO,21going into full adrenaline mode to try to keep the company alive. And as mentioned in the last post, SpaceX was in the same movie at the same time playing the same role, so Musk’s life was like this:
   
But enough people had been impressed enough by Tesla that a couple key investments at critical moments came in and kept the company alive, and at the end of the whole mess, Tesla was now a new company. Musk was CEO, and the Jonathan Ive of the car industry, star car designer Franz von Holzhausen, who had been the Design Director at GM and then Mazda, had decided to bet his career on the barely-standing Tesla and became their chief designer.
A few weeks ago, when I stepped into the Tesla design studio to meet von Holzhausen, I was excited to meet the uber-flamboyant diva celebrity car designer, just hoping I would understand what he was saying through his unbelievably thick German accent—and was horribly disappointed to meet an extremely normal-acting American man.
The studio, which I described in the last post, is a shiny playroom of art and physics. Von Holzhausen showed me a full-size clay car that was simultaneously testing two different possible designs for the upcoming Model 3 by making the two halves of the model different. He explained how precise everything about car design is and how “a difference of a quarter millimeter can spread itself across the entire car.”
I asked him what it was like to come to Tesla after having spent years at more established car companies. He described the difference like this: “A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around—the product is successful when it’s great, and the company becomes great because of that.” (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: “The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company’s done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO—it’s done. Game over.”) Von Holzhausen went on, saying, “Another difference is that at other companies, engineering comes first—a design package is prescribed on the designer and they’re told to make it beautiful. At Tesla, design and engineering are assigned equal value, and Elon keeps them opposed to each other.” Now that von Holzhausen has gotten used to his freedom to be obsessed with the product at Tesla, he says he “would dread to go back to pre-historic ways.”
Von Holzhausen’s first mission at Tesla was to design their Step 2 car—the mid-priced, mid-volume one—that would be called the Model S. The Roadster was based on existing design and was a springboard for the company more than a long-term product. The Model S would be Tesla’s first flagship product, and it was their chance to reinvent the concept of a car, from scratch. Von Holzhausen said, “When we started Model S, it was a clean sheet of paper.”
This all sounded uncannily similar to how Steve Jobs had done things at Apple. He obsessed over making “insanely great products,” and he never paid attention to what other companies were doing, always coming at things from a clean sheet of paper perspective. When Apple decided to make a phone, they didn’t try to make a better Blackberry—they asked, “What should a mobile phone be?”
Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse—and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there’s often a huge opportunity there.
When the iPhone came out, it turned the phone industry on its head. So should we be surprised that when the Tesla Model S came out, Consumer Reports anointed it the best car that had ever been made with an unheard of 99/100 rating, and that Tesla owners are across-the-board obsessed with the car? No, because it’s like the iPhone—it’s a 15-year leap into the future.32
    
The Model S is the fastest 4-door sedan in history, with 3.2-second 0-60 time. It saves battery power by being insanely aerodynamic with the industry’s lowest drag coefficient (.24). A bunch of engineering innovations have combined to give it the highest NHTSA safety rating of any car ever tested by the US government, 5.4 stars.
The Model S is already driving itself and soon, it’ll be able to drive itself to meet you out in the driveway in the morning with the temperature already set and the right music on; at night, you’ll be able to pull up to the house and just get out of the car and the car will park itself into the garage and plug itself in. They did away with model years (i.e. the 2014 Toyota Camry, the 2015 Toyota Camry, etc.), so instead of holding all the year’s new features until the new release, they just put features in as they go. Someone who buys a Tesla today might have a slightly different car than someone who bought one two weeks ago. And they’re constantly rolling out fixes and new features through automatic wifi software updates—owners often wake up in the morning to discover the car has a new capability.
In a bunch of cases, Tesla has wanted to do something that wasn’t technically possible with the current world or industry limitations—so they’d build what they needed to build to change those limitations:
The Tesla battery is heavy and they wanted to make the body super light to offset some of that weight—so they turned to SpaceX and used its advanced rocket technology to make Tesla the only North American car with an all aluminum body.
Musk and von Holzhausen’s22 team had spent all this time perfecting the design of the car before it was time to put the door handles on, and they got really used to it that way. When it was time for handles, they didn’t want to ruin how it was, so they figured out how to make the handles lay flush with the door.
They didn’t like the dealership model and wanted to sell directly to customers, but many states don’t allow that, so one by one, they’re fighting the states that won’t and slowly overturning direct car sales bans.
They wanted to get rid of buttons altogether and have all controls on a huge, 17″ touchscreen—but when their first car came out, there was no iPad yet, and 17″ touchscreens suitable for a car didn’t exist. So they built their own.33
 Innovations like these helped make the Tesla a standout car, but there were still questions around the major shortcomings of EV cars. Of the three EV concerns we listed earlier, AC Propulsion had made significant headway on two—performance and battery range—and the Tesla team had picked it up from there and had continued to improve both. Performance was now the best in the world for a sedan and the battery range—between 208 and 270 miles per charge, depending on the model—was excellent.
But there were still two problematic questions that needed to be addressed:
Can you take a road trip? And can anyone afford the car? Tesla is working on both.
 How Tesla is solving the road trip problem: 
With a 200+ range, the Tesla battery has plenty of juice to get most people through the day on any normal day. Even a busy day of commuting and errands and exploration rarely gets close to 200 miles driving. But on long city-to-city drives or road trips, EVs have always had an issue. So Musk came up with a solution:
Build a worldwide energy network. Tesla came up with the Supercharger—a high-caliber, on-the-road charger—and there would be public stations that would contain a whole row of Superchargers, just like a row of gas pumps at a gas station. A normal garage charger takes either 5 or 10 hours to fully charge the Model S battery, depending on which type of in-car charging system you opted for. Clearly no one wants to stop for multiple hours while on the road to accomplish what a gas car can by stopping for five minutes—so the Supercharger goes much faster. It can charge a Model S at a rate that gives it about 60 miles of range for every 10 minutes of charging time. So if you’re driving between Boston and New York (215 miles), you might make it with no stopping, but if you did need to stop, you could just charge up for 5 or 10 minutes—not that much more than a stop for gas. Driving from LA to San Francisco (382 miles), you’d need to stop for 20 or 30 minutes.
And the thing is—on a 4-hour drive from Boston to New York, isn’t a 5-10 minute stop desirable anyway? On a 6-7 hour drive from LA to SF, wouldn’t most people stop for 20-30 minutes to get some food and go to the bathroom anyway?
The more I thought about this, the more I realized how little of an issue range is for an EV with a good battery like the Tesla. Just say you do a long drive five days a year. That means on 360 of the 365 days, you have to do nothing. You just drive, and you never need to stop at a gas station. And the other five days? You’d probably just need to stop for about as long as you would stop on a long drive anyway.
Seems like a perfect solution, but you need to have a Supercharger along your drive if it’s going to work. Here’s where Superchargers are today in the US:34
    
And they’re building them at a furious pace—here’s where they’ll be by the end of 2016:
   
 Europe and Asia will be equally well-covered.
For now, only Teslas can use the Supercharger stations, and only the Tesla can really make long-distance drives right now anyway. But down the road, Musk plans to partner with other EV car companies so any EV can stop at one.
A couple other things about Superchargers: they’re all free to use, and soon, they’ll all be entirely solar-powered. Musk jokes that if there’s a zombie apocalypse, Tesla owners will be fine because they won’t need the grid to fuel their car. And it means that if you had friends to stay with, you could technically drive across the US without taking a wallet.
This is also going to become even easier with time, because Tesla is making new innovations every year. For example, the Roadster now has a 350 mile range battery and you can just about do LA to SF without stopping—it’s only a matter of time before their cheaper cars have a similar range. Tesla also recently unveiled a new Supercharger feature—the battery swap. A Tesla driver will be able to pull up to a little rectangle and stop the car. The ground opens up and a machine comes out and takes the car’s battery off, brings up a fresh battery and puts it on, and you’re good to go—all in 90 seconds. This would cost $60-80, or as much as an expensive tank of gas—so Tesla drivers would now have the option of “fast or free.”
So with that problem very close to being out of the way, Tesla seems to only have one issue left:
 Who the hell can afford a $75,000 car?  
The starting price of a Tesla Model S is technically $69,900. But if you want the higher-range cars and the faster charging battery, the price jumps up. There are a bunch of other “well shit now that you mention it yeah I do want that too” features, and a Model S can quickly work its way toward the $100,000 mark.
Musk is always quick to point out that for the moment, the US offers a $7,500 tax credit for buying an EV of sufficient range. He also points out what I mentioned above about the $2,000-ish a year gas savings. Sure—but even subtracting all that, we’re around $55,000 for a Tesla Model S, which is prohibitive for most people. Tesla has a new car coming out soon—their SUV with Falcon Wing doors, called the Model X—but it’s another Step 2, mid-price / mid-volume expensive car. Doesn’t solve the pricing problem.
It’s a rule of thumb in the car world that every $5,000 decrease in car price approximately doubles the number of buyers who can afford the car. So if Tesla can somehow come out with a stellar EV for about $35,000 less than the Model S, it would double the buyer pool 7 times, or multiply it by 125-fold. Which would now mean most people could afford it. Let’s bring back Tesla’s Hershey’s Kiss business plan from earlier:
   
So Step 3 is what this is all about. Step 3 is why Tesla exists and if Tesla ends up changing the world, it’ll be because of Step 3.
That car is the Model 3, and it’s coming out in 2017. Supposedly. And it’ll cost $35,000—$27,500 after the tax credit, and after taking gas savings into account, under $20,000. Supposedly.
But how? Right now, the Model 3 battery costs around $20,000. Even if Tesla ditches the high-tech aluminum body, makes the car smaller, and ditches some of the fanciest things about the Model S, the battery pack alone makes a price like $35,000 impossible.
 How Tesla is solving the high-price problem: 
Big problems call for big solutions. To solve the range problem, Tesla is building a worldwide energy network of Superchargers. And to solve the price problem, they’re building this:35
    
That’s what Musk has named the Gigafactory. It’s a $5 billion lithium-ion battery factory, currently being built in Nevada. The factory will be self-sufficient, powered entirely by on-site solar, wind, and geothermal energy, and it will employ 6,500 people.
Right now, the world’s combined annual output of lithium-ion batteries is 30GWh—mostly for use in laptops and mobile phones. The Gigafactory will make more than that each year, which means it will more than double the total lithium-ion batteries made each year globally. There are two huge benefits to doing this:
First, Tesla is planning to ramp up production of their cars until they’re producing 500,000 of them a year, and they’re going to need a lot of lithium-ion batteries when they do. Musk’s reasoning is simple: “I know we can’t get enough lithium-ion batteries unless we build this bloody factory, and I know no one else is building this thing.” The numbers make this necessity clear. To make enough batteries for their planned 500,000 cars a year, Tesla will need about 30GWh of lithium-ion batteries a year—the current world output—meaning that without building the Gigafactory, they’d have to use every single lithium-ion battery in the world. Tesla’s Gigafactory will just barely cover Tesla’s needs—if a day comes when every car company is making a ton of EVs, there will need to be many Gigafactories built by many companies.
Second, by both doubling the world supply of lithium-ion batteries and by continuing to innovate with battery technology, Tesla’s work at the Gigafactory will make batteries a lot cheaper. Musk says the price of the battery should go down by at least 30%. Right now, Musk says Tesla could make their cars with a 500 mile range—they don’t do it because it would increase the cost of the car. But as battery prices go down, EV ranges will go up as well.
I’m pretty convinced that the Model S is the best expensive car ever made. In its first year, its sales blew away its well-known direct competitors—the S-Class Mercedes, BMW 7-Series, the Lexus LS, and the Audi A8—and it’s been in the lead ever since. But those cars all play in a small space for the very rich.
It’s the Model 3 that will turn the industry on its head. You may not know much about Tesla today—or particularly care—but I’m pretty sure everyone will know about the Model 3 soon. Maybe that’s why Musk refuses to do any advertising—because he knows that when the Model 3 comes out, he won’t have to.
The market has taken notice. Tesla’s $226 million IPO in June of 2010 marks the first IPO for an American car company since Ford went public in 1956. Since then, the company’s value has soared upwards. Today, seven years after being on the brink of bankruptcy, Tesla’s market cap is a massive $31 billion. To put in perspective how big a deal that is, I set Tesla’s path to that number down on a graph with the Big Three US automakers (just using straight lines to simplify):
   
The car industry forest canopy has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and for decades, no hungry underdog has been able to make a run at it. Tesla hasn’t cracked the canopy yet, but for the first time in a long time, there’s a new company bolting upwards from the ground at lightning speed.
 A Ripple Effect 
If you’re another one of the big car companies, and you’ve been around for decades, and you’re comfortably doing your thing, making slight incremental improvements each year to your existing line of cars—could anything in the world be more annoying than Tesla?
Remember, the car companies know alllll about electric cars and their benefits. Most of them made an electric car in the 1990s when California mandated that they do, and then the second the mandate went away, they confiscated and literally crushed the cars. Then they whipped the cars into the dump and covered the pile with a tablecloth with a “nothing to see here folks” look on their faces. The scare was over and they could go back to their comfort zone, incrementally improving their gas vehicles.
Their feelings on EVs make perfect sense:
Dealerships make a huge amount of profit fixing gas engines, oil filters, and doing oil changes—money they’d stop making when they sold EVs with motors that rarely broke.
The car companies already know gas cars back and forth, and they’ve mastered the art of making a few tiny new changes to them each year so the new year’s models will be a little better than the previous year’s. But EVs are a new world for them, and they don’t know any more about how to make a good powertrain or improve battery energy density than Tesla does—in fact, they know less, as evidenced by Toyota and Mercedes both buying the Tesla powertrain for their EVs. What a pain in the ass all that R&amp;D would be.
Most importantly, the world already wants to buy gas cars. There’s no convincing needed—just a few standard TV ads to hone the latest phase of the brand’s image and inform customers about the latest product updates. But EVs are new and scary to customers, and there’s a hump to get over in educating the world about why they should buy one. But the really problematic thing about this is that in order to market an EV well, you need to do what I’m doing in this post and explain all the reasons EVs are obviously a huge step forward from gas cars—which simultaneously sends the message, “Gas cars are dirty, inconvenient, and old-fashioned.” Not a thing you want to do when your current bread and butter is selling 10 million gas cars a year.
And who wants to deal with all of these things when they could just skip it if Tesla would just go away. 
Franz von Holzhausen has worked at three of these other companies. The way he sees it, “they’re trapped in their manufacturing legacy process, trapped in gas engines being their bread and butter, trapped in their dealership model, trapped in their own history.”
Musk explains it as a lack of guts and originality: “The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward.”36
 But the Tesla tree is racing upwards, and its impending burst through the canopy has successfully scared the industry. We know this for sure, because when the first Tesla Roadster shipped in 2008, there were no big company EVs on the market. Today, Ford, Chevy, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Fiat, Kia, Mitsubishi, and Smart all  have an EV on the road. Not a coincidence.
So what’s the deal with all of these other EVs?
Most notable is the Nissan Leaf, introduced in 2010, which has been the highest-selling EV in the world in recent years (though the much more expensive Tesla Model S has topped the industry in EVs sold so far in 2015). The Leaf costs about $30,000 ($22,500 after tax credit) and has a range of 84 miles. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has for a while been one of the few strongly pro-EV voices in the car industry outside of Tesla. He talks about the “cul-de-sac” effect that will begin to accelerate EV sales—i.e. people will be jealous that their neighbor has a more futuristic car and doesn’t have to get gas, will ask questions, and then might get one themselves.
The recently introduced BMW i3 is currently selling next best after the Leaf and Model S. It costs $43,000 ($35,500 after tax credit) and has a range of 81 miles. BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer has jumped on the EV train, saying, “You have to look into the future, 10, 15, 20 years…cars like the BMW i3 are a must.”
No other EV has had significant sales yet.23 I asked Musk about the Leaf and the i3. About the Leaf, he said, “The range is too low, but if they keep iterating on that, they’ll eventually get there.” On the i3: “They’re trying to do something there. The range is low, but it’s a step in the right direction, and if they keep going, they’ll get something there.”
This “Congrats on your first big boy toilet poop, Johnny, now next time try to get the whole thing inside the bowl and you’ll be on your way!” tone is about as effusive as Musk gets when assessing the industry’s current attempts at an EV.
Volkswagen just hired BMW’s ex-CEO and also seems to be bullish on EVs, and GM is promising big things with their upcoming EV, the Chevy Bolt.
Other car companies still aren’t convinced. Mercedes CEO Dieter Zetsche said he doesn’t expect EVs to sell well for a while, because “the customer gets a car with less range, longer refueling times, somewhat less space, and a higher price tag.” The major Japanese companies, Toyota and Honda, are both skeptical about EVs and have been pouring their future into hybrids and hydrogen cars instead. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is so anti-EV that he’s told the world not to buy their Fiat 500e EV, saying they’re only selling it because regulations have forced them to.
If EVs are the dominant car of the future, they have a long way to go to get there. As of January 2015, there were a total of 740,000 EVs on the road worldwide. Compare that to the whole picture of over 80 million cars sold worldwide annually and over a billion total cars on the road. EVs make up only a fraction of a percent of the car industry. But they’re on the move:37
    
So we’re either at the cusp of a new EV-dominated car era or in the middle of another little EV bubble before they vanish from existence again—and as you can see from the quotes above, the car industry is currently divided in which way they’re betting.
I think we’ll learn a lot more soon, because the world is still yet to see its first true potential EV disruptor. The issue with Tesla right now is most people can’t afford one, and the issue with every other EV is the range sucks. It looks like this:
   
The truth is, the typical American drives 37 miles a day on average, and the 80+ mile range options are probably actually plenty for most people. But 80 miles seems like an insufficient range to prospective buyers, and mass adoption won’t happen with that kind of range.
Tesla’s plan all along was to plant a stellar car right in that Quadrant 4 box, and that’s what they say they’re going to do in 2017 when the Model 3 comes out. A number of other carmakers, including Nissan, Volkswagen, and GM have all declared their intention to release a not-that-expensive long-range EV soon. It’s not clear if any or all of these companies will get into Quadrant 4, but if they do…
If there are high-quality, affordable EVs for sale that also have a high range…
 I cannot think of one reason anyone would ever buy a gas car again. 
A Tesla-quality car that’s affordable to the middle class would seem to have only pros in the Pro/Con list:
 Pros of an affordable, high-quality, long-range EV over a comparable gas car: 
 Drives better. The instant torque of an EV is like exploding out of a gun. There’s no lag time between your foot touching the pedal and the car moving. Without gears, it accelerates perfectly smoothly. The handling is incredible. It’s silent.
 More convenient. No stops for gas. Much less need to take the car in for maintenance. No oil changes. More storage because with no engine, the hood is now the frunk (the front trunk).
 Safer. With no engine, the entire front of the car becomes a crumple zone. That’s part of why the Model S has blown away the safety ratings.
 Cheaper. No gas or oil, and less maintenance. No longer beholden to fluctuating gas prices.
 Healthier. No smog in cities, which cause many, many health problems. 
 Oh yeah, and the whole thing about avoiding an environmental, economic, or geopolitical catastrophe. 
 Cons of an affordable, high-quality, long-range EV over a comparable gas car: 
People who love to shift the manual stick around with all their muscle because they’re a cool cat on the open road to destiny can’t do that.
Five days a year, when you’re on a long drive, you have to stop for 30 minutes every three hours instead of five minutes every four hours—a con that becomes moot if you would have stopped for 30 minutes anyway every few hours.
EVs aren’t there yet. Right now, there are legit cons. But as the next few years pass, EVs will get cheaper, battery ranges will get longer and longer, Superchargers will pop up more and more until they’re everywhere, and charging times will just decrease as technology advances. Maybe I’m missing something, and I’m sure a bunch of seething commenters will try to make that very clear to me, but it seems like a given to me: the gas era is over and EVs are the obvious, obvious future.
 An Angry Giant 
The car companies, as I mentioned, aren’t happy about all of this—they’re acting like a kid with a cupcake whose parents are forcing them to eat their vegetables.
But how about the oil industry?
Unlike car companies, the oil industry can’t suck it up, get on the EV train, and after an unpleasant hump, continue to thrive. If EVs catch on in a serious way and end up being the ubiquitous type of car, oil companies are ruined. 45% of all the world’s extracted oil is used for transportation, but in the developed world, it’s much higher—in the US, 71% of extracted oil is used for transportation, and most of that is for cars.
So if the car industry has a cupcake and its parents are forcing it to eat vegetables, the oil industry has a cupcake but its parents are forcing it to eat razor blades. The car industry will resist the veggies and have a little tantrum before grudgingly giving in—the oil industry will furiously try to gouge the parents’ eyes out in resistance because for him, this is life and death.
And that’s how the oil industry sees EVs—horrifying razor blades. And giant industries don’t just roll over and eat razor blades without a serious fight.
We’ve seen this before. Tobacco companies fought tooth and nail to stay alive and strong as long as possible when the tide started to turn against them. And the oil industry itself has been fighting tooth and nail for a while now on another front—the battle to keep people confused about whether global warming is a thing.
Usually in these cases, the industry clawing for survival knows it’s on the way out. But in the meantime, they’re making money, and the longer it takes before the public fully gets the situation, the longer it’ll be before the public uniformly rejects them, politicians are able to regulate against them, and the money finally stops. Time is very much money in these situations.
The tactic to stay alive longer is always the same—put out misinformation to create confusion, and make it political so half the country feels like they’re going against “their own team” if they side against the industry.
The super-clever way they create confusion is by generating the public perception that there’s a genuine debate among scientists. That’s how you make a 97% consensus seem like an open question:38
    
The same tactic was used a few decades ago when 98% of scientists said smoking caused lung cancer, but the tobacco industry convinced the public for a long time that “scientists disagree” about whether smoking is harmful. The book Merchants of Doubt details how many of the same pro-smoking “scientists” a generation later became the “global warming isn’t a thing” scientists—the actual same people. 
When the 1990 California Zero Emissions Mandate forced car companies to make an EV in order to continue selling cars in CA, the oil industry saw it as a small tumor they needed to swiftly nip in the bud before it grew into a serious threat. Soon, a new voice popped up, a grassroots campaign called “Californians Against Utility Company Abuse” (CAUCA). The campaign staged protests against the state’s proposed utility investments in alternative-vehicle support systems. They also mentioned that “the environmental benefits of electric cars were dubious.”39 But as it turns out, CAUCA was created by a PR firm who was hired and funded by the oil industry. Eventually, the mandate was repealed, EVs disappeared, and the tumor was squashed.
Now, there’s a new tumor for the oil industry—Elon Musk. Tesla is showing the public directly that EVs are the future and funding the development of technology that’s making EVs better than anyone thought possible. A government mandate is crushable—obsessed Model S owners are not.
But again, oil doesn’t need to avoid an EV future to have a reason to fight—it just needs to delay the EV future for as long as it possibly can. Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” Big oil’s current mission is “to delay the advent of sustainable transport by making people think EVs aren’t actually better for the environment than gas cars.”
EVs are most definitely better for the environment—so the oil industry reaches for a key tool.
   
There are now a bunch of myths floating around. I didn’t treat them like automatic myths—each time I heard an argument for why EVs are dirty, I dug in and read about it, but each time, there was little basis in fact. Some examples of myths I’ve seen floating around about EVs or Tesla in particular:
 Myth: EV battery disposal is hazardous.
 Actually: A) Lithium-ion cells used in cars aren’t especially hazardous and are classified as landfill safe, B) They’re almost all recycled anyway, and C) They’ll continue to be recycled, because a used car battery still has a lot of value, either as a stationary battery or in the raw materials themselves.
 Myth: Manufacturing a Tesla is much dirtier than manufacturing a Prius or many other gas cars.
 Actually: Expensive cars are dirtier to manufacture than cheap ones. Comparing the manufacturing of a Tesla to a Prius is like saying “Prius’s are dirty because it’s dirtier to manufacture a Prius than a golf cart.” If you compare apples to apples, it’s no dirtier to make a Tesla than a similarly-priced luxury car.
 Myth: EVs are a huge burden on the electric grid.
 Actually: The grid is sized for the worst second of the worst day of the worst year—so there’s usually a lot of excess capacity. You could replace 70% of US gas car miles with EV miles with no changes to the grid. That percentage will also grow even higher as more homes get their power from solar panels.
 Myth: The Tesla uses a lot of graphite in their battery, which contributes to China’s pollution problem.
 Actually: The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.
But there’s one myth which has been more effective and more pervasive than any of these—the long tailpipe theory. 
The long tailpipe theory is everywhere. Anyone who doesn’t like EVs points it out immediately. So what’s the theory? I’ll let Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld do the honors:
“The entire reason for doing these stupid little cars is a lie because electricity comes from coal. In some cases, some studies show that these can produce more pollution than internal combustion engines.”40
 Upon first examination, this makes sense. Let’s bring back our US emissions chart to see what Greg means:
   
Earlier in the post, we identified the two biggest causes of CO2 emissions: cars running on gas and coal making electricity. The long tailpipe theory’s logic is that all an EV does is shift energy production from the first bad category to the second bad category. Since coal is the most prominent source of electricity in the world, and coal emits about 1.5 times more carbon than oil per joule of energy produced, EVs are actually worse emissions culprits than gas cars.
When you read about EVs or talk to people about them, you’ll hear this theory come up again and again and again and again.
The thing you’ll notice, though, is that every time you hear someone all mad about the long tailpipe emissions of EVs, they’re using wording like, “may be” and “often” and, in the case of Greg, “in some cases, some studies show.” That’s because you have to use words like that when you’re saying things that you wish were true but actually aren’t.
Taking the US as an example, here’s why they’re wrong:
 1) US electricity production is mixed, not just coal. Coal only makes up 39% of US electricity production. And that number’s going down:41
    
Natural gas, which emits less than half the CO2 of coal, now makes up over a quarter of US electricity production. Nuclear and renewables emit almost no CO2 and now produce a third of US electricity.
 2) Energy production is more efficient in a power plant than it is in a car engine. To use an example with an identical source fuel, burning natural gas in a power plant is about 60% efficient, meaning 40% of the energy of the fuel is lost in the energy production process. In a car, burning gas is less than 25% efficient, with the vast majority of the energy lost to heat. The larger more complex system at a power plant will always be far better at capturing waste heat than a tiny car engine. The increased efficiency means that even a car running purely on coal-generated electricity will emit carbon at the same rate as a gas car that gets 30 miles per gallon—which would be a significantly cleaner-than-average gas car.
Because the breakdown of energy source is different in different states, an EV will be greener in some places than others. The US Department of Energy has a great tool to assess exactly how an EV stacks up against a gas car in any zip code in the country.
In the parts of the country that use very little coal, like upstate New York, an EV’s well-to-wheel emissions are far less than that of a gas car (on the chart, HEV = a traditional hybrid car, PHEV = a plug-in hybrid car):
   
In the heaviest coal states, like Colorado, EVs cause a lot more CO2 emissions—but still less than a gas car:
   
The national average is somewhere in between, putting an EV at 61% of a gas car’s emissions overall:
   
 The Union of Concerned Scientists 24 came up with a way to directly compare car emissions, regardless of the type of car it is—a metric called “miles per gallon equivalent,” or MPGghg (ghg stands for greenhouse gases).
MPGghg is how many miles per gallon a gas car would need to achieve in order to match the carbon emissions of an EV (in the EV’s case, the emissions come from the plant that makes the electricity). In other words, if an EV gets 40 MPGghg, it means it emits the exact same amount of carbon as a gas car that gets 40 MPG.
The average new gas car gets 23 MPG. Anything above 30 MPG is really good for a gas car, and anything below 15 or 17 is bad. For reference, remember that an EV running on just coal-produced electricity would have an MPGghg of 30 (so even in a hypothetical entirely coal-powered state, an EV would be the same as a highly efficient gas car), and an EV running on just natural gas-powered electricity would have an MPGghg of 54 and just top the Toyota Prius, which runs at 50 MPG.
Here’s a useful map that shows the kind of MPGghg EVs get in different parts of the US:42
    
So even for the 17% of the population living in the worst coal states, an EV beats almost all gas cars. This sums it up:43
    
And the thing is, each year, that already-nicely-positioned blue bar will make a little jump to the right. Because the grid is getting cleaner every year, it means an EV gets cleaner as time goes by. Gas cars are locked where they are, and they’ll be stuck watching as the future pulls away from them.
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I didn’t feel strongly about this topic before I spent a lot of recent time learning about it—and now that I have, I kind of think the only way someone could feel positive about a gas car future is if they’re misinformed, personally financially interested in gas cars, hopelessly old-fashioned, drunk with politics, or kind of just being a dick? Right? They would have to be one of those five things to be super pro-gas car—right?
The battle going on isn’t about gas cars vs. electric cars. That one’s already decided. This is a war about time. Oil companies will try to slow things down, and they may succeed—but they’re not winning this one. I just don’t see how they could. A company that makes lantern fuel can stay strong for a while by shielding the public from understanding what a light bulb is, but eventually, people will figure it out and lanterns will be out of business, bringing the lantern fuel company down with it. Greasy hoods are old, noisy acceleration is old, overheating engines are old, oil changes are old, and it won’t be long before everyone realizes that. A fun field trip in 2050 will be taking your grandkid to see an old 20th-century gas station and explaining how it worked.25 Driving a gas car is like littering on a camping trail, smoking on an airplane, and throwing a big stack of paper in the trash, and it’s just a matter of time until public disgust catches up to it.
 Zooming Back Out 
Learning to harness the dragon of fire launched our modern world, and still today, we live in the age of burning. But we need to move on—we need to stop plowing through the trust fund and get a job. The dog needs to let the cave go. We need to learn to make energy the adult way—sustainably.
The sustainable energy world of the future—the yellow zone of our timeline from earlier in the post—is simple. It looks like this:
 1) Almost everything we use will run on electricity. 
 2) Almost all of our electricity will be produced from sustainable sources. 
That’s a world running on sunlight and electricity, and burning has no part in that world.
This transition will happen in steps, over time. At the beginning of the post, we identified the two problems we needed to address most urgently: 1) Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty. 2) Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty.
We spent the rest of the post zoomed in on Problem 2 to examine how things got that way, stayed that way, and why we may be witnessing the moment it finally changes.
We won’t get into Problem 1 today—but both Musk, through the US-leading solar panel installation company he co-founded, SolarCity, and Tesla, with their new product, the Powerwall stationary battery,26 are leading the way in this half of the energy equation too. For those interested, I put up a mini post on solar power and SolarCity.
People don’t quite realize it yet, but as of this moment, a family or business has the option to individually move themselves into the sustainable future. Using products made by SolarCity and Tesla alone, you can today live in a home and drive a car that are both powered by a solar panel-connected battery and live entirely on sunlight. Musk and his companies have made a little yellow brick road right out of the Fossil Fuel Era for anyone who wants to leave. And if modern technology can allow individual people, businesses, or even whole cities to live without fossil fuels, it hints that the only era any of us has ever known might be soon coming to an end.
 How to Change the World 
A study of Tesla isn’t about a car or a car company—it’s about how change happens. And about why it often doesn’t happen.
Our intuition tells us that technology, social norms, movements and ideas just move forward through time, as if forward progress is a river and those things are on a raft gliding through. We so associate the passage of time with progress that we use the term “the future” to refer to a better, more advanced version of our present world.
In reality, if a more advanced future does happen, it’s because that future was willed into our lives by a few brave people. The present isn’t welcoming of an advanced future because the present is run by a thick canopy made up of the ideas, norms, and technologies of the past. There’ll be incremental tweaks and slight iterations on proven-to-work concepts, which may seem to us like moving into the future, but it’s really just a polishing up of the past.
When the real change arrives, you know you’re seeing it. It’s a distinct and exhilarating feeling when you witness a disrupting innovator ram its way through the canopy. I had that feeling when I watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone in 2007. Before that moment, I had assumed that the ubiquitous Blackberrys and Nokias and Razors of the world were cutting-edge technology—but that keynote was an epiphany about how buried in the past those phones actually were. You don’t realize your Blackberry sucks until the iPhone exists. The feeling I had watching that keynote is the same feeling I had when I was six and I saw someone type on a computer word processor for the first time, and the last word on the line would magically jump to the line below when it hit the edge. Typewriters, which had seemed normal that morning, were suddenly ancient. The same thing happened when I saw the first iPod and became instantly disgusted with my horribly clunky and inefficient big booklet of CDs.
I had this feeling again, last month, when I test drove a Tesla Model S. I had driven to the Tesla factory that morning in what had felt like a brand new rental car, and I left the factory in the same car, now feeling like a 1982 model. I get now why Matthew Inman calls his Model S a “magical space car”—because that’s how it felt. That’s how a new, revolutionary technology always feels. Our modern world became as advanced as it is not by floating up an inevitable advancement river, but because of a collection of moments over time when a person or company has done something that makes everyone’s jaw drop.
But those world-changing moments don’t just smoothly glide into the world: these leaps into the future usually have to jam themselves through the canopy and then battle to keep themselves there. The past, which likes to loiter casually in our present world, hates when a piece of the future bursts onto the scene, because that exposes the past for being what it really is—the past. So a new and disruptive technology is often met with hostility as it emerges, as the existing canopy does whatever it can to squash the potential disruptor out of existence before it can gain momentum and start to spread. The old guard knows that once a disruptor gets a foothold and starts quickly spreading its ideas, the entire game changes—and once that balance tips, now instead of trying to squash the disruptor, everyone has to scramble to try to emulate it.
What Tesla is doing right now is an up-close example of how that kind of change happens.
The idea to change the car industry started as brainwaves zipping around Elon Musk’s head, as Christie Nicholson learned the hard way, but Musk couldn’t do much about it on his own. To make the idea real, he had to scale those brainwaves up, and he did that by building Tesla. That brought a new player into the car industry, run by a collective super-brain made up of 11,000 Tesla employees who also happened to think a lot about electric cars.
Change doesn’t happen on a familiar landscape—change has to construct the landscape itself. This is part of the reason the challenges Tesla has taken on are so enormous. Henry Ford didn’t just build a car—he built a landscape, defining what a car was. Since then, car companies have worked within Ford’s landscape. Bringing back what Musk said about Ford—He was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed—it’s clear that this is exactly what Musk and Tesla are doing right now. If there aren’t enough charging stations for long-trips, build an energy network of Superchargers. If scalability is held back by the high price of lithium-ion batteries, build a factory that doubles the world supply of them to bring the price down. Just get it done.
But with a goal as ambitious as “accelerating the advent of sustainable transport” and a victory condition as far-reaching as “half of all new cars being electric,”27 building one great car company isn’t enough. To bring Musk’s original idea to the next level, Tesla would need to scale itself. To do that, Tesla is building a line of cars so stellar that it’s going to change the public’s expectations of what a car should be, and the whole industry will have to adjust to that new expectation.
And by solving so many EV problems for its own cars, it’s forging the path to an EV-dominated world for all the other companies too. A company trying to rise to the top of their industry would hold their innovation secrets close—but because Tesla’s goal is to transform the industry, in 2014, Tesla made all of their patents available to whomever wanted them.
Other companies are critical to the mission, because Tesla’s goal is to ramp production up to 500,000 cars, which is only around half a percent of the total cars made each year. He explained, “The impact that Tesla will have is fairly small in and of itself. It will change people’s perception perhaps, but it will not in and of itself change the world. But if large numbers of people are choosing to buy the Model 3, and the car companies see that there’s no excuse left anymore because the car’s long range and the car’s handling and acceleration is better in every way than a gasoline car, and it’s affordable—and people are pretty sure this is what they want to buy—then that’s what will prompt car companies to invest real money into electric vehicle programs of their own, and indirectly, by spurring competition, Tesla can be the catalyst for a multi-order of magnitude shift of the entire industry towards electric.”
That’s how to spread the brainwaves of a single person throughout a huge industry and the global public—and by the time it’s done, everyone will think a lot about electric cars.
Maybe I’m wrong about something, or maybe something unexpected happens—but from what I’ve seen, read, and talked about, it really seems like Tesla is going to fulfill its mission and change the world. It’s going to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. If the Model 3 ends up being as great as they say it’s gonna be, there’s no doubt in my mind that electric cars will be the norm far earlier than they would have been. Which will, in turn, mean that 50 years from now, the atmosphere’s CO2 level will probably be lower than it would have otherwise been, cities will be less smoggy than they would have otherwise been, global temperatures will be lower than they would have otherwise been, the sad polar bear will get to eat seals again, along with about 12 other positive effects that will legitimately affect our lives. Pretty down-the-middle definition of changing the world.
Meanwhile, this is what Musk spends two days of his week on. With the rest of his time, he’s trying to make humanity a multi-planetary species—a goal that makes his Tesla mission seem like starting a grapefruit stand. We’ll get into all that in the next post.
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If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!
If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
Next up in this series:  
 Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars  
Other posts in the series:
 Part 1: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man  
Part 4: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce  
 Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City  
 Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop
  Extra Post #3: SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket — The Full Story  
 And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company:  Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future  
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 Some other Musk-y Wait But Why posts: 
 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence 
 The Fermi Paradox 
 Putting Time in Perspective 
 And the least Musk-y post ever: 
 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate 
  
Sources: 
IPCC: Special Report: Emissions Scenarios 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – Flowcharts Archive 
McKinsey &amp; Company: Road toward a low-carbon future: Reducing CO2 emissions from passenger vehicles in the global transportation system 
EIA: International energy data and analysis 
NPC Global Oil &amp; Gas Study: Topic Paper #4: Electric Generation Efficiency 
BP: Statistical Review of World Energy 2014 
Documentary: Who Killed the Electric Car? 
Documentary: Revenge of the Electric Car 
Shades of Green: Electric Cars’ Carbon Emissions Around the Globe 
Scrips: Graphics Gallery 
IEA: Availability of Fossil Fuels 
Judy and Curtis Anderson: Electric and Hybrid Cars: A History 
Interview: Baidu CEO Robin Li interviews Bill Gates and Elon Musk  
BBC: 50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy 
Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport 
Andrew Pollack: “General Motors Sues California Over Quota for Electric Car Sales.” The New York Times, 2001
Consumer Reports: Tesla Model S – The electric car that shatters every myth 
Alex Taylor, Fortune Magazine: Toyota: the Birth of the Prius 
Rolling Stone: Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math 
NYTimes: Elon Musk Says Self-Driving Tesla Cars Will Be in the U.S. by Summer 
Tesla Blog: The Mission of Tesla 
Tesla Blog: The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Car 
Green Car Reports: Despite Quick Charging, Toyota Exec Says Electric Cars Won’t Work For Long Ranges 
Richard Muller, NYTimes: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic 
Yahoo Finance: Tesla Motors Launches Revolutionary Supercharger Enabling Convenient Long Distance Driving 
EIA: What are the products and uses of petroleum? 
EIA: How much carbon dioxide is produced when different fuels are burned? 
Bloomberg: Teslas in California Help Bring Dirty Rain to China 
TED Talks: Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity 
Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk 
SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk
How Tesla Will Change The World — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man — Wait But Why
2015-05-07
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><em>This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies.</em></p>
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<p><strong>PDF and ebook options: </strong>We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Musk-Raddest-Man-Final-PDF-Preview.pdf">here</a>), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-musk"></a><a href="http://amzn.to/1RkVeEm"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Last month, I got a surprising phone call.</p>
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<p>Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world’s raddest man.</p>
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<p>I’ll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for <i>Iron Man’s </i>Tony Stark, but for the moment, I’ll let Richard Branson explain things briefly:<a href="#footnote2-1-3623">1</a>
</p><p><em>Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality…his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.</em></p>
<p>So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.</p>
<p>A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I’d be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.</p>
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<p>For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two <em>separate </em>items that have been sitting for a while in my “Future Post Topics” document, verbatim:</p>
<p>– “electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy”</p>
<p>– “spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??”</p>
<p>I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">wrote about</a> Artificial Intelligence—I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn’t understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.</p>
<p>It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.</p>
<p>So it was on. The plan was that I’d come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. <em>Exciting.</em></p>
<p>The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people—these world-class engineers and rocket scientists—and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.</p>
<p>The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in <em>all </em>of the following industries:</p>
<ul>
<li>Automotive</li>
<li>Aerospace</li>
<li>Solar Energy</li>
<li>Energy Storage</li>
<li>Satellite</li>
<li>High-Speed Ground Transportation</li>
<li>And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion</li>
</ul>
<p>Zeus would have been less stressful.</p>
<p>So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There’s a <em>lot </em>to get into.</p>
<p>We’ll dive deep into Musk’s companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let’s start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he’s such a big deal.<a href="#footnote-1-3623">1</a><a href="#footnote2-2-3623">2</a><sup>← click these</sup></p>
<p><strong>The Making of Elon Musk</strong></p>
<p><em>Note: There’s a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it’s been a key source in putting together these posts. I’m going to keep to a brief overview of his life here—if you want the full story, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062301233/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0062301233&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=wabuwh00-20&amp;linkId=UMV6CN256IWSDQDR">get the bio</a>.</em></p>
<p>Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school.<a href="#footnote-2-3623">2</a> But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the <i>Encyclopedia Britannica. </i></p>
<p>One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”<a href="#footnote2-3-3623">3</a> Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.</p>
<p>He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20">Commodore VIC-20</a>. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program” guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.<a href="#footnote-3-3623">3</a>
</p><p>Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.<a href="#footnote-4-3623">4</a>
</p><p>In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”<a href="#footnote2-4-3623">4</a>
</p><p>He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.</p>
<p>He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.</p>
<p>But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”<a href="#footnote2-5-3623">5</a> So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.</p>
<p>His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.</p>
<p>Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had ever heard of”<a href="#footnote2-6-3623">6</a>—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.</p>
<p>In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.</p>
<p>In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com’s many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.</p>
<p>This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes).<a href="#footnote-5-3623">5</a>
</p><p>If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.</p>
<p>The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:</p>
<p>In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.</p>
<p>Mm hm.</p>
<p>Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone<em> </em>started a successful <em>electric</em> car startup was never.</p>
<p>And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, <em>another </em>company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”<a href="#footnote2-7-3623">7</a>
</p><p>If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.</p>
<p>By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.</p>
<p>During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.</p>
<p>Darkness.</p>
<p>But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, <em>very </em>good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.</p>
<p>And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.</p>
<p>First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.</p>
<p>That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.</p>
<p><em>The next day,</em> on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.</p>
<p>While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.</p>
<p>Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts” for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.</p>
<p>Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under $30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s <em>total </em>annual production of lithium-ion batteries.</p>
<p>SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVjW9XdPlhg">Powerwall</a>.</p>
<p>And since that’s not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html">Hyperloop</a>.</p>
<p>In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”<a href="#footnote2-8-3623">8</a> Musk’s current net worth <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/">clocks in</a> at $12.9 billion.</p>
<p>All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”<a href="#footnote2-9-3623">9</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/F.jpg"></a>Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUMZTtQU10o">calls</a> Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur.” Others know him as “the real life Iron Man,” and not for no reason—Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr. to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first <em>Iron Man</em> movie so he could model his character off of Musk.<a href="#footnote2-10-3623">10</a> He’s even <a href="http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Musk_Who_Fell_to_Earth">been on</a> The Simpsons.</p>
<p>And this is the man I was somehow on the phone with as I frantically paced back and forth in my apartment, in pajama pants.</p>
<p>On the call, he made it clear that he wasn’t looking for me to advertise his companies—he only wanted me to help explain what’s going on in the worlds surrounding those companies and why the things happening with electric cars, sustainable energy production, and aerospace matter so much.</p>
<p>He seemed particularly bored with people spending time writing about <em>him—</em>he feels there are so many things of critical importance going on in the industries he’s involved in, and every time someone writes about him, he wishes they were writing about fossil fuel supply or battery advancements or the importance of making humanity multi-planetary (this is especially clear in the intro to the upcoming biography on him, when the author explains how <em>not</em> interested Musk was in having a bio written about him).</p>
<p>So I’m sure this first post, whose title is “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man,” will annoy him.</p>
<p>But I have reasons. To me, there are two worthy areas of exploration in this post series:</p>
<p><strong>1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing.</strong> He deeply believes that he’s taken on the most pressing possible causes to give humanity the best chance of a good future. I want to explore those causes in depth and the reasons he’s so concerned about them.</p>
<p><strong>2) To understand why Musk is <em>able to </em>do what he’s doing. </strong>There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else—and I think there’s a lot to learn from them.</p>
<p>So on my visit to California, I had two goals in mind: to understand as best I could what Musk and his teams were working on so feverishly and why it mattered so much, and to try to gain insight into what it is that makes him so capable of changing the world.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Visiting the Factories</strong></p>
<p>The Tesla Factory (in Northern CA) and the SpaceX Factory (in Southern CA), in addition to both being huge, and rad, have a lot in common.</p>
<p>Both factories are bright and clean, shiny and painted white, with super high ceilings. Both feel more like laboratories than traditional factories. And in both places, the engineers doing white collar jobs and the technicians doing blue collar jobs are deliberately placed in the same working quarters so they’ll work closely together and give each other feedback—and Musk believes it’s crucial for those designing the machines to be around those machines as they’re being manufactured. And while a traditional factory environment wouldn’t be ideal for an engineer on a computer and a traditional office environment wouldn’t be a good workplace for a technician, a clean, futuristic laboratory feels right for both professions. There are almost no closed offices in either factory—everyone is out in the open, exposed to everyone else.</p>
<p>When I pulled up to the Tesla factory (joined by Andrew), I was first taken by its size—and when I looked it up, I wasn’t surprised <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings_in_the_world">to see</a> that it has the second-largest building footprint (aka base area) in the U.S.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_6427.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The factory was formerly jointly owned by GM and Toyota, who sold it to Tesla in 2010. We started off the day with a full tour of the factory—a sea of red robots making cars and being silly:<a href="#footnote-6-3623">6</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_6434.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_6439.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_6444.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And other cool things, like a vast section of the factory that just makes the car battery, and another that houses the 20,000 pound rolls of aluminum they slice and press and weld into Teslas.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/130.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And this giant press, which costs $50 million and presses metal with <em>4,500 tons </em>of pressure (the same pressure you’d get if you stacked 2,500 cars on top of something).</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/142.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per <em>day </em>clip when they inhabited the factory.</p>
<p>I had a chance to visit the Tesla design studio (no pictures allowed), where there were designers sketching car designs on computer screens and, on the other side of the room, full-size car models made of clay. An actual-size clay version of the upcoming Model 3 was surrounded by specialists sculpting it with tiny instruments and blades, shaving off fractions of a millimeter to examine the way light bounced off the curves. There was also a 3D printer that could quickly “print” out a shoe-sized 3D model of a sketched Tesla design so a designer could actually hold their design and look at it from different angles. Deliciously futuristic.</p>
<p>The next day was the SpaceX factory, which might be even cooler, but the building contains advanced rocket technology, which according to the government is “weapons technology,” and apparently random bloggers aren’t allowed to take pictures of weapons technology.</p>
<p>Anyway, after the tours, I had a chance to sit down with several senior engineers and designers at both companies. They’d explain that they were a foremost expert in their field, I’d explain that I had recently figured out how big the building would be that could hold all humans, and we’d begin our discussion. I’d ask them about their work, their thoughts on the company as a whole and the broader industry, and then I’d ask them about their relationship with Elon and what it was like to work for him. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Musk has said he has a strict “no assholes” hiring policy, and I could see that at work in these meetings.</p>
<p>So what’s Musk like as a boss?</p>
<p>Let’s start by seeing what the internet says—there’s a <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-with-Elon-Musk">Quora thread</a> that poses the question: “What is it like to work with Elon Musk?”</p>
<p>The first answer is from a longtime SpaceX employee who no longer works there, who describes the day that their 3rd launch failed, a devastating blow for the company and for all the people who had worked for years to try to make it work.</p>
<p>She describes Elon emerging from mission command to address the company and delivering a rousing speech. She refers to Elon’s “infinite wisdom” and says, “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.”</p>
<p>Right below that answer is another answer, from an anonymous SpaceX engineer, who describes working for Musk like this:</p>
<p>“You can always tell when someone’s left an Elon meeting: they’re defeated…nothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks.”</p>
<p>Reading about Musk online and in Vance’s book, I was struck by how representative both of these Quora comments were of whole camps of opinion on working for Musk. Doing so seems to bring out a tremendous amount of adoration and a tremendous amount of exasperation, sometimes with a tone of bitterness—and even more oddly, much of the time, you hear both sides of this story expressed by the same person. For example, later in the comment of the effusive Quora commenter comes “Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him…the challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t.” And the frustrated anonymous commenter later concedes that the way Elon is “is understandable” given the enormity of the task at hand, and that “it is a great company and I do love it.”</p>
<p>My own talks with Musk’s engineers and designers told a similar story. I was told: “Elon always wants to know, ‘Why are we not going faster?’ He always wants bigger, better, faster” by the same person who a few minutes later was emphasizing how fair and thoughtful Musk tends to be in handling the terms for a recently fired employee.</p>
<p>The same person who told me he has “lots of sleepless nights” said in the adjacent sentence how happy he is to be at the company and that he hopes to “never leave.”</p>
<p>One senior executive described interacting with Musk like this: “Any conversation’s fairly high stakes because he’ll be very opinionated, and he can go deeper than you expect or are prepared for or deeper than your knowledge goes on a given topic, and it does feel like a high wire act interacting with him, especially when you find yourself in a [gulp] technical disagreement.”<a href="#footnote-7-3623">7</a> The same executive, who had previously worked at a huge tech company, also called Musk “the most grounded billionaire I’ve ever worked with.”</p>
<p>What I began to understand is that the explanation for both sides of the story—the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell—comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect—for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he’s undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless.</p>
<p>Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation—one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he’d ask Musk what his real angle was and what he <em>really </em>thinks. Musk’s response would always be boring: “I think exactly what I said.”</p>
<p>A few people I spoke with referenced Musk’s obsession with truth and accuracy. He’s fine with and even welcoming of negative criticism about him when he believes it’s accurate, but when the press gets something wrong about him or his companies, he usually can’t help himself and will engage them and correct their error. He detests vague spin-doctor phrases like “studies say” and “scientists disagree,” and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn’t think twice about—because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest.</p>
<p>There’s even an undertone of integrity in Musk’s tyrannical demands of workers, because while he may be a tyrant, he’s not a hypocrite. Employees pressured to work 80 hours a week tend to be less bitter about it when at least the CEO is in there working 100.</p>
<p>Speaking of the CEO, let’s go have a hamburger with him.</p>
<p><strong>My Lunch With Elon</strong></p>
<p>It started like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lunch-1.png"></a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lunch-2.png"></a></p>
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<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lunch-4.png"><br />
</a><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lunch-5.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lunch-6.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lunch-2.png"></a></p>
<p>After about seven minutes of this, I was able to get out my first question, a smalltalk-y question about how he thought the recent launch had gone (they had attempted an extremely difficult rocket-landing maneuver—more on that in the SpaceX post). His response included the following words: hypersonic, rarefied, densifying, supersonic, Mach 1, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, vacuum, regimes, thrusters, nitrogen, helium, mass, momentum, ballistic, and boost-back. While this was happening, I was still mostly blacked out from the surreality of the situation, and when I started to come to, I was scared to ask any questions about what he was saying in case he had already explained it while I was unconscious.</p>
<p>I eventually regained the ability to have adult human conversation, and we began what turned into a highly interesting and engaging two-hour discussion.<a href="#footnote-8-3623">8</a> This guy has a lot on his mind across a <em>lot </em>of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn’t actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn’t actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.</p>
<p>I’ll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:</p>
<p>— He’s a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn’t really come through on camera.</p>
<p>— He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.</p>
<p>— <strong>He is very, <em>very </em>concerned about AI.</strong> I quoted him in my <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">posts</a> on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how <em>much</em> he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the <em>three </em>things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.</p>
<p>— <strong>The Fermi Paradox also worries him.</strong> In <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">my post</a> on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation <em>fast</em>, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.</p>
<p>— <strong>One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness.</strong> I think of consciousness as a smooth <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">spectrum</a>. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.</p>
<p>— <strong>I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming.</strong> He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The <em>whole system</em> is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally <em>anyone</em> else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk <em>fixes shit for humanity.</em> So what did I do?</p>
<p><strong>Me: </strong>Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?</p>
<p><strong>Elon: </strong>The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.</p>
<p><strong>Me: </strong>You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.</p>
<p><strong>Elon:</strong> You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.</p>
<p><strong>Me: </strong>I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.</p>
<p><strong>Elon: </strong>I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.</p>
<p><strong>Me: </strong>And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.</p>
<p><strong>Elon: </strong>[Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.</p>
<p>Comments:</p>
<p>1) It’s really funny to brashly pressure Elon Musk to take on yet another seemingly-insurmountable task and to act a little disappointed in him that he’s not currently doing it, when he’s already doing more for humanity than literally anyone on the planet.</p>
<p>2) It’s also super fun to casually brush off the moral issues around genetic programming with “I think there’s a way” and to refer to <em>DNA—</em>literally the smallest and most complex substance ever—as “just a physical material deep down” when I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Because those things will be his problem to figure out, not mine.</p>
<p>3) I think I’ve successfully planted the seed. If Musk takes on human genetics 15 years from now and we all end up living to 250 because of it, you all owe me a drink.</p>
<address>___________</address>
<p>Watching interviews with Musk, you see a lot of people ask him some variation of this question Chris Anderson <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity#t-1088953">asked him</a> on stage at the 2013 TED conference:</p>
<p><em>How have you done this? These projects—PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX—they’re so spectacularly different. They’re such ambitious projects, at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way—what is it about you? Can we have some of that secret sauce?</em></p>
<p>There are a lot of things about Musk that make him so successful, but I do think there’s a “secret sauce” that puts Musk in a different league from even the other renowned billionaires of our time. I have a theory about what that is, which has to do with the way Musk thinks, the way that he reasons through problems, and the way he views the world. As this series continues, think about this, and we’ll discuss a lot more in the last post.</p>
<p>For now, I’ll leave you with Elon Musk holding a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Panic Monster</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_6470.jpg"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="#">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!</p>
<p>If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>Next up in this series:<strong> Part 2: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">How Tesla Will Change the World</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Other posts in the series:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 3:</strong> <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars<br />
</a>Part 4: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Extra Post #1: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/the-deal-with-solar.html">The Deal With Solar City</a></strong><br />
<strong> Extra Post #2: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html">The Deal With the Hyperloop<br />
</a>Extra Post #3: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html">SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket — The Full Story</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/neuralink">Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Some Musk-y Wait But Why Posts:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox</a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html">What Makes You You?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-musk"></a></p>
<p><strong>Sources</strong></p>
<p>A large part of what I learned for this post came from my own conversations with Musk and his staff. As I mentioned above, Ashlee Vance’s upcoming biography, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062301233/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;camp=1789&amp;amp;creative=390957&amp;amp;creativeASIN=0062301233&amp;amp;linkCode=as2&amp;amp;tag=wabuwh00-20&amp;amp;linkId=UMV6CN256IWSDQDR">Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future</a>, </em>is excellent and helped me fill in a bunch of gaps. Further info came from the sources below:</p>
<p>Documentary: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Electric_Car"><em>Revenge of the Electric Car</em></a><br />
TED Talks: <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity#t-1160586"><em>Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity</em></a><br />
Khan Academy: <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/khan-academy-living-room-chats/v/elon-musk">Interview With Elon Musk</a><br />
Quora: <em><a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-with-Elon-Musk">What is it like to work with Elon Musk?</a></em><br />
SXSW: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeQMWdOMa-A">Interview with Elon Musk</a><br />
Consumer Reports: <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2012/11/tesla-model-s-the-electric-car-that-shatters-every-myth/index.htm"><em>Tesla Model S: The Electric Car that Shatters Every Myth</em></a><br />
Wired: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_lfxPI5ObM"><em>How the Tesla Model S is Made</em></a><br />
Interview: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJHTY0gWOGw">Elon Musk says he’s a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla</a><br />
Interview: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I00quUJmM9M&amp;feature=youtu.be">Elon Musk gets introspective</a><br />
Business Insider: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-learned-rocket-science-for-spacex-2014-10"><em>Former SpaceX Exec Explains How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science</em></a><br />
Esquire: <a href="http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212/"><em>Elon Musk: The Triumph of His Will</em></a><br />
Oxford Martin School: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1HZIQliuoA">Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport</a><br />
MIT Interview: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfJjx12wkVQ">Elon Musk compares AI efforts to “Summoning the Demon”</a><br />
Documentary: <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkMuc8pXiTI">Billionaire Elon Musk : How I Became The Real ‘Iron Man’</a></em><br />
Reddit: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama">Elon Musk AMA</a><br />
Chris Anderson: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUMZTtQU10o">Chris Anderson on Elon Musk, the World’s Most Remarkable Entrepreneur</a><br />
Engineering.com: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9FD1UE6E1g">Who’s Better? Engineers or Scientists?</a><br />
Forbes: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2012/10/10/elon-musk-to-maye-musk-mom-i-havent-started-yet/"><em>Big Day For SpaceX As Elon Musk Tells His Mom ‘I Haven’t Started Yet’</em></a></p>
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 Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man

 May 7, 2015 By Tim Urban


 This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies.

 __________

 PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

 ___________

 Last month, I got a surprising phone call.

 Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world’s raddest man.

 I’ll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s Tony Stark, but for the moment, I’ll let Richard Branson explain things briefly:1

 Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality…his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.

 So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.

 A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I’d be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.

 For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my “Future Post Topics” document, verbatim:

 – “electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy”

 – “spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??”

 I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial Intelligence—I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn’t understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.

 It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.

 So it was on. The plan was that I’d come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting.

 The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people—these world-class engineers and rocket scientists—and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.

 The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:

 * Automotive
 * Aerospace
 * Solar Energy
 * Energy Storage
 * Satellite
 * High-Speed Ground Transportation
 * And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion

 Zeus would have been less stressful.

 So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There’s a lot to get into.

 We’ll dive deep into Musk’s companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let’s start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he’s such a big deal.12← click these

 The Making of Elon Musk

 Note: There’s a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it’s been a key source in putting together these posts. I’m going to keep to a brief overview of his life here—if you want the full story, get the bio.

 Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school.2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

 One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.

 He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program” guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.3

 Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.4

 In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”4

 He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.

 He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.

 But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”5 So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.

 His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.

 Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had ever heard of”6—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.

 In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.

 In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com’s many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.

 This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes).5

 If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.

 The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:

 In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.

 Mm hm.

 Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a successful electric car startup was never.

 And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”7

 If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.

 By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.

 Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.

 During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.

 Darkness.

 But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, very good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.

 And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.

 First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.

 That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.

 The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.

 While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.

 Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts” for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.

 Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under $30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s total annual production of lithium-ion batteries.

 SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the Powerwall.

 And since that’s not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the Hyperloop.

 In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”8 Musk’s current net worth clocks in at $12.9 billion.

 All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”9

 Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, calls Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur.” Others know him as “the real life Iron Man,” and not for no reason—Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr. to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first Iron Man movie so he could model his character off of Musk.10 He’s even been on The Simpsons.

 And this is the man I was somehow on the phone with as I frantically paced back and forth in my apartment, in pajama pants.

 On the call, he made it clear that he wasn’t looking for me to advertise his companies—he only wanted me to help explain what’s going on in the worlds surrounding those companies and why the things happening with electric cars, sustainable energy production, and aerospace matter so much.

 He seemed particularly bored with people spending time writing about him—he feels there are so many things of critical importance going on in the industries he’s involved in, and every time someone writes about him, he wishes they were writing about fossil fuel supply or battery advancements or the importance of making humanity multi-planetary (this is especially clear in the intro to the upcoming biography on him, when the author explains how not interested Musk was in having a bio written about him).

 So I’m sure this first post, whose title is “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man,” will annoy him.

 But I have reasons. To me, there are two worthy areas of exploration in this post series:

 1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing. He deeply believes that he’s taken on the most pressing possible causes to give humanity the best chance of a good future. I want to explore those causes in depth and the reasons he’s so concerned about them.

 2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing. There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else—and I think there’s a lot to learn from them.

 So on my visit to California, I had two goals in mind: to understand as best I could what Musk and his teams were working on so feverishly and why it mattered so much, and to try to gain insight into what it is that makes him so capable of changing the world.

 ___________

 Visiting the Factories

 The Tesla Factory (in Northern CA) and the SpaceX Factory (in Southern CA), in addition to both being huge, and rad, have a lot in common.

 Both factories are bright and clean, shiny and painted white, with super high ceilings. Both feel more like laboratories than traditional factories. And in both places, the engineers doing white collar jobs and the technicians doing blue collar jobs are deliberately placed in the same working quarters so they’ll work closely together and give each other feedback—and Musk believes it’s crucial for those designing the machines to be around those machines as they’re being manufactured. And while a traditional factory environment wouldn’t be ideal for an engineer on a computer and a traditional office environment wouldn’t be a good workplace for a technician, a clean, futuristic laboratory feels right for both professions. There are almost no closed offices in either factory—everyone is out in the open, exposed to everyone else.

 When I pulled up to the Tesla factory (joined by Andrew), I was first taken by its size—and when I looked it up, I wasn’t surprised to see that it has the second-largest building footprint (aka base area) in the U.S.

 The factory was formerly jointly owned by GM and Toyota, who sold it to Tesla in 2010. We started off the day with a full tour of the factory—a sea of red robots making cars and being silly:6

 And other cool things, like a vast section of the factory that just makes the car battery, and another that houses the 20,000 pound rolls of aluminum they slice and press and weld into Teslas.

 And this giant press, which costs $50 million and presses metal with 4,500 tons of pressure (the same pressure you’d get if you stacked 2,500 cars on top of something).

 The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per day clip when they inhabited the factory.

 I had a chance to visit the Tesla design studio (no pictures allowed), where there were designers sketching car designs on computer screens and, on the other side of the room, full-size car models made of clay. An actual-size clay version of the upcoming Model 3 was surrounded by specialists sculpting it with tiny instruments and blades, shaving off fractions of a millimeter to examine the way light bounced off the curves. There was also a 3D printer that could quickly “print” out a shoe-sized 3D model of a sketched Tesla design so a designer could actually hold their design and look at it from different angles. Deliciously futuristic.

 The next day was the SpaceX factory, which might be even cooler, but the building contains advanced rocket technology, which according to the government is “weapons technology,” and apparently random bloggers aren’t allowed to take pictures of weapons technology.

 Anyway, after the tours, I had a chance to sit down with several senior engineers and designers at both companies. They’d explain that they were a foremost expert in their field, I’d explain that I had recently figured out how big the building would be that could hold all humans, and we’d begin our discussion. I’d ask them about their work, their thoughts on the company as a whole and the broader industry, and then I’d ask them about their relationship with Elon and what it was like to work for him. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Musk has said he has a strict “no assholes” hiring policy, and I could see that at work in these meetings.

 So what’s Musk like as a boss?

 Let’s start by seeing what the internet says—there’s a Quora thread that poses the question: “What is it like to work with Elon Musk?”

 The first answer is from a longtime SpaceX employee who no longer works there, who describes the day that their 3rd launch failed, a devastating blow for the company and for all the people who had worked for years to try to make it work.

 She describes Elon emerging from mission command to address the company and delivering a rousing speech. She refers to Elon’s “infinite wisdom” and says, “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.”

 Right below that answer is another answer, from an anonymous SpaceX engineer, who describes working for Musk like this:

 “You can always tell when someone’s left an Elon meeting: they’re defeated…nothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks.”

 Reading about Musk online and in Vance’s book, I was struck by how representative both of these Quora comments were of whole camps of opinion on working for Musk. Doing so seems to bring out a tremendous amount of adoration and a tremendous amount of exasperation, sometimes with a tone of bitterness—and even more oddly, much of the time, you hear both sides of this story expressed by the same person. For example, later in the comment of the effusive Quora commenter comes “Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him…the challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t.” And the frustrated anonymous commenter later concedes that the way Elon is “is understandable” given the enormity of the task at hand, and that “it is a great company and I do love it.”

 My own talks with Musk’s engineers and designers told a similar story. I was told: “Elon always wants to know, ‘Why are we not going faster?’ He always wants bigger, better, faster” by the same person who a few minutes later was emphasizing how fair and thoughtful Musk tends to be in handling the terms for a recently fired employee.

 The same person who told me he has “lots of sleepless nights” said in the adjacent sentence how happy he is to be at the company and that he hopes to “never leave.”

 One senior executive described interacting with Musk like this: “Any conversation’s fairly high stakes because he’ll be very opinionated, and he can go deeper than you expect or are prepared for or deeper than your knowledge goes on a given topic, and it does feel like a high wire act interacting with him, especially when you find yourself in a [gulp] technical disagreement.”7 The same executive, who had previously worked at a huge tech company, also called Musk “the most grounded billionaire I’ve ever worked with.”

 What I began to understand is that the explanation for both sides of the story—the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell—comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect—for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he’s undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless.

 Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation—one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he’d ask Musk what his real angle was and what he really thinks. Musk’s response would always be boring: “I think exactly what I said.”

 A few people I spoke with referenced Musk’s obsession with truth and accuracy. He’s fine with and even welcoming of negative criticism about him when he believes it’s accurate, but when the press gets something wrong about him or his companies, he usually can’t help himself and will engage them and correct their error. He detests vague spin-doctor phrases like “studies say” and “scientists disagree,” and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn’t think twice about—because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest.

 There’s even an undertone of integrity in Musk’s tyrannical demands of workers, because while he may be a tyrant, he’s not a hypocrite. Employees pressured to work 80 hours a week tend to be less bitter about it when at least the CEO is in there working 100.

 Speaking of the CEO, let’s go have a hamburger with him.

 My Lunch With Elon

 It started like this:


 After about seven minutes of this, I was able to get out my first question, a smalltalk-y question about how he thought the recent launch had gone (they had attempted an extremely difficult rocket-landing maneuver—more on that in the SpaceX post). His response included the following words: hypersonic, rarefied, densifying, supersonic, Mach 1, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, vacuum, regimes, thrusters, nitrogen, helium, mass, momentum, ballistic, and boost-back. While this was happening, I was still mostly blacked out from the surreality of the situation, and when I started to come to, I was scared to ask any questions about what he was saying in case he had already explained it while I was unconscious.

 I eventually regained the ability to have adult human conversation, and we began what turned into a highly interesting and engaging two-hour discussion.8 This guy has a lot on his mind across a lot of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn’t actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn’t actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.

 I’ll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:

 — He’s a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn’t really come through on camera.

 — He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.

 — He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

 — The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

 — One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

 — I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes shit for humanity. So what did I do?

 Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?

 Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

 Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

 Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.

 Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

 Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.

 Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

 Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.

 Comments:

 1) It’s really funny to brashly pressure Elon Musk to take on yet another seemingly-insurmountable task and to act a little disappointed in him that he’s not currently doing it, when he’s already doing more for humanity than literally anyone on the planet.

 2) It’s also super fun to casually brush off the moral issues around genetic programming with “I think there’s a way” and to refer to DNA—literally the smallest and most complex substance ever—as “just a physical material deep down” when I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Because those things will be his problem to figure out, not mine.

 3) I think I’ve successfully planted the seed. If Musk takes on human genetics 15 years from now and we all end up living to 250 because of it, you all owe me a drink.

 ___________

 Watching interviews with Musk, you see a lot of people ask him some variation of this question Chris Anderson asked him on stage at the 2013 TED conference:

 How have you done this? These projects—PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX—they’re so spectacularly different. They’re such ambitious projects, at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way—what is it about you? Can we have some of that secret sauce?

 There are a lot of things about Musk that make him so successful, but I do think there’s a “secret sauce” that puts Musk in a different league from even the other renowned billionaires of our time. I have a theory about what that is, which has to do with the way Musk thinks, the way that he reasons through problems, and the way he views the world. As this series continues, think about this, and we’ll discuss a lot more in the last post.

 For now, I’ll leave you with Elon Musk holding a Panic Monster.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!

 If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 Next up in this series: Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World

 Other posts in the series:

 Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
 Part 4: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce

 Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
 Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop
 Extra Post #3: SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket — The Full Story

 And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company: Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

 Some Musk-y Wait But Why Posts:

 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

 The Fermi Paradox

 What Makes You You?

 Sources

 A large part of what I learned for this post came from my own conversations with Musk and his staff. As I mentioned above, Ashlee Vance’s upcoming biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is excellent and helped me fill in a bunch of gaps. Further info came from the sources below:

 Documentary: Revenge of the Electric Car
 TED Talks: Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
 Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk
 Quora: What is it like to work with Elon Musk?
 SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk
 Consumer Reports: Tesla Model S: The Electric Car that Shatters Every Myth
 Wired: How the Tesla Model S is Made
 Interview: Elon Musk says he’s a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla
 Interview: Elon Musk gets introspective
 Business Insider: Former SpaceX Exec Explains How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science
 Esquire: Elon Musk: The Triumph of His Will
 Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport
 MIT Interview: Elon Musk compares AI efforts to “Summoning the Demon”
 Documentary: Billionaire Elon Musk : How I Became The Real ‘Iron Man’
 Reddit: Elon Musk AMA
 Chris Anderson: Chris Anderson on Elon Musk, the World’s Most Remarkable Entrepreneur
 Engineering.com: Who’s Better? Engineers or Scientists?
 Forbes: Big Day For SpaceX As Elon Musk Tells His Mom ‘I Haven’t Started Yet’

 1. Thank you for following instructions. I came across much more in my research than I have room to fit in these posts, so I’ll tuck extra tidbits and related thoughts into these blue circle footnotes throughout the post. Click these if you have time.↩

 2. He was badly bullied in his early teens, including one particularly traumatic incident in which a group of guys who constantly picked on Elon attacked him in full force one day, pushing him down a flight of stairs and then beating him unconscious. He has breathing problems to this day because of the injuries.↩

 3. He first became enamored with computers and video games during a trip to the US he accompanied his father on when he was a little kid and all the hotels they stayed in had arcades—this was also when he first became enamored with America.↩

 4. As an experiment, he lived for a while on $1/day during college, eating mostly hot dogs.↩

 5. Musk and the PayPal team stayed on good terms, for the most part, and a number of them have since invested in Musk’s later companies.↩

 6. Here’s a cool video of the robots in action.↩

 7. He didn’t actually gulp.↩

 8. I did an odd but kind of a hilarious thing and fucked with him at the very beginning. I knew from watching interviews with him the certain things he absolutely hates being asked about because he thinks the topics are impossibly stupid and impractical. I picked the three that seemed to bother him most, and right in the beginning of the interview, said: “So by the way, since we spoke on the phone, I’ve altered the plan a bit, and I’m going to focus on three main things in these posts: hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels in space, and the space elevator.” He looked at me with horrified disappointment and after a pause, said, “Really??” Then I told him I was just messing with him and he exhaled hugely and said, “Oh thank god.” Fun.↩

 1. http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/elon-musk/↩

 2. Gray square footnotes are just for sources. Only bother with these if you want to see the source of a quote or fact or read more about the topic.↩

 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&feature=youtu.be&t=35m49s↩

 4. http://www.startalkradio.net/show/the-future-of-humanity-with-elon-musk/↩

 5. https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/khan-academy-living-room-chats/v/elon-musk↩

 6. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk, 64.↩

 7. http://www.greenoptimistic.com/solarcity-acquires-silevo-plans-one-largest-solar-panel-factories-world-20140618/#.VUmgnNNViko↩

 8. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk, 189 ↩

 9. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk, 21.↩

 10. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk, 181.↩

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 * 
This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. 
__________
 PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:
     
___________
Last month, I got a surprising phone call.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world’s raddest man.
   
I’ll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s Tony Stark, but for the moment, I’ll let Richard Branson explain things briefly:1
  Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality…his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it. 
So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.
A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I’d be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.
   
   
For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my “Future Post Topics” document, verbatim:
– “electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy”
– “spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??”
I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial Intelligence—I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn’t understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.
It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.
So it was on. The plan was that I’d come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting. 
The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people—these world-class engineers and rocket scientists—and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.
The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:
Automotive
Aerospace
Solar Energy
Energy Storage
Satellite
High-Speed Ground Transportation
And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion
Zeus would have been less stressful.
So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There’s a lot to get into.
We’ll dive deep into Musk’s companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let’s start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he’s such a big deal.1 2 ← click these 
 The Making of Elon Musk 
 Note: There’s a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it’s been a key source in putting together these posts. I’m going to keep to a brief overview of his life here—if you want the full story, get the bio. 
Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school.2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  
One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.
He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program” guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.3
 Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.4
 In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”4
 He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.
He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.
But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”5 So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.
His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.
Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had ever heard of”6—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.
In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.
In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com’s many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.
This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes).5
 If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.
The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:
In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.
Mm hm.
Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a successful electric car startup was never.
And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”7
 If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.
By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.
Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.
During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.
Darkness.
But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, very good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.
And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.
First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.
That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.
 The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.
While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.
Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts” for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.
Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under $30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s total annual production of lithium-ion batteries.
SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the Powerwall.
And since that’s not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the Hyperloop.
In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”8 Musk’s current net worth clocks in at $12.9 billion.
All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”9
   Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, calls Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur.” Others know him as “the real life Iron Man,” and not for no reason—Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr. to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first Iron Man movie so he could model his character off of Musk.10 He’s even been on The Simpsons.
And this is the man I was somehow on the phone with as I frantically paced back and forth in my apartment, in pajama pants.
On the call, he made it clear that he wasn’t looking for me to advertise his companies—he only wanted me to help explain what’s going on in the worlds surrounding those companies and why the things happening with electric cars, sustainable energy production, and aerospace matter so much.
He seemed particularly bored with people spending time writing about him—he feels there are so many things of critical importance going on in the industries he’s involved in, and every time someone writes about him, he wishes they were writing about fossil fuel supply or battery advancements or the importance of making humanity multi-planetary (this is especially clear in the intro to the upcoming biography on him, when the author explains how not interested Musk was in having a bio written about him).
So I’m sure this first post, whose title is “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man,” will annoy him.
But I have reasons. To me, there are two worthy areas of exploration in this post series:
 1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing. He deeply believes that he’s taken on the most pressing possible causes to give humanity the best chance of a good future. I want to explore those causes in depth and the reasons he’s so concerned about them.
 2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing. There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else—and I think there’s a lot to learn from them.
So on my visit to California, I had two goals in mind: to understand as best I could what Musk and his teams were working on so feverishly and why it mattered so much, and to try to gain insight into what it is that makes him so capable of changing the world.
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 Visiting the Factories 
The Tesla Factory (in Northern CA) and the SpaceX Factory (in Southern CA), in addition to both being huge, and rad, have a lot in common.
Both factories are bright and clean, shiny and painted white, with super high ceilings. Both feel more like laboratories than traditional factories. And in both places, the engineers doing white collar jobs and the technicians doing blue collar jobs are deliberately placed in the same working quarters so they’ll work closely together and give each other feedback—and Musk believes it’s crucial for those designing the machines to be around those machines as they’re being manufactured. And while a traditional factory environment wouldn’t be ideal for an engineer on a computer and a traditional office environment wouldn’t be a good workplace for a technician, a clean, futuristic laboratory feels right for both professions. There are almost no closed offices in either factory—everyone is out in the open, exposed to everyone else.
When I pulled up to the Tesla factory (joined by Andrew), I was first taken by its size—and when I looked it up, I wasn’t surprised to see that it has the second-largest building footprint (aka base area) in the U.S.
   
The factory was formerly jointly owned by GM and Toyota, who sold it to Tesla in 2010. We started off the day with a full tour of the factory—a sea of red robots making cars and being silly:6
    
   
   
And other cool things, like a vast section of the factory that just makes the car battery, and another that houses the 20,000 pound rolls of aluminum they slice and press and weld into Teslas.
   
And this giant press, which costs $50 million and presses metal with 4,500 tons of pressure (the same pressure you’d get if you stacked 2,500 cars on top of something).
   
The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per day clip when they inhabited the factory.
I had a chance to visit the Tesla design studio (no pictures allowed), where there were designers sketching car designs on computer screens and, on the other side of the room, full-size car models made of clay. An actual-size clay version of the upcoming Model 3 was surrounded by specialists sculpting it with tiny instruments and blades, shaving off fractions of a millimeter to examine the way light bounced off the curves. There was also a 3D printer that could quickly “print” out a shoe-sized 3D model of a sketched Tesla design so a designer could actually hold their design and look at it from different angles. Deliciously futuristic.
The next day was the SpaceX factory, which might be even cooler, but the building contains advanced rocket technology, which according to the government is “weapons technology,” and apparently random bloggers aren’t allowed to take pictures of weapons technology.
Anyway, after the tours, I had a chance to sit down with several senior engineers and designers at both companies. They’d explain that they were a foremost expert in their field, I’d explain that I had recently figured out how big the building would be that could hold all humans, and we’d begin our discussion. I’d ask them about their work, their thoughts on the company as a whole and the broader industry, and then I’d ask them about their relationship with Elon and what it was like to work for him. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Musk has said he has a strict “no assholes” hiring policy, and I could see that at work in these meetings.
So what’s Musk like as a boss?
Let’s start by seeing what the internet says—there’s a Quora thread that poses the question: “What is it like to work with Elon Musk?”
The first answer is from a longtime SpaceX employee who no longer works there, who describes the day that their 3rd launch failed, a devastating blow for the company and for all the people who had worked for years to try to make it work.
She describes Elon emerging from mission command to address the company and delivering a rousing speech. She refers to Elon’s “infinite wisdom” and says, “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.”
Right below that answer is another answer, from an anonymous SpaceX engineer, who describes working for Musk like this:
“You can always tell when someone’s left an Elon meeting: they’re defeated…nothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks.”
Reading about Musk online and in Vance’s book, I was struck by how representative both of these Quora comments were of whole camps of opinion on working for Musk. Doing so seems to bring out a tremendous amount of adoration and a tremendous amount of exasperation, sometimes with a tone of bitterness—and even more oddly, much of the time, you hear both sides of this story expressed by the same person. For example, later in the comment of the effusive Quora commenter comes “Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him…the challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t.” And the frustrated anonymous commenter later concedes that the way Elon is “is understandable” given the enormity of the task at hand, and that “it is a great company and I do love it.”
My own talks with Musk’s engineers and designers told a similar story. I was told: “Elon always wants to know, ‘Why are we not going faster?’ He always wants bigger, better, faster” by the same person who a few minutes later was emphasizing how fair and thoughtful Musk tends to be in handling the terms for a recently fired employee.
The same person who told me he has “lots of sleepless nights” said in the adjacent sentence how happy he is to be at the company and that he hopes to “never leave.”
One senior executive described interacting with Musk like this: “Any conversation’s fairly high stakes because he’ll be very opinionated, and he can go deeper than you expect or are prepared for or deeper than your knowledge goes on a given topic, and it does feel like a high wire act interacting with him, especially when you find yourself in a [gulp] technical disagreement.”7 The same executive, who had previously worked at a huge tech company, also called Musk “the most grounded billionaire I’ve ever worked with.”
What I began to understand is that the explanation for both sides of the story—the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell—comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect—for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he’s undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless.
Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation—one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he’d ask Musk what his real angle was and what he really thinks. Musk’s response would always be boring: “I think exactly what I said.”
A few people I spoke with referenced Musk’s obsession with truth and accuracy. He’s fine with and even welcoming of negative criticism about him when he believes it’s accurate, but when the press gets something wrong about him or his companies, he usually can’t help himself and will engage them and correct their error. He detests vague spin-doctor phrases like “studies say” and “scientists disagree,” and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn’t think twice about—because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest.
There’s even an undertone of integrity in Musk’s tyrannical demands of workers, because while he may be a tyrant, he’s not a hypocrite. Employees pressured to work 80 hours a week tend to be less bitter about it when at least the CEO is in there working 100.
Speaking of the CEO, let’s go have a hamburger with him.
 My Lunch With Elon 
It started like this:
     
   
  
   
   
   
After about seven minutes of this, I was able to get out my first question, a smalltalk-y question about how he thought the recent launch had gone (they had attempted an extremely difficult rocket-landing maneuver—more on that in the SpaceX post). His response included the following words: hypersonic, rarefied, densifying, supersonic, Mach 1, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, vacuum, regimes, thrusters, nitrogen, helium, mass, momentum, ballistic, and boost-back. While this was happening, I was still mostly blacked out from the surreality of the situation, and when I started to come to, I was scared to ask any questions about what he was saying in case he had already explained it while I was unconscious.
I eventually regained the ability to have adult human conversation, and we began what turned into a highly interesting and engaging two-hour discussion.8 This guy has a lot on his mind across a lot of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn’t actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn’t actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.
I’ll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:
— He’s a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn’t really come through on camera.
— He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.
— He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.
— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.
— One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.
— I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes shit for humanity. So what did I do?
 Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?
 Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.
 Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.
 Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.
 Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.
 Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.
 Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.
 Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.
Comments:
1) It’s really funny to brashly pressure Elon Musk to take on yet another seemingly-insurmountable task and to act a little disappointed in him that he’s not currently doing it, when he’s already doing more for humanity than literally anyone on the planet.
2) It’s also super fun to casually brush off the moral issues around genetic programming with “I think there’s a way” and to refer to DNA—literally the smallest and most complex substance ever—as “just a physical material deep down” when I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Because those things will be his problem to figure out, not mine.
3) I think I’ve successfully planted the seed. If Musk takes on human genetics 15 years from now and we all end up living to 250 because of it, you all owe me a drink.
___________
Watching interviews with Musk, you see a lot of people ask him some variation of this question Chris Anderson asked him on stage at the 2013 TED conference:
 How have you done this? These projects—PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX—they’re so spectacularly different. They’re such ambitious projects, at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way—what is it about you? Can we have some of that secret sauce? 
There are a lot of things about Musk that make him so successful, but I do think there’s a “secret sauce” that puts Musk in a different league from even the other renowned billionaires of our time. I have a theory about what that is, which has to do with the way Musk thinks, the way that he reasons through problems, and the way he views the world. As this series continues, think about this, and we’ll discuss a lot more in the last post.
For now, I’ll leave you with Elon Musk holding a Panic Monster.
   
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Next up in this series: Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World  
 Other posts in the series: 
 Part 3:  How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce  
 Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City  
 Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop
Extra Post #3: SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket — The Full Story  
 And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company: Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future  
 Some Musk-y Wait But Why Posts: 
 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence 
 The Fermi Paradox 
 What Makes You You? 
   
 Sources 
A large part of what I learned for this post came from my own conversations with Musk and his staff. As I mentioned above, Ashlee Vance’s upcoming biography,  Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is excellent and helped me fill in a bunch of gaps. Further info came from the sources below:
Documentary:  Revenge of the Electric Car  
TED Talks:  Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity  
Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk 
Quora:  What is it like to work with Elon Musk?  
SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk 
Consumer Reports:  Tesla Model S: The Electric Car that Shatters Every Myth  
Wired:  How the Tesla Model S is Made  
Interview: Elon Musk says he’s a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla 
Interview: Elon Musk gets introspective 
Business Insider:  Former SpaceX Exec Explains How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science  
Esquire:  Elon Musk: The Triumph of His Will  
Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport 
MIT Interview: Elon Musk compares AI efforts to “Summoning the Demon” 
Documentary:  Billionaire Elon Musk : How I Became The Real ‘Iron Man’  
Reddit: Elon Musk AMA 
Chris Anderson: Chris Anderson on Elon Musk, the World’s Most Remarkable Entrepreneur 
Engineering.com: Who’s Better? Engineers or Scientists? 
Forbes:  Big Day For SpaceX As Elon Musk Tells His Mom ‘I Haven’t Started Yet’
Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html
7.3 Billion People, One Building — Wait But Why
2015-03-07
Tim Urban
<div><div><p>After a year and a half of writing Wait But Why posts, I’ve noticed a theme: humans seem to come up a lot.</p>
<p>Sometimes we talk about where humans <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/your-ancestor-is-jellyfish.html">came from</a> or where we <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">might</a> be going or how we’re all <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-future.html">related</a>; other times we look at how we <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html">interact</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/07/7-ways-to-be-insufferable-on-facebook.html">and</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/11-awkward-things-about-email.html">communicate</a> and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">form</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html">relationships</a>. We’ve talked about <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/combined-wealth-world.html">rich</a> humans and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/absurdly-famous-people-probably-dont-know-enough.html">famous</a> humans and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">baby</a> humans and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/the-death-toll-comparison-breakdown.html">dead</a> humans and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-i-learned-while-i-was-in.html">humans</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/russia-what-you-didnt-know.html">from</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/japan-and-how-i-failed-to-figure-it-out.html">all</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/08/19-things-learned-nigeria.html">over</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">the</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/but-what-about-greenland.html">world</a>. We’ve explored what it means <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html">to be a human</a>, what it means to be a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">good human</a>, and whether we’re <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">all alone</a> in the universe. And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html">what</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">really</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">matters</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">most</a> in this <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html">one, short human life</a>.</p>
<p>But somehow, we made it through all of that discussion without ever asking the most important question of all about humans—</p>
<p><em>How big a building would you need to fit them all in it?</em></p>
<p>It’s a question that’s tantalized almost no one through the ages, and today we’re gonna tackle it hard.</p>
<p>But before we ask all 7.3 billion humans to stop what they’re doing so I can arrange and bunch them together at my whim, let’s discuss the number 7.3 billion.</p>
<p>The first thing to note is that when I did a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/what-if-all-71-billion-people-moved-to.html">post</a> on population density in August of 2013, the number I kept referring to was 7.1 billion. The <a href="http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/">world population</a> has grown by 194,000,000, or almost 3%, since then.</p>
<p>Second, 7.3 billion people is a lot of people. If each living human were represented by a dry grain of rice, the rice would fill a cube-shaped box with a side of 6.1 meters,<a href="#footnote2-1-3475">1</a> or about 20 feet—around the size of a two-story house.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Rice.png"></a></p>
<p>That’s a lot of rice grains.</p>
<p>And how about 7.3 billion grains of sand? Well according to this <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Wentworth-Grain-Size-Chart.pdf">delightful chart</a>, “sand” can mean a lot of things. 7.3 billion “very coarse” grains (about 2mm in diameter) would fill a large cubic room with a height of 4m (13ft). 7.3 billion medium-size grains (.25mm in diameter) would fill a medium, 46cm high (1.5ft) cardboard box. And 7.3 billion of the finest, .0625mm sand grains (any smaller and it wouldn’t be sand anymore—it would be silt) would take up about 1,700 cubic centimeters of space, almost but not quite filling a 2-liter soda bottle.</p>
<p>Also, walking 7.3 billion steps would take you around the Earth…150 times. (At two steps per second, that would take you 115 years.) (I’m doing that thing where I’m going on divergent math spirals during the post and then just putting what I figured out into the actual post. I’ll try to stay on topic here but it won’t be easy. Let’s keep going.)</p>
<p><b>7.3 billion humans in one-dimensional configurations</b></p>
<p>The first activity today will be putting all humans in a single file line. We’ll start near Quito, Ecuador, right on the equator, and the line will follow the equator. We’ll begin with Carlos. Stand here, Carlos.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Carlos.png"></a></p>
<p>Second in line will be Daniela. Third is you, Andrea.<a href="#footnote-1-3475">1</a> Since we’re trying to be efficient, I want everyone to stand as close as possible to the people in front of you and behind you without actually touching. Some people will require more or less space than others because people are different sizes, but let’s assume each person we add to the line will make the line one foot (about 30cm) longer on average.<a href="#footnote-2-3475">2</a>
</p><p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Carlos-and-Others.png"></a></p>
<p>So we do this for a while and the line gets longer and longer. We build bridges over oceans and tunnels through mountains to make a clean line along the equator. Eventually, the line goes around the whole Earth gets back to Carlos. But we’ve only gotten through 131 million people—less than 2% of humans—so we’ll need to wind around the Earth again. And again. Finally, halfway through the 56th loop, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, we get to the final human, and we’re done.</p>
<p>Okay that kind of annoyed me because it ended up in the shape of spring, not a line. Let’s try another way.</p>
<p>Carlos, stand on the X again. We’re gonna have Daniela stand on your shoulders, and then Andrea’s gonna stand on hers, and we’ll just keep going up from there.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Tower.png"></a></p>
<p>The average human is 165cm (5’5″) tall, but about a foot of that is from the shoulders to the top of the head, so when we add someone onto the top person’s shoulders, the height of the tower rises by an average of about 134cm (4’5″).</p>
<p>We stack and stack and eventually, we reach the moon. Unfortunately, we’ve only used 286 million people at this point and have 96% of humans still left to go. By the time we finally finish, the tower is 9.8 million km (6.1m miles) high, and we’re around 1/5th of the way to Mars, 1/4th of the way to Venus, and 1/15th of the way to the sun.<a href="#footnote2-2-3475">2</a>
</p><p>How about if we all held hands and formed a huge circle? Let’s say that we’ll stand side-by-side, holding hands, which is enough distance apart to take up about three feet (91cm) of the circle each.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3-Feet.png"></a></p>
<p>Continuing like this, our final circle has a circumference of 6.6 million km (4.1m miles) and a diameter of 2.1 million km (1.3m miles).</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Circle.jpg"></a></p>
<p>While we’re all out there holding hands and dying instantly from being in space without suits, the Earth will look to us around the same size as the moon usually looks in our night sky.</p>
<p>Okay one dimensional shapes are pretty inconvenient for everyone—let’s reel things in and try this in two dimensions:</p>
<p><b>7.3 billion humans in two-dimensional configurations</b></p>
<p>The addition of a second dimension to our human shapes makes the species seem a lot smaller.</p>
<p>When arranging humans in two dimensions, the first question we need to ask is, “How much ground area does each human need when we’re bunching them all together as closely as we can without killing everyone?” The answer, for this post, is .1 square meters, giving us a rate of 10 people per square meter.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>How Many People Can Fit in a Square Meter Comfortably-ish?</strong></p>
<p>The quest for this answer brought me to the most obscure corners of the internet, where I came across two key groups of bored people. The <a href="http://www.macleans.ca/general/how-many-journalists-can-you-fit-into-one-square-metre/">first one</a> shows nine Canadian journalists choosing to spend time positioning themselves together into one square meter. Doing so gives each of them an average of one 33cm x 33cm (13″ x 13″) square to stand in. You can see in the video that while it’s definitely tight, no one is forced to molest anyone else and everyone can breathe.</p>
<p>But that’s using all adults. The world’s <a href="http://world.bymap.org/MedianAge.html">median age</a> is 29, and the youngest billion humans tend to be quite little. The <a href="https://kelvinroadschool.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-many-children-fit-into-square-metre.html">second case</a> brings us across the world to a random New Zealand elementary school, where a teacher has decided to get cute and cram as many kids as she can into a square meter. She maxes out at a shocking <em>22 </em>kids.</p>
<p>Putting these two performances together, it seems reasonable to say that 10 humans per square meter is a safe estimate for what we can use as our human-bunching metric. Nine adults in the square managed fine and the addition of children into the mix should be able to easily increase that total by one to 10 (yes, some adults are much larger than average, but others are tiny—the world’s <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-12-439.pdf">average adult</a> is a not-that-large 62kg (137lb) person).</p>
</div>
<p>At 10 people per square meter, we can fit 1,000 people in a 10m x 10m square. A basketball court is 28m x 15m, which means we can fit 4,200 people on one, all in bounds.</p>
<p>We can fit 54,000 people on an American football field, which is large enough to hold the entire population of Liechtenstein or Monaco, and if we expand our field to the size of a soccer field—sorry, a <em>football pitch—</em>we can hold over 71,000 people, more than enough space to contain the population of Greenland.</p>
<p>Tiananmen Square is pretty huge—880m x 500m or just under half a square kilometer.</p>
<p><strong> </strong>If it were empty, it could hold 4.4 million people, or the entire population of Croatia, Oman, Lebanon, Panama, Moldova, Uruguay, Kuwait, Mongolia, or Lithuania.</p>
<p>A full square kilometer could fit 10 million people—the population of a megacity—and you could pack all 26 million Scandinavians—everyone in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark<a href="#footnote2-3-3475">3</a>—into one square mile.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/scandinavia.png"></a></p>
<p>Central Park, with an area of 3.41 square km (1.3 sq mi), could easily hold the population of Australia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Venezuela, Malaysia, Nepal, Mozambique or Syria. You could fit all 13.9 million Jews into Central Park and still have room for the population of Romania, Chile, or the Netherlands. The entire human race in 5,000 BC, which historians estimate to be between 5 – 20 million people, would fill up at most a little over half of Central Park.</p>
<p>We’re just getting started, so settle in.</p>
<p>You could squeeze all 320 million Americans into a 5.7km x 5.7km (3.5mi x 3.5mi) square, which would take less than five hours to walk around.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Americans.png"></a></p>
<p>And a square 10km x 10km (6.2mi x 6.2mi), or a small island about twice the size of Bermuda, could hold a <em>billion </em>people (which you could walk the perimeter of in about 8 hours). A slightly larger island, Martha’s Vineyard, has an area of 226km<sup>2</sup> and could fit all the world’s Christians on it [insert your own wisecrack here]<em>. </em>Alternatively, Martha’s Vineyard could fit the entire combined population of North America and South America…<em>and still have room for the entire population of Africa. </em>As for the world’s females, if they ever got annoyed with men and wanted to start a club, they could hold their membership-wide meetings in the 360km<sup>2</sup> Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>Anyway, what we really want to know is how big a piece of land we’d need to hold <em>everyone</em>—all 7.3 billion of us. And the answer is, a 27km x 27km (16.8mi x 16.8mi) square.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/All-Humans.png"></a></p>
<p>That square is smaller than Bahrain. And on top of Africa, it would look like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Africa.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The square is also smaller than New York City.</p>
<p>NYC has an area of 786 square km, or 303 sq mi, and the whole human race could fit inside it—with room for another half a billion people. Specifically:</p>
<ul>
<li>Manhattan could fit 590 million people</li>
<li>Brooklyn could fit 1.38 billion people</li>
<li>Queens could fit 2.83 billion people</li>
<li>The Bronx could fit 1.09 billion people</li>
<li>Staten Island could fit 1.51 billion people</li>
</ul>
<p>So let’s try it. First by geographic region:</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NYC1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>How’s everyone doing down there?</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Crowd.png"></a></p>
<p>Great. Now, let’s shift around and organize by religion:</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NYC2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So that’s how much ground space the human race takes up—but that’s only talking about the living humans.</p>
<p>Scientists’ estimates for the total number of humans who have ever lived<a href="#footnote2-4-3475">4</a> tend to range from 90 to 110 billion people. The most common estimates are around 108 billion total humans. Using that assumption, a little under 7% of all people who have ever lived are alive right now:</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/108B.png"></a></p>
<p>We just had a Dinner Table <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/table/bring-one-person-back-from-the-dead">discussion</a> about which dead human we’d like to bring back to life—but what if we brought <em>all</em> dead humans back? How much space would we need to make room for them?</p>
<p>We’d need 10,800 square kilometers—a square with a side of 103km (65mi)—which would easily fit inside Jamaica, Qatar, Kuwait, The Gambia, or Connecticut.</p>
<p>Continuing into hypothetical world, we could fit a <em>trillion </em>people in South Korea, Iceland, Guatemala, or Cuba, and if we covered every square meter of the Earth’s land with people, it would fit 1.48 quadrillion people—200,000 times the current world population. To finish the job, let’s cover the <em>entire </em>surface of the Earth with people—including oceans—to bring the total people that could fit on an Earth-sized planet to a little over five quadrillion people.<a href="#footnote-3-3475">3</a>
</p><p>And that’s all fine, but my grandfathers didn’t fight in World War II so I could write posts about two-dimensional things. Time to get in the ring with the big boys.</p>
<p><b>7.3 billion humans in three-dimensional configurations</b></p>
<p>Sticking with our 10 humans per square meter of floor metric, we bring height into the equation using the worldwide average human height of 165cm (65in).<a href="#footnote-4-3475">4</a> So we can build ourselves a booth with a square meter base and a 1.65 meter height that will fit 10 average humans. This gives us our 3D metric—.165m<sup>3</sup>/person, or 6.06 people per cubic meter.</p>
<p>When we put lots of people in three-dimensional buildings, we’ll do it by building different height “floors”—some floors would be higher than 1.65m for taller people, others would be shorter than average for shorter people, but each person would be on a floor where the ceiling was just a few millimeters above their head, and the floors would average out to be 1.65m high each.</p>
<p>The Empire State Building has a <a href="http://www.esbnyc.com/sites/default/files/esb_fact_sheet_4_9_14_4.pdf">volume</a> of 1.05 million cubic meters, which when hollowed out and replaced with our new “floors” would hold 6.3 million very unhappy people.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=at%26t+stadium&amp;espv=2&amp;biw=1340&amp;bih=745&amp;site=webhp&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=FxP1VNm7OabasATRvIGYDQ&amp;ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg#imgdii=_&amp;imgrc=_LI64REmZJ6y6M%253A%3B3jcWPn0ROouOkM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fktul.images.worldnow.com%252Fimages%252F22937208_BG1.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.ktul.com%252Fstory%252F22937208%252Fatt-buys-naming-rights-to-cowboys-stadium%3B1280%3B720">AT&amp;T Stadium</a>, home of the Dallas Cowboys, is a huge domed structure with a <a href="http://twistedsifter.com/2009/09/new-dallas-cowboys-stadium/">volume</a> of 2.94 million cubic meters. With the addition of floors, it could hold 17.6 million people. That’s big enough to fit the entire population of Dallas…plus the populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.</p>
<p>The largest building in the world, volume-wise, is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Everett_Factory">Boeing Everett Factory</a> in Washington State. With a 900m x 495m base (which almost exactly matches the dimensions of Tiananmen Square) and a ceiling over 33m high, the factory’s volume is 13.3 million cubic meters—which we could fit all the world’s French people into with room left over for all the Belgians as well (78.7 million person capacity).</p>
<p>But if we’re gonna fit <em>all </em>of us into a single building, nothing currently on Earth is going to work—we have to build it ourselves.</p>
<p>At .165 meters per person, we’ll need a little over 1.2 billion cubic meters, or just over one cubic kilometer (1.204km<sup>3</sup> to be exact).<a href="#footnote-5-3475">5</a> This cubic building would have a side of 1.07km (about 2/3 of a mile), giving it a base of about 1.1km—a little over double the size of the Boeing Factory base—and a height of 1,070m (3,511 feet), which is 29% taller than the <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Burj_Khalifa.jpg">Burj Khalifa</a>, the world’s tallest skyscraper. That’s a <em>large </em>building, but neither the base nor the height alone are unfathomable by modern architectural standards. Here’s what it would look like if we built it in Manhattan (with other structures added for reference):</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Cube1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Cube2.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Cube3.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Somewhere in that building is you. Somewhere else are all your friends. Somewhere in there is a 16-year-old Cambodian girl and all her friends. Somewhere is a Somali pirate, his barber, and all his barber’s friends. Every NBA player is in there, along with every rockstar, movie star, supermodel, and politician. Every bartender and construction worker and priest and lawyer and prisoner and princess and soldier and dentist are somewhere in that building, along with all 1.4 billion Chinese people, every blond person, and every member of ISIS.</p>
<p>The human race, which seems overwhelmingly large in one dimension when it’s wrapping 55 times around the Earth or forming a circle that dwarfs the moon’s orbit, seems much more manageable when it can fit inside Bahrain or New York City with room to spare and almost quaint when organized neatly into a cube that would take you only 20 minutes to jog around.</p>
<p>And with that, our initial goal is accomplished. But what if, instead of ending this post here, we went just one step further? After all that work, who wants to stop now while there’s still so much empty space in all of our atoms?</p>
<p><strong>7.3 Billion Humans Compressed Down to Their Atomic Nuclei</strong></p>
<p>Every atom’s different, but a general ballpark rule is that an atom’s diameter is about 100,000 times larger than the diameter of its nucleus, the thing that carries nearly all of the atom’s mass. Translated into three dimensions, that means an atom’s nucleus makes up only around one <i>quadrillionth </i>of an atom’s total volume. The way I visualize this is by imagining an atom to be a cubic kilometer—a hollow cube taller than the tallest skyscraper (around the size of our humanity cube above). This building is so large that if you were inside it, hanging from the ceiling, and you let go, it would take you about 15 seconds of free fall before you hit the ground. If you’re standing on one side of the base, it would take you about 12 minutes to walk across to the other.</p>
<p>If that huge cube is an atom, somewhere in the middle is a 1 cm<sup>3</sup> <em>sugar cube—</em>and that’s the nucleus. And the atom’s mass would be about exactly the mass of the sugar cube, which takes up one quadrillionth of the total space. Just about all of the other 999,999,999,999,999 quadrillionths of the atom is massless, empty space.</p>
<p>Your body’s mass is the combined masses of the sugar cubes in the middle of each of your body’s atoms.</p>
<p>So how big is the human race <em>really</em>? When we get rid of the empty space in all the atoms of all 7.3 billion people, what are we left with?</p>
<p>An M&amp;M.</p>
<p><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MM1.png"></a></p>
<p>Not even, actually. The volume of a human is about .0664 cubic meters, putting the combined volume of all humans at about 485 million cubic meters. When we reduce that to one quadrillionth of its size, we get .485 cubic centimeters. An M&amp;M is .636cm<sup>3</sup>, about 30% too large. A Skittle is too large too (.74cm<sup>3</sup>), as are a quarter (.809cm<sup>3</sup>) and a nickel (.689cm<sup>3</sup>). It’s pretty hard to find everyday objects as small as .485cm<sup>3</sup> (a US penny works, but at .433cm<sup>3</sup>, falls just short of fitting us all in it).</p>
<p>And that’s where we’ll end things today. With an M&amp;M weighing 450 million tonnes—heavier than 75 Pyramids of Giza—that we could all fit into if someone squished us hard enough.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you liked this post, here are four more posts in the Pointless Calculations category:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/combined-wealth-world.html">What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion?</a> More cubes. Gold ones this time.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/what-does-quadrillion-sour-patch-kids.html">What Does a Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Look Like?</a> Candy cubes in space.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/putting-all-worlds-water-into-big-cube.html">Putting the world’s oceans, lakes, and rivers in cubes.</a> Water cubes.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/what-if-all-71-billion-people-moved-to.html">What if all 7.1 Billion People Moved to Tunisia?</a> No cubes, but another post experimenting with the human population (less abusive to the stick figures).</p>
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 7.3 Billion People, One Building

 March 3, 2015 By Tim Urban


 After a year and a half of writing Wait But Why posts, I’ve noticed a theme: humans seem to come up a lot.

 Sometimes we talk about where humans came from or where we might be going or how we’re all related; other times we look at how we interact and communicate and form relationships. We’ve talked about rich humans and famous humans and baby humans and dead humans and humans from all over the world. We’ve explored what it means to be a human, what it means to be a good human, and whether we’re all alone in the universe. And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what really matters most in this one, short human life.

 But somehow, we made it through all of that discussion without ever asking the most important question of all about humans—

 How big a building would you need to fit them all in it?

 It’s a question that’s tantalized almost no one through the ages, and today we’re gonna tackle it hard.

 But before we ask all 7.3 billion humans to stop what they’re doing so I can arrange and bunch them together at my whim, let’s discuss the number 7.3 billion.

 The first thing to note is that when I did a post on population density in August of 2013, the number I kept referring to was 7.1 billion. The world population has grown by 194,000,000, or almost 3%, since then.

 Second, 7.3 billion people is a lot of people. If each living human were represented by a dry grain of rice, the rice would fill a cube-shaped box with a side of 6.1 meters,1 or about 20 feet—around the size of a two-story house.

 That’s a lot of rice grains.

 And how about 7.3 billion grains of sand? Well according to this delightful chart, “sand” can mean a lot of things. 7.3 billion “very coarse” grains (about 2mm in diameter) would fill a large cubic room with a height of 4m (13ft). 7.3 billion medium-size grains (.25mm in diameter) would fill a medium, 46cm high (1.5ft) cardboard box. And 7.3 billion of the finest, .0625mm sand grains (any smaller and it wouldn’t be sand anymore—it would be silt) would take up about 1,700 cubic centimeters of space, almost but not quite filling a 2-liter soda bottle.

 Also, walking 7.3 billion steps would take you around the Earth…150 times. (At two steps per second, that would take you 115 years.) (I’m doing that thing where I’m going on divergent math spirals during the post and then just putting what I figured out into the actual post. I’ll try to stay on topic here but it won’t be easy. Let’s keep going.)

 7.3 billion humans in one-dimensional configurations

 The first activity today will be putting all humans in a single file line. We’ll start near Quito, Ecuador, right on the equator, and the line will follow the equator. We’ll begin with Carlos. Stand here, Carlos.

 Second in line will be Daniela. Third is you, Andrea.1 Since we’re trying to be efficient, I want everyone to stand as close as possible to the people in front of you and behind you without actually touching. Some people will require more or less space than others because people are different sizes, but let’s assume each person we add to the line will make the line one foot (about 30cm) longer on average.2

 So we do this for a while and the line gets longer and longer. We build bridges over oceans and tunnels through mountains to make a clean line along the equator. Eventually, the line goes around the whole Earth gets back to Carlos. But we’ve only gotten through 131 million people—less than 2% of humans—so we’ll need to wind around the Earth again. And again. Finally, halfway through the 56th loop, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, we get to the final human, and we’re done.

 Okay that kind of annoyed me because it ended up in the shape of spring, not a line. Let’s try another way.

 Carlos, stand on the X again. We’re gonna have Daniela stand on your shoulders, and then Andrea’s gonna stand on hers, and we’ll just keep going up from there.

 The average human is 165cm (5’5″) tall, but about a foot of that is from the shoulders to the top of the head, so when we add someone onto the top person’s shoulders, the height of the tower rises by an average of about 134cm (4’5″).

 We stack and stack and eventually, we reach the moon. Unfortunately, we’ve only used 286 million people at this point and have 96% of humans still left to go. By the time we finally finish, the tower is 9.8 million km (6.1m miles) high, and we’re around 1/5th of the way to Mars, 1/4th of the way to Venus, and 1/15th of the way to the sun.2

 How about if we all held hands and formed a huge circle? Let’s say that we’ll stand side-by-side, holding hands, which is enough distance apart to take up about three feet (91cm) of the circle each.

 Continuing like this, our final circle has a circumference of 6.6 million km (4.1m miles) and a diameter of 2.1 million km (1.3m miles).

 While we’re all out there holding hands and dying instantly from being in space without suits, the Earth will look to us around the same size as the moon usually looks in our night sky.

 Okay one dimensional shapes are pretty inconvenient for everyone—let’s reel things in and try this in two dimensions:

 7.3 billion humans in two-dimensional configurations

 The addition of a second dimension to our human shapes makes the species seem a lot smaller.

 When arranging humans in two dimensions, the first question we need to ask is, “How much ground area does each human need when we’re bunching them all together as closely as we can without killing everyone?” The answer, for this post, is .1 square meters, giving us a rate of 10 people per square meter.

 How Many People Can Fit in a Square Meter Comfortably-ish?

 The quest for this answer brought me to the most obscure corners of the internet, where I came across two key groups of bored people. The first one shows nine Canadian journalists choosing to spend time positioning themselves together into one square meter. Doing so gives each of them an average of one 33cm x 33cm (13″ x 13″) square to stand in. You can see in the video that while it’s definitely tight, no one is forced to molest anyone else and everyone can breathe.

 But that’s using all adults. The world’s median age is 29, and the youngest billion humans tend to be quite little. The second case brings us across the world to a random New Zealand elementary school, where a teacher has decided to get cute and cram as many kids as she can into a square meter. She maxes out at a shocking 22 kids.

 Putting these two performances together, it seems reasonable to say that 10 humans per square meter is a safe estimate for what we can use as our human-bunching metric. Nine adults in the square managed fine and the addition of children into the mix should be able to easily increase that total by one to 10 (yes, some adults are much larger than average, but others are tiny—the world’s average adult is a not-that-large 62kg (137lb) person).

 At 10 people per square meter, we can fit 1,000 people in a 10m x 10m square. A basketball court is 28m x 15m, which means we can fit 4,200 people on one, all in bounds.

 We can fit 54,000 people on an American football field, which is large enough to hold the entire population of Liechtenstein or Monaco, and if we expand our field to the size of a soccer field—sorry, a football pitch—we can hold over 71,000 people, more than enough space to contain the population of Greenland.

 Tiananmen Square is pretty huge—880m x 500m or just under half a square kilometer.

 Credit: Keith Higgons

 If it were empty, it could hold 4.4 million people, or the entire population of Croatia, Oman, Lebanon, Panama, Moldova, Uruguay, Kuwait, Mongolia, or Lithuania.

 A full square kilometer could fit 10 million people—the population of a megacity—and you could pack all 26 million Scandinavians—everyone in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark3—into one square mile.

 Central Park, with an area of 3.41 square km (1.3 sq mi), could easily hold the population of Australia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Venezuela, Malaysia, Nepal, Mozambique or Syria. You could fit all 13.9 million Jews into Central Park and still have room for the population of Romania, Chile, or the Netherlands. The entire human race in 5,000 BC, which historians estimate to be between 5 – 20 million people, would fill up at most a little over half of Central Park.

 We’re just getting started, so settle in.

 You could squeeze all 320 million Americans into a 5.7km x 5.7km (3.5mi x 3.5mi) square, which would take less than five hours to walk around.

 And a square 10km x 10km (6.2mi x 6.2mi), or a small island about twice the size of Bermuda, could hold a billion people (which you could walk the perimeter of in about 8 hours). A slightly larger island, Martha’s Vineyard, has an area of 226km2 and could fit all the world’s Christians on it [insert your own wisecrack here]. Alternatively, Martha’s Vineyard could fit the entire combined population of North America and South America…and still have room for the entire population of Africa. As for the world’s females, if they ever got annoyed with men and wanted to start a club, they could hold their membership-wide meetings in the 360km2 Gaza Strip.

 Anyway, what we really want to know is how big a piece of land we’d need to hold everyone—all 7.3 billion of us. And the answer is, a 27km x 27km (16.8mi x 16.8mi) square.

 That square is smaller than Bahrain. And on top of Africa, it would look like this:

 The square is also smaller than New York City.

 NYC has an area of 786 square km, or 303 sq mi, and the whole human race could fit inside it—with room for another half a billion people. Specifically:

 * Manhattan could fit 590 million people
 * Brooklyn could fit 1.38 billion people
 * Queens could fit 2.83 billion people
 * The Bronx could fit 1.09 billion people
 * Staten Island could fit 1.51 billion people

 So let’s try it. First by geographic region:

 How’s everyone doing down there?

 Great. Now, let’s shift around and organize by religion:

 So that’s how much ground space the human race takes up—but that’s only talking about the living humans.

 Scientists’ estimates for the total number of humans who have ever lived4 tend to range from 90 to 110 billion people. The most common estimates are around 108 billion total humans. Using that assumption, a little under 7% of all people who have ever lived are alive right now:

 We just had a Dinner Table discussion about which dead human we’d like to bring back to life—but what if we brought all dead humans back? How much space would we need to make room for them?

 We’d need 10,800 square kilometers—a square with a side of 103km (65mi)—which would easily fit inside Jamaica, Qatar, Kuwait, The Gambia, or Connecticut.

 Continuing into hypothetical world, we could fit a trillion people in South Korea, Iceland, Guatemala, or Cuba, and if we covered every square meter of the Earth’s land with people, it would fit 1.48 quadrillion people—200,000 times the current world population. To finish the job, let’s cover the entire surface of the Earth with people—including oceans—to bring the total people that could fit on an Earth-sized planet to a little over five quadrillion people.3

 And that’s all fine, but my grandfathers didn’t fight in World War II so I could write posts about two-dimensional things. Time to get in the ring with the big boys.

 7.3 billion humans in three-dimensional configurations

 Sticking with our 10 humans per square meter of floor metric, we bring height into the equation using the worldwide average human height of 165cm (65in).4 So we can build ourselves a booth with a square meter base and a 1.65 meter height that will fit 10 average humans. This gives us our 3D metric—.165m3/person, or 6.06 people per cubic meter.

 When we put lots of people in three-dimensional buildings, we’ll do it by building different height “floors”—some floors would be higher than 1.65m for taller people, others would be shorter than average for shorter people, but each person would be on a floor where the ceiling was just a few millimeters above their head, and the floors would average out to be 1.65m high each.

 The Empire State Building has a volume of 1.05 million cubic meters, which when hollowed out and replaced with our new “floors” would hold 6.3 million very unhappy people.

 AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, is a huge domed structure with a volume of 2.94 million cubic meters. With the addition of floors, it could hold 17.6 million people. That’s big enough to fit the entire population of Dallas…plus the populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.

 The largest building in the world, volume-wise, is the Boeing Everett Factory in Washington State. With a 900m x 495m base (which almost exactly matches the dimensions of Tiananmen Square) and a ceiling over 33m high, the factory’s volume is 13.3 million cubic meters—which we could fit all the world’s French people into with room left over for all the Belgians as well (78.7 million person capacity).

 But if we’re gonna fit all of us into a single building, nothing currently on Earth is going to work—we have to build it ourselves.

 At .165 meters per person, we’ll need a little over 1.2 billion cubic meters, or just over one cubic kilometer (1.204km3 to be exact).5 This cubic building would have a side of 1.07km (about 2/3 of a mile), giving it a base of about 1.1km—a little over double the size of the Boeing Factory base—and a height of 1,070m (3,511 feet), which is 29% taller than the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. That’s a large building, but neither the base nor the height alone are unfathomable by modern architectural standards. Here’s what it would look like if we built it in Manhattan (with other structures added for reference):

 Somewhere in that building is you. Somewhere else are all your friends. Somewhere in there is a 16-year-old Cambodian girl and all her friends. Somewhere is a Somali pirate, his barber, and all his barber’s friends. Every NBA player is in there, along with every rockstar, movie star, supermodel, and politician. Every bartender and construction worker and priest and lawyer and prisoner and princess and soldier and dentist are somewhere in that building, along with all 1.4 billion Chinese people, every blond person, and every member of ISIS.

 The human race, which seems overwhelmingly large in one dimension when it’s wrapping 55 times around the Earth or forming a circle that dwarfs the moon’s orbit, seems much more manageable when it can fit inside Bahrain or New York City with room to spare and almost quaint when organized neatly into a cube that would take you only 20 minutes to jog around.

 And with that, our initial goal is accomplished. But what if, instead of ending this post here, we went just one step further? After all that work, who wants to stop now while there’s still so much empty space in all of our atoms?

 7.3 Billion Humans Compressed Down to Their Atomic Nuclei

 Every atom’s different, but a general ballpark rule is that an atom’s diameter is about 100,000 times larger than the diameter of its nucleus, the thing that carries nearly all of the atom’s mass. Translated into three dimensions, that means an atom’s nucleus makes up only around one quadrillionth of an atom’s total volume. The way I visualize this is by imagining an atom to be a cubic kilometer—a hollow cube taller than the tallest skyscraper (around the size of our humanity cube above). This building is so large that if you were inside it, hanging from the ceiling, and you let go, it would take you about 15 seconds of free fall before you hit the ground. If you’re standing on one side of the base, it would take you about 12 minutes to walk across to the other.

 If that huge cube is an atom, somewhere in the middle is a 1 cm3 sugar cube—and that’s the nucleus. And the atom’s mass would be about exactly the mass of the sugar cube, which takes up one quadrillionth of the total space. Just about all of the other 999,999,999,999,999 quadrillionths of the atom is massless, empty space.

 Your body’s mass is the combined masses of the sugar cubes in the middle of each of your body’s atoms.

 So how big is the human race really? When we get rid of the empty space in all the atoms of all 7.3 billion people, what are we left with?

 An M&M.

 Not even, actually. The volume of a human is about .0664 cubic meters, putting the combined volume of all humans at about 485 million cubic meters. When we reduce that to one quadrillionth of its size, we get .485 cubic centimeters. An M&M is .636cm3, about 30% too large. A Skittle is too large too (.74cm3), as are a quarter (.809cm3) and a nickel (.689cm3). It’s pretty hard to find everyday objects as small as .485cm3 (a US penny works, but at .433cm3, falls just short of fitting us all in it).

 And that’s where we’ll end things today. With an M&M weighing 450 million tonnes—heavier than 75 Pyramids of Giza—that we could all fit into if someone squished us hard enough.

 ___________

 If you liked this post, here are four more posts in the Pointless Calculations category:

 What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion? More cubes. Gold ones this time.

 What Does a Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Look Like? Candy cubes in space.

 Putting the world’s oceans, lakes, and rivers in cubes. Water cubes.

 What if all 7.1 Billion People Moved to Tunisia? No cubes, but another post experimenting with the human population (less abusive to the stick figures).

 1. According to this possibly-accurate list of popular Ecuadorian names, Carlos, Daniela, and Andrea are red hot right now.↩

 2. This metric system / non-metric system thing is unbelievably annoying. Almost half of WBW readers are from metric system countries, so I can’t just use imperial units, but a little over half of readers are from the US, so I can’t just use the metric system either, because feet and miles are a bit more intuitive to all those people. So I’ll just put calculations in both systems, which is annoying for everyone—because the US decided to stick with a totally nonsensical system of measurement.↩

 3. Not useful information.↩

 4. Super awkward to start this section with such a mundane sentence after rousing things up so much at the end of the last section.↩

 5. While I was at it, I worked out that to fit all 108 billion humans that have ever lived, we’d need a cubic building with sides of 2.6km.↩

 1. There are about 7,000 grains of rice to a cup, or to 240mL, which translates to 7.3 billion grains filling 251 cubic meters. (In this post, gray square footnotes will be for calculations and other technical details. Blue circles for extraneous thoughts and facts.)↩

 2. At the closest they ever come to Earth, Mars is 33.9 million miles away, Venus is 24m miles away, and the sun is 93m miles away.↩

 3. The definition of Scandinavia is a little confusing. Some people exclude Denmark or Finland, others include Iceland. The most common definition seems to be those four countries.↩

 4. using 50,000 BC as a starting date for humans.↩

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After a year and a half of writing Wait But Why posts, I’ve noticed a theme: humans seem to come up a lot.
Sometimes we talk about where humans came from or where we might be going or how we’re all related; other times we look at how we interact and communicate and form relationships. We’ve talked about rich humans and famous humans and baby humans and dead humans and humans from all over the world. We’ve explored what it means to be a human, what it means to be a good human, and whether we’re all alone in the universe. And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what really matters most in this one, short human life.
But somehow, we made it through all of that discussion without ever asking the most important question of all about humans—
 How big a building would you need to fit them all in it? 
It’s a question that’s tantalized almost no one through the ages, and today we’re gonna tackle it hard.
But before we ask all 7.3 billion humans to stop what they’re doing so I can arrange and bunch them together at my whim, let’s discuss the number 7.3 billion.
The first thing to note is that when I did a post on population density in August of 2013, the number I kept referring to was 7.1 billion. The world population has grown by 194,000,000, or almost 3%, since then.
Second, 7.3 billion people is a lot of people. If each living human were represented by a dry grain of rice, the rice would fill a cube-shaped box with a side of 6.1 meters,1 or about 20 feet—around the size of a two-story house.
   
That’s a lot of rice grains.
And how about 7.3 billion grains of sand? Well according to this delightful chart, “sand” can mean a lot of things. 7.3 billion “very coarse” grains (about 2mm in diameter) would fill a large cubic room with a height of 4m (13ft). 7.3 billion medium-size grains (.25mm in diameter) would fill a medium, 46cm high (1.5ft) cardboard box. And 7.3 billion of the finest, .0625mm sand grains (any smaller and it wouldn’t be sand anymore—it would be silt) would take up about 1,700 cubic centimeters of space, almost but not quite filling a 2-liter soda bottle.
Also, walking 7.3 billion steps would take you around the Earth…150 times. (At two steps per second, that would take you 115 years.) (I’m doing that thing where I’m going on divergent math spirals during the post and then just putting what I figured out into the actual post. I’ll try to stay on topic here but it won’t be easy. Let’s keep going.)
 7.3 billion humans in one-dimensional configurations 
The first activity today will be putting all humans in a single file line. We’ll start near Quito, Ecuador, right on the equator, and the line will follow the equator. We’ll begin with Carlos. Stand here, Carlos.
   
Second in line will be Daniela. Third is you, Andrea.1 Since we’re trying to be efficient, I want everyone to stand as close as possible to the people in front of you and behind you without actually touching. Some people will require more or less space than others because people are different sizes, but let’s assume each person we add to the line will make the line one foot (about 30cm) longer on average.2
    
So we do this for a while and the line gets longer and longer. We build bridges over oceans and tunnels through mountains to make a clean line along the equator. Eventually, the line goes around the whole Earth gets back to Carlos. But we’ve only gotten through 131 million people—less than 2% of humans—so we’ll need to wind around the Earth again. And again. Finally, halfway through the 56th loop, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, we get to the final human, and we’re done.
Okay that kind of annoyed me because it ended up in the shape of spring, not a line. Let’s try another way.
Carlos, stand on the X again. We’re gonna have Daniela stand on your shoulders, and then Andrea’s gonna stand on hers, and we’ll just keep going up from there.
   
The average human is 165cm (5’5″) tall, but about a foot of that is from the shoulders to the top of the head, so when we add someone onto the top person’s shoulders, the height of the tower rises by an average of about 134cm (4’5″).
We stack and stack and eventually, we reach the moon. Unfortunately, we’ve only used 286 million people at this point and have 96% of humans still left to go. By the time we finally finish, the tower is 9.8 million km (6.1m miles) high, and we’re around 1/5th of the way to Mars, 1/4th of the way to Venus, and 1/15th of the way to the sun.2
 How about if we all held hands and formed a huge circle? Let’s say that we’ll stand side-by-side, holding hands, which is enough distance apart to take up about three feet (91cm) of the circle each.
   
Continuing like this, our final circle has a circumference of 6.6 million km (4.1m miles) and a diameter of 2.1 million km (1.3m miles).
   
While we’re all out there holding hands and dying instantly from being in space without suits, the Earth will look to us around the same size as the moon usually looks in our night sky.
Okay one dimensional shapes are pretty inconvenient for everyone—let’s reel things in and try this in two dimensions:
 7.3 billion humans in two-dimensional configurations 
The addition of a second dimension to our human shapes makes the species seem a lot smaller.
When arranging humans in two dimensions, the first question we need to ask is, “How much ground area does each human need when we’re bunching them all together as closely as we can without killing everyone?” The answer, for this post, is .1 square meters, giving us a rate of 10 people per square meter.
 How Many People Can Fit in a Square Meter Comfortably-ish? 
The quest for this answer brought me to the most obscure corners of the internet, where I came across two key groups of bored people. The first one shows nine Canadian journalists choosing to spend time positioning themselves together into one square meter. Doing so gives each of them an average of one 33cm x 33cm (13″ x 13″) square to stand in. You can see in the video that while it’s definitely tight, no one is forced to molest anyone else and everyone can breathe.
But that’s using all adults. The world’s median age is 29, and the youngest billion humans tend to be quite little. The second case brings us across the world to a random New Zealand elementary school, where a teacher has decided to get cute and cram as many kids as she can into a square meter. She maxes out at a shocking 22 kids.
Putting these two performances together, it seems reasonable to say that 10 humans per square meter is a safe estimate for what we can use as our human-bunching metric. Nine adults in the square managed fine and the addition of children into the mix should be able to easily increase that total by one to 10 (yes, some adults are much larger than average, but others are tiny—the world’s average adult is a not-that-large 62kg (137lb) person).
At 10 people per square meter, we can fit 1,000 people in a 10m x 10m square. A basketball court is 28m x 15m, which means we can fit 4,200 people on one, all in bounds.
We can fit 54,000 people on an American football field, which is large enough to hold the entire population of Liechtenstein or Monaco, and if we expand our field to the size of a soccer field—sorry, a football pitch—we can hold over 71,000 people, more than enough space to contain the population of Greenland.
Tiananmen Square is pretty huge—880m x 500m or just under half a square kilometer.
  If it were empty, it could hold 4.4 million people, or the entire population of Croatia, Oman, Lebanon, Panama, Moldova, Uruguay, Kuwait, Mongolia, or Lithuania.
A full square kilometer could fit 10 million people—the population of a megacity—and you could pack all 26 million Scandinavians—everyone in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark3—into one square mile.
   
Central Park, with an area of 3.41 square km (1.3 sq mi), could easily hold the population of Australia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Venezuela, Malaysia, Nepal, Mozambique or Syria. You could fit all 13.9 million Jews into Central Park and still have room for the population of Romania, Chile, or the Netherlands. The entire human race in 5,000 BC, which historians estimate to be between 5 – 20 million people, would fill up at most a little over half of Central Park.
We’re just getting started, so settle in.
You could squeeze all 320 million Americans into a 5.7km x 5.7km (3.5mi x 3.5mi) square, which would take less than five hours to walk around.
   
And a square 10km x 10km (6.2mi x 6.2mi), or a small island about twice the size of Bermuda, could hold a billion people (which you could walk the perimeter of in about 8 hours). A slightly larger island, Martha’s Vineyard, has an area of 226km2 and could fit all the world’s Christians on it [insert your own wisecrack here]. Alternatively, Martha’s Vineyard could fit the entire combined population of North America and South America…and still have room for the entire population of Africa. As for the world’s females, if they ever got annoyed with men and wanted to start a club, they could hold their membership-wide meetings in the 360km2 Gaza Strip.
Anyway, what we really want to know is how big a piece of land we’d need to hold everyone—all 7.3 billion of us. And the answer is, a 27km x 27km (16.8mi x 16.8mi) square.
   
That square is smaller than Bahrain. And on top of Africa, it would look like this:
   
The square is also smaller than New York City.
NYC has an area of 786 square km, or 303 sq mi, and the whole human race could fit inside it—with room for another half a billion people. Specifically:
Manhattan could fit 590 million people
Brooklyn could fit 1.38 billion people
Queens could fit 2.83 billion people
The Bronx could fit 1.09 billion people
Staten Island could fit 1.51 billion people
So let’s try it. First by geographic region:
   
How’s everyone doing down there?
   
Great. Now, let’s shift around and organize by religion:
   
So that’s how much ground space the human race takes up—but that’s only talking about the living humans.
Scientists’ estimates for the total number of humans who have ever lived4 tend to range from 90 to 110 billion people. The most common estimates are around 108 billion total humans. Using that assumption, a little under 7% of all people who have ever lived are alive right now:
   
We just had a Dinner Table discussion about which dead human we’d like to bring back to life—but what if we brought all dead humans back? How much space would we need to make room for them?
We’d need 10,800 square kilometers—a square with a side of 103km (65mi)—which would easily fit inside Jamaica, Qatar, Kuwait, The Gambia, or Connecticut.
Continuing into hypothetical world, we could fit a trillion people in South Korea, Iceland, Guatemala, or Cuba, and if we covered every square meter of the Earth’s land with people, it would fit 1.48 quadrillion people—200,000 times the current world population. To finish the job, let’s cover the entire surface of the Earth with people—including oceans—to bring the total people that could fit on an Earth-sized planet to a little over five quadrillion people.3
 And that’s all fine, but my grandfathers didn’t fight in World War II so I could write posts about two-dimensional things. Time to get in the ring with the big boys.
 7.3 billion humans in three-dimensional configurations 
Sticking with our 10 humans per square meter of floor metric, we bring height into the equation using the worldwide average human height of 165cm (65in).4 So we can build ourselves a booth with a square meter base and a 1.65 meter height that will fit 10 average humans. This gives us our 3D metric—.165m3/person, or 6.06 people per cubic meter.
When we put lots of people in three-dimensional buildings, we’ll do it by building different height “floors”—some floors would be higher than 1.65m for taller people, others would be shorter than average for shorter people, but each person would be on a floor where the ceiling was just a few millimeters above their head, and the floors would average out to be 1.65m high each.
The Empire State Building has a volume of 1.05 million cubic meters, which when hollowed out and replaced with our new “floors” would hold 6.3 million very unhappy people.
 AT&amp;T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, is a huge domed structure with a volume of 2.94 million cubic meters. With the addition of floors, it could hold 17.6 million people. That’s big enough to fit the entire population of Dallas…plus the populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
The largest building in the world, volume-wise, is the Boeing Everett Factory in Washington State. With a 900m x 495m base (which almost exactly matches the dimensions of Tiananmen Square) and a ceiling over 33m high, the factory’s volume is 13.3 million cubic meters—which we could fit all the world’s French people into with room left over for all the Belgians as well (78.7 million person capacity).
But if we’re gonna fit all of us into a single building, nothing currently on Earth is going to work—we have to build it ourselves.
At .165 meters per person, we’ll need a little over 1.2 billion cubic meters, or just over one cubic kilometer (1.204km3 to be exact).5 This cubic building would have a side of 1.07km (about 2/3 of a mile), giving it a base of about 1.1km—a little over double the size of the Boeing Factory base—and a height of 1,070m (3,511 feet), which is 29% taller than the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. That’s a large building, but neither the base nor the height alone are unfathomable by modern architectural standards. Here’s what it would look like if we built it in Manhattan (with other structures added for reference):
   
   
   
Somewhere in that building is you. Somewhere else are all your friends. Somewhere in there is a 16-year-old Cambodian girl and all her friends. Somewhere is a Somali pirate, his barber, and all his barber’s friends. Every NBA player is in there, along with every rockstar, movie star, supermodel, and politician. Every bartender and construction worker and priest and lawyer and prisoner and princess and soldier and dentist are somewhere in that building, along with all 1.4 billion Chinese people, every blond person, and every member of ISIS.
The human race, which seems overwhelmingly large in one dimension when it’s wrapping 55 times around the Earth or forming a circle that dwarfs the moon’s orbit, seems much more manageable when it can fit inside Bahrain or New York City with room to spare and almost quaint when organized neatly into a cube that would take you only 20 minutes to jog around.
And with that, our initial goal is accomplished. But what if, instead of ending this post here, we went just one step further? After all that work, who wants to stop now while there’s still so much empty space in all of our atoms?
 7.3 Billion Humans Compressed Down to Their Atomic Nuclei 
Every atom’s different, but a general ballpark rule is that an atom’s diameter is about 100,000 times larger than the diameter of its nucleus, the thing that carries nearly all of the atom’s mass. Translated into three dimensions, that means an atom’s nucleus makes up only around one quadrillionth of an atom’s total volume. The way I visualize this is by imagining an atom to be a cubic kilometer—a hollow cube taller than the tallest skyscraper (around the size of our humanity cube above). This building is so large that if you were inside it, hanging from the ceiling, and you let go, it would take you about 15 seconds of free fall before you hit the ground. If you’re standing on one side of the base, it would take you about 12 minutes to walk across to the other.
If that huge cube is an atom, somewhere in the middle is a 1 cm3 sugar cube—and that’s the nucleus. And the atom’s mass would be about exactly the mass of the sugar cube, which takes up one quadrillionth of the total space. Just about all of the other 999,999,999,999,999 quadrillionths of the atom is massless, empty space.
Your body’s mass is the combined masses of the sugar cubes in the middle of each of your body’s atoms.
So how big is the human race really? When we get rid of the empty space in all the atoms of all 7.3 billion people, what are we left with?
An M&amp;M.
   
Not even, actually. The volume of a human is about .0664 cubic meters, putting the combined volume of all humans at about 485 million cubic meters. When we reduce that to one quadrillionth of its size, we get .485 cubic centimeters. An M&amp;M is .636cm3, about 30% too large. A Skittle is too large too (.74cm3), as are a quarter (.809cm3) and a nickel (.689cm3). It’s pretty hard to find everyday objects as small as .485cm3 (a US penny works, but at .433cm3, falls just short of fitting us all in it).
And that’s where we’ll end things today. With an M&amp;M weighing 450 million tonnes—heavier than 75 Pyramids of Giza—that we could all fit into if someone squished us hard enough.
___________
 If you liked this post, here are four more posts in the Pointless Calculations category: 
 What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion? More cubes. Gold ones this time.
 What Does a Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Look Like? Candy cubes in space.
 Putting the world’s oceans, lakes, and rivers in cubes. Water cubes.
 What if all 7.1 Billion People Moved to Tunisia? No cubes, but another post experimenting with the human population (less abusive to the stick figures).
7.3 Billion People, One Building — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley.html
The American Presidents—Johnson to McKinley — Wait But Why
2015-02-20
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p><em><strong>Note: </strong>This is Part 2. Part 1 (Washington to Lincoln) is <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">here</a>.</em></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Last year, I published the post, <em><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln</a></em>.</p>
<p>Washington to Lincoln. Two superstars, bookending legends like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson; the birth of the constitution; the expansion from 13 East Coast colonies to a huge nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; two foreign wars; and a fierce debate over the issue of slavery—all leading up to the sizzling climax of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It’s not for everyone—but I’d click the shit out of that headline if I saw it on Facebook.</p>
<p>This year, I’ve gone a different direction. I’ve created <em>one of the least clickable headlines in the history of the internet. </em></p>
<p>Here’s what the full scale looks like:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/clickbait2.png"></a></p>
<p>So forgive me if I’m a little confused why you’re here right now—why you’re voluntarily involving yourself in a piece of writing that will focus on Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.</p>
<p>Maybe you clicked on this by accident while trying to click “Hide all posts from Wait But Why.” Or maybe, just maybe, you’re like me and you have a morbid fascination with this group of <em>eight consecutive presidents</em> <em>who no one has heard of.</em> Sure, you know a bit about Grant. You know Johnson was impeached. You might know Garfield and McKinley were assassinated. But unless you’re a history buff, that’s about all you know. I’m pretty into history, and that was about all I knew.</p>
<p>So I decided to dig in—way more in depth than I dug into the first 16—to the abyss between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Because if we’re gonna do this—we’re gonna really do this.</p>
<p>Three notes before we start:</p>
<p><strong>1) Here’s this chart again:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/PartyVotes-Presidents.png"></a></p>
<p>You can see that after the political chaos of the first 16 presidencies (a time period which constitutes both what historians call <em>The First Party System</em>—up through Quincy Adams—and <em>The Second Party System</em>—from Jackson to Pierce), things settle down into a clean Republican vs. Democrat divide. The period we’ll cover in this post is 36 years long, running from the Civil War to the dawn of the 20th Century—a period Mark Twain first called The Gilded Age.<a href="#footnote-1-3429">1</a>
</p><p>The politics of this period are what historians call <em>The Third Party System</em>—and in this system, there are Republicans and Democrats, which sounds familiar, but those parties barely resemble those same two parties today. If anything, the Republicans of The Gilded Age may have more in common with today’s Democrats and the Democrats of that time may better resemble today’s Republicans (although of course, it’s blurry, and both parties back then contain a mix of the two parties today, as well as having certain characteristics that don’t exist today at all, which makes comparisons of then vs. now a bit of an apples-to-oranges situation).</p>
<p>As you can see on the chart, the Gilded Age Republicans, who made up most of the Civil War’s victorious North, largely dominated the era.</p>
<p><strong>2) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States">Here’s the chart</a> that shows the aggregation of historians’ rankings of the presidents.</strong> Of course, even the aggregate ranks are totally subjective and not at all definitive—but I believe it’s the best way to give each president a ranking that reflects the general scholarly consensus on how the presidents stack up against each other. The aggregate column in that chart is where I draw my rankings from below each president’s name.</p>
<p>And how does this post’s group fare in the rankings? <em>None </em>of the eight presidents crack the top 18. What a crew.</p>
<p><strong>3) This is a critical time to refresh yourself on the Mustache Era.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Mustache.png"></a></p>
<p>The Mustache Era is an unprecedented time in American history, during which presidential mustaches were rampant. And never before or after the mustache era was there <em>any </em>other presidential mustache. The Gilded Age that we’ll be covering today overlaps almost entirely with the Mustache Era.<a href="#footnote-2-3429">2</a>
</p><p>And now it’s time to buckle up and hold on tight as I take you on a whirlwind tour of eight of the most random men in the world. We start in April, 1865. The Civil War has just ended, Lincoln has just been shot, and the country is in total mayhem…</p>
<p><strong>17) Andrew Johnson</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Johnson.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>Presidency:</strong> 1865 – 1869 <strong>Lived:</strong> 1808 – 1875 <strong>Ranking:</strong> 41/43</p>
<p><strong>Mustache?</strong> No.</p>
<p><strong>His Deal: </strong>Born in a super-poor log cabin situation in North Carolina, Johnson was raised by a single mom and apprenticed as a tailor before doing the most stereotypical politics ladder climb ever, going from city alderman to city mayor to state House to state Senate to federal Congress to Tennessee governor to federal Senate to vice president to president.<a href="#footnote-3-3429">3</a> Satisfying. Johnson capped off his epic journey by making the odd decision to stand on the top rung of the ladder being a dick for four years and followed that up by plunging all the way back down to the ground in disgrace. He spent the rest of his life losing small elections before finally winning a Senate seat four months before dying. Of his late-life Senate win, Johnson remarked, “Thank God for this vindication,” which was a weird thing to say since today he’s known as the third worst president in US history and mostly just comes up as the answer to the pre-1998 trivia question, “Who is the only US president to be impeached?”</p>
<p><strong>His Presidency: </strong>Johnson was chosen to be Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 (before Lincoln’s second term) because he was a rare combo: a politician from the South (Tennessee) and one of Lincoln’s rival Democrats, but one who was also fervently pro-Union and anti-secession—this made him the perfect choice to help Lincoln win the election and send the message of cross-party and cross-region collaboration and national unity. Six weeks after winning the election, Johnson and Lincoln held their first and last meeting as president and vice president, because that night, Lincoln was shot.</p>
<p>New President Johnson inherited a nation that had <em>just </em>come out of Civil War. The smoke was still clearing and the plan had been for Lincoln to spend his second term making a trillion critical decisions for the future of the country. With a clear winner to the war, and one party, Lincoln’s Republicans, in an unusual position of power, it was a rare opportunity to reshape the nation for the future and finally shed off the conflicts of the past, like slavery, that had plagued the country since its beginning. And Lincoln would <em>really </em>have been a great person to do that.</p>
<p>Instead, the hypercharged Republicans were suddenly led by a Southern Democrat, who it turns out didn’t really agree with much of what Lincoln had planned to do for the post-war Reconstruction effort. Johnson spent the next four years doing everything he could to get in the way of major Republican progress. The Republicans wanted to be tough with the South, punishing prominent Confederate politicians and refusing to offer reconstruction aid until Southern states agreed to grant equal rights and citizenship to newly-freed slaves—but Johnson vetoed most of the bills that the Republican Congress tried to pass, including the Civil Rights Bill, arguing that it gave “a perfect equality of the white and black races in every State of the Union.” He wrote, in a letter to a governor, “this is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Lincoln would have been proud.</p>
<p>The Republicans, who despised Johnson, successfully impeached him in 1868, claiming he had acted outside the president’s legal boundaries on several occasions—and at his impeachment trial, they fell one vote short of ousting him from office. The next year, he got crushed in his own primary and never even had a chance to run for a second term.</p>
<p>Johnson’s presidency ties with Buchanan’s for most maddening to read about.</p>
<p><strong>Things He Can Brag About: </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Being the only president to serve in the Senate after his presidency</li>
<li>Alaska is Johnson’s doing. His Secretary of State, William Seward, bought it from Russia for $7.2 million ($121 million in today’s dollars). At the time, Americans viewed this as a terrible deal and the whole thing was referred to, for a while, as “Seward’s Folly.”</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Things He Hopes We Don’t Remember: </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>His white supremacist quote I included above</li>
<li>In what is definitely the funniest thing I’ve read so far in my research on the first 24 presidents, Johnson, at his and Lincoln’s 1864 inauguration, showed up at the event <em>hammered </em>and proceeded to make a complete debacle of a long, rambling, drunken speech as Lincoln and the entire Senate Chamber looked on in shock. A Senator who attended said afterwards, “I was never so mortified in my life—had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight.” Johnson then disappeared into reclusion for six weeks to avoid public ridicule.</li>
<li>He owned about nine slaves before becoming vice president, and is rumored to have fathered children with one of them.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Things He’s Annoyed About:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Apparently he celebrated his 60th birthday by having a party for several hundred children, which sounds like an incredibly unfun party and something that definitely wasn’t his idea.</li>
<li>Clinton’s impeachment. Until 1998, the <em>one </em>thing everyone knew about him is that he was the only president to be impeached. Clinton took away Johnson’s one major distinction.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Other Notable Facts: </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>After his time as a tailor’s apprentice, Johnson would forever make his own clothing, even while president.</li>
<li>He looks <a href="http://randomoverload.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/b293my-lee-jones-totally-looks-like-andrew-johnson.jpg">hilariously</a> <a href="http://cdn3.everyjoe.com/wp-content/gallery/celebrity-lookalikes/andrew-johnson-tommy-lee-jones.jpg">similar</a> to Tommy Lee Jones.</li>
<li>Civil War general and next president Ulysses S. Grant had a major falling out with Johnson during Johnson’s presidency, presumably because of Johnson’s whole “trying to undo all the progress of the Civil War” thing. Grant wouldn’t allow his kids to attend Johnson’s 60th birthday party, and Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration.</li>
<li>Lincoln’s assassination was actually supposed to be part of a three-assassination trifecta, all in the same night. Two of Booth’s co-conspirators had plans to shoot VP Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. The attempt on Seward nearly succeeded, injuring him badly. But apparently Johnson’s would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, didn’t even attempt to kill Johnson because he <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Atzerodt">got drunk instead</a>. Pretty funny picturing Booth walking into Atzerodt’s apartment the next day and asking what the <em>hell</em> happened and Atzerodt being like, “Huh? OOOOHHH SHIT…oh RIGHT….shit I am SO sorry man, totally slipped my mind.”</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Last Words: </strong>After having a stroke and falling off his chair: “My right side is paralyzed. I need no doctor. I can overcome my troubles.” He couldn’t.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/2">Next (Ulysses S. Grant) →</a></p>
<p><strong>All Pages:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Andrew Johnson (and Intro)</strong><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/2">Ulysses S. Grant</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/3">Rutherford B. Hayes</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/4">James A. Garfield</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/5">Chester A. Arthur</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/6">Grover Cleveland</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/7">Benjamin Harrison</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley/8">William McKinley</a></p>
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 The American Presidents—Johnson to McKinley

 February 20, 2015 By Tim Urban


 Note: This is Part 2. Part 1 (Washington to Lincoln) is here.

 ___________

 Last year, I published the post, The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln.

 Washington to Lincoln. Two superstars, bookending legends like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson; the birth of the constitution; the expansion from 13 East Coast colonies to a huge nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; two foreign wars; and a fierce debate over the issue of slavery—all leading up to the sizzling climax of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It’s not for everyone—but I’d click the shit out of that headline if I saw it on Facebook.

 This year, I’ve gone a different direction. I’ve created one of the least clickable headlines in the history of the internet.

 Here’s what the full scale looks like:

 So forgive me if I’m a little confused why you’re here right now—why you’re voluntarily involving yourself in a piece of writing that will focus on Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.

 Maybe you clicked on this by accident while trying to click “Hide all posts from Wait But Why.” Or maybe, just maybe, you’re like me and you have a morbid fascination with this group of eight consecutive presidents who no one has heard of. Sure, you know a bit about Grant. You know Johnson was impeached. You might know Garfield and McKinley were assassinated. But unless you’re a history buff, that’s about all you know. I’m pretty into history, and that was about all I knew.

 So I decided to dig in—way more in depth than I dug into the first 16—to the abyss between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Because if we’re gonna do this—we’re gonna really do this.

 Three notes before we start:

 1) Here’s this chart again:

 You can see that after the political chaos of the first 16 presidencies (a time period which constitutes both what historians call The First Party System—up through Quincy Adams—and The Second Party System—from Jackson to Pierce), things settle down into a clean Republican vs. Democrat divide. The period we’ll cover in this post is 36 years long, running from the Civil War to the dawn of the 20th Century—a period Mark Twain first called The Gilded Age.1

 The politics of this period are what historians call The Third Party System—and in this system, there are Republicans and Democrats, which sounds familiar, but those parties barely resemble those same two parties today. If anything, the Republicans of The Gilded Age may have more in common with today’s Democrats and the Democrats of that time may better resemble today’s Republicans (although of course, it’s blurry, and both parties back then contain a mix of the two parties today, as well as having certain characteristics that don’t exist today at all, which makes comparisons of then vs. now a bit of an apples-to-oranges situation).

 As you can see on the chart, the Gilded Age Republicans, who made up most of the Civil War’s victorious North, largely dominated the era.

 2) Here’s the chart that shows the aggregation of historians’ rankings of the presidents. Of course, even the aggregate ranks are totally subjective and not at all definitive—but I believe it’s the best way to give each president a ranking that reflects the general scholarly consensus on how the presidents stack up against each other. The aggregate column in that chart is where I draw my rankings from below each president’s name.

 And how does this post’s group fare in the rankings? None of the eight presidents crack the top 18. What a crew.

 3) This is a critical time to refresh yourself on the Mustache Era.

 The Mustache Era is an unprecedented time in American history, during which presidential mustaches were rampant. And never before or after the mustache era was there any other presidential mustache. The Gilded Age that we’ll be covering today overlaps almost entirely with the Mustache Era.2

 And now it’s time to buckle up and hold on tight as I take you on a whirlwind tour of eight of the most random men in the world. We start in April, 1865. The Civil War has just ended, Lincoln has just been shot, and the country is in total mayhem…

 17) Andrew Johnson

 Presidency: 1865 – 1869 Lived: 1808 – 1875 Ranking: 41/43

 Mustache? No.

 His Deal: Born in a super-poor log cabin situation in North Carolina, Johnson was raised by a single mom and apprenticed as a tailor before doing the most stereotypical politics ladder climb ever, going from city alderman to city mayor to state House to state Senate to federal Congress to Tennessee governor to federal Senate to vice president to president.3 Satisfying. Johnson capped off his epic journey by making the odd decision to stand on the top rung of the ladder being a dick for four years and followed that up by plunging all the way back down to the ground in disgrace. He spent the rest of his life losing small elections before finally winning a Senate seat four months before dying. Of his late-life Senate win, Johnson remarked, “Thank God for this vindication,” which was a weird thing to say since today he’s known as the third worst president in US history and mostly just comes up as the answer to the pre-1998 trivia question, “Who is the only US president to be impeached?”

 His Presidency: Johnson was chosen to be Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 (before Lincoln’s second term) because he was a rare combo: a politician from the South (Tennessee) and one of Lincoln’s rival Democrats, but one who was also fervently pro-Union and anti-secession—this made him the perfect choice to help Lincoln win the election and send the message of cross-party and cross-region collaboration and national unity. Six weeks after winning the election, Johnson and Lincoln held their first and last meeting as president and vice president, because that night, Lincoln was shot.

 New President Johnson inherited a nation that had just come out of Civil War. The smoke was still clearing and the plan had been for Lincoln to spend his second term making a trillion critical decisions for the future of the country. With a clear winner to the war, and one party, Lincoln’s Republicans, in an unusual position of power, it was a rare opportunity to reshape the nation for the future and finally shed off the conflicts of the past, like slavery, that had plagued the country since its beginning. And Lincoln would really have been a great person to do that.

 Instead, the hypercharged Republicans were suddenly led by a Southern Democrat, who it turns out didn’t really agree with much of what Lincoln had planned to do for the post-war Reconstruction effort. Johnson spent the next four years doing everything he could to get in the way of major Republican progress. The Republicans wanted to be tough with the South, punishing prominent Confederate politicians and refusing to offer reconstruction aid until Southern states agreed to grant equal rights and citizenship to newly-freed slaves—but Johnson vetoed most of the bills that the Republican Congress tried to pass, including the Civil Rights Bill, arguing that it gave “a perfect equality of the white and black races in every State of the Union.” He wrote, in a letter to a governor, “this is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Lincoln would have been proud.

 The Republicans, who despised Johnson, successfully impeached him in 1868, claiming he had acted outside the president’s legal boundaries on several occasions—and at his impeachment trial, they fell one vote short of ousting him from office. The next year, he got crushed in his own primary and never even had a chance to run for a second term.

 Johnson’s presidency ties with Buchanan’s for most maddening to read about.

 Things He Can Brag About:

 * Being the only president to serve in the Senate after his presidency
 * Alaska is Johnson’s doing. His Secretary of State, William Seward, bought it from Russia for $7.2 million ($121 million in today’s dollars). At the time, Americans viewed this as a terrible deal and the whole thing was referred to, for a while, as “Seward’s Folly.”

 Things He Hopes We Don’t Remember:

 * His white supremacist quote I included above
 * In what is definitely the funniest thing I’ve read so far in my research on the first 24 presidents, Johnson, at his and Lincoln’s 1864 inauguration, showed up at the event hammered and proceeded to make a complete debacle of a long, rambling, drunken speech as Lincoln and the entire Senate Chamber looked on in shock. A Senator who attended said afterwards, “I was never so mortified in my life—had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight.” Johnson then disappeared into reclusion for six weeks to avoid public ridicule.
 * He owned about nine slaves before becoming vice president, and is rumored to have fathered children with one of them.

 Things He’s Annoyed About:

 * Apparently he celebrated his 60th birthday by having a party for several hundred children, which sounds like an incredibly unfun party and something that definitely wasn’t his idea.
 * Clinton’s impeachment. Until 1998, the one thing everyone knew about him is that he was the only president to be impeached. Clinton took away Johnson’s one major distinction.

 Other Notable Facts:

 * After his time as a tailor’s apprentice, Johnson would forever make his own clothing, even while president.
 * He looks hilariously similar to Tommy Lee Jones.
 * Civil War general and next president Ulysses S. Grant had a major falling out with Johnson during Johnson’s presidency, presumably because of Johnson’s whole “trying to undo all the progress of the Civil War” thing. Grant wouldn’t allow his kids to attend Johnson’s 60th birthday party, and Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration.
 * Lincoln’s assassination was actually supposed to be part of a three-assassination trifecta, all in the same night. Two of Booth’s co-conspirators had plans to shoot VP Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. The attempt on Seward nearly succeeded, injuring him badly. But apparently Johnson’s would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, didn’t even attempt to kill Johnson because he got drunk instead. Pretty funny picturing Booth walking into Atzerodt’s apartment the next day and asking what the hell happened and Atzerodt being like, “Huh? OOOOHHH SHIT…oh RIGHT….shit I am SO sorry man, totally slipped my mind.”

 Last Words: After having a stroke and falling off his chair: “My right side is paralyzed. I need no doctor. I can overcome my troubles.” He couldn’t.

 Next (Ulysses S. Grant) →

 All Pages:

 Andrew Johnson (and Intro)
 Ulysses S. Grant
 Rutherford B. Hayes
 James A. Garfield
 Chester A. Arthur
 Grover Cleveland
 Benjamin Harrison
 William McKinley

 1. This was a satirical name, referring to it as a time of deep social problems masked by a thin gold gilding.↩

 2. This, by the way, is not to be confused with the Beard Age of American history, which overlaps with the Mustache Era, but is its own phenomenon entirely. Between Lincoln and Benjamin Harrison, there were eight presidents and 7.5 beards (one beard on Lincoln, Grant, and Harrison, two beards on Hayes and Garfield, and a half a beard on Arthur). Like the Mustache Era, the Beard Age is a unique incident in history—never before or after it did a presidential beard exist.↩

 3. Get used to me having no idea which of these words to capitalize and which to leave lower case. Nothing is more confusing.↩

 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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Note: This is Part 2. Part 1 (Washington to Lincoln) is here. 
___________
Last year, I published the post,  The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln .
Washington to Lincoln. Two superstars, bookending legends like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson; the birth of the constitution; the expansion from 13 East Coast colonies to a huge nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; two foreign wars; and a fierce debate over the issue of slavery—all leading up to the sizzling climax of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It’s not for everyone—but I’d click the shit out of that headline if I saw it on Facebook.
This year, I’ve gone a different direction. I’ve created one of the least clickable headlines in the history of the internet.  
Here’s what the full scale looks like:
   
So forgive me if I’m a little confused why you’re here right now—why you’re voluntarily involving yourself in a piece of writing that will focus on Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.
Maybe you clicked on this by accident while trying to click “Hide all posts from Wait But Why.” Or maybe, just maybe, you’re like me and you have a morbid fascination with this group of eight consecutive presidents who no one has heard of. Sure, you know a bit about Grant. You know Johnson was impeached. You might know Garfield and McKinley were assassinated. But unless you’re a history buff, that’s about all you know. I’m pretty into history, and that was about all I knew.
So I decided to dig in—way more in depth than I dug into the first 16—to the abyss between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Because if we’re gonna do this—we’re gonna really do this.
Three notes before we start:
 1) Here’s this chart again: 
   
You can see that after the political chaos of the first 16 presidencies (a time period which constitutes both what historians call The First Party System—up through Quincy Adams—and The Second Party System—from Jackson to Pierce), things settle down into a clean Republican vs. Democrat divide. The period we’ll cover in this post is 36 years long, running from the Civil War to the dawn of the 20th Century—a period Mark Twain first called The Gilded Age.1
 The politics of this period are what historians call The Third Party System—and in this system, there are Republicans and Democrats, which sounds familiar, but those parties barely resemble those same two parties today. If anything, the Republicans of The Gilded Age may have more in common with today’s Democrats and the Democrats of that time may better resemble today’s Republicans (although of course, it’s blurry, and both parties back then contain a mix of the two parties today, as well as having certain characteristics that don’t exist today at all, which makes comparisons of then vs. now a bit of an apples-to-oranges situation).
As you can see on the chart, the Gilded Age Republicans, who made up most of the Civil War’s victorious North, largely dominated the era.
 2) Here’s the chart that shows the aggregation of historians’ rankings of the presidents. Of course, even the aggregate ranks are totally subjective and not at all definitive—but I believe it’s the best way to give each president a ranking that reflects the general scholarly consensus on how the presidents stack up against each other. The aggregate column in that chart is where I draw my rankings from below each president’s name.
And how does this post’s group fare in the rankings? None of the eight presidents crack the top 18. What a crew.
 3) This is a critical time to refresh yourself on the Mustache Era. 
   
The Mustache Era is an unprecedented time in American history, during which presidential mustaches were rampant. And never before or after the mustache era was there any other presidential mustache. The Gilded Age that we’ll be covering today overlaps almost entirely with the Mustache Era.2
 And now it’s time to buckle up and hold on tight as I take you on a whirlwind tour of eight of the most random men in the world. We start in April, 1865. The Civil War has just ended, Lincoln has just been shot, and the country is in total mayhem…
 17) Andrew Johnson 
   
 Presidency: 1865 – 1869 Lived: 1808 – 1875 Ranking: 41/43
 Mustache? No.
 His Deal: Born in a super-poor log cabin situation in North Carolina, Johnson was raised by a single mom and apprenticed as a tailor before doing the most stereotypical politics ladder climb ever, going from city alderman to city mayor to state House to state Senate to federal Congress to Tennessee governor to federal Senate to vice president to president.3 Satisfying. Johnson capped off his epic journey by making the odd decision to stand on the top rung of the ladder being a dick for four years and followed that up by plunging all the way back down to the ground in disgrace. He spent the rest of his life losing small elections before finally winning a Senate seat four months before dying. Of his late-life Senate win, Johnson remarked, “Thank God for this vindication,” which was a weird thing to say since today he’s known as the third worst president in US history and mostly just comes up as the answer to the pre-1998 trivia question, “Who is the only US president to be impeached?”
 His Presidency: Johnson was chosen to be Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 (before Lincoln’s second term) because he was a rare combo: a politician from the South (Tennessee) and one of Lincoln’s rival Democrats, but one who was also fervently pro-Union and anti-secession—this made him the perfect choice to help Lincoln win the election and send the message of cross-party and cross-region collaboration and national unity. Six weeks after winning the election, Johnson and Lincoln held their first and last meeting as president and vice president, because that night, Lincoln was shot.
New President Johnson inherited a nation that had just come out of Civil War. The smoke was still clearing and the plan had been for Lincoln to spend his second term making a trillion critical decisions for the future of the country. With a clear winner to the war, and one party, Lincoln’s Republicans, in an unusual position of power, it was a rare opportunity to reshape the nation for the future and finally shed off the conflicts of the past, like slavery, that had plagued the country since its beginning. And Lincoln would really have been a great person to do that.
Instead, the hypercharged Republicans were suddenly led by a Southern Democrat, who it turns out didn’t really agree with much of what Lincoln had planned to do for the post-war Reconstruction effort. Johnson spent the next four years doing everything he could to get in the way of major Republican progress. The Republicans wanted to be tough with the South, punishing prominent Confederate politicians and refusing to offer reconstruction aid until Southern states agreed to grant equal rights and citizenship to newly-freed slaves—but Johnson vetoed most of the bills that the Republican Congress tried to pass, including the Civil Rights Bill, arguing that it gave “a perfect equality of the white and black races in every State of the Union.” He wrote, in a letter to a governor, “this is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Lincoln would have been proud.
The Republicans, who despised Johnson, successfully impeached him in 1868, claiming he had acted outside the president’s legal boundaries on several occasions—and at his impeachment trial, they fell one vote short of ousting him from office. The next year, he got crushed in his own primary and never even had a chance to run for a second term.
Johnson’s presidency ties with Buchanan’s for most maddening to read about.
 Things He Can Brag About:  
Being the only president to serve in the Senate after his presidency
Alaska is Johnson’s doing. His Secretary of State, William Seward, bought it from Russia for $7.2 million ($121 million in today’s dollars). At the time, Americans viewed this as a terrible deal and the whole thing was referred to, for a while, as “Seward’s Folly.”
 Things He Hopes We Don’t Remember:  
His white supremacist quote I included above
In what is definitely the funniest thing I’ve read so far in my research on the first 24 presidents, Johnson, at his and Lincoln’s 1864 inauguration, showed up at the event hammered and proceeded to make a complete debacle of a long, rambling, drunken speech as Lincoln and the entire Senate Chamber looked on in shock. A Senator who attended said afterwards, “I was never so mortified in my life—had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight.” Johnson then disappeared into reclusion for six weeks to avoid public ridicule.
He owned about nine slaves before becoming vice president, and is rumored to have fathered children with one of them.
 Things He’s Annoyed About: 
Apparently he celebrated his 60th birthday by having a party for several hundred children, which sounds like an incredibly unfun party and something that definitely wasn’t his idea.
Clinton’s impeachment. Until 1998, the one thing everyone knew about him is that he was the only president to be impeached. Clinton took away Johnson’s one major distinction.
 Other Notable Facts:  
After his time as a tailor’s apprentice, Johnson would forever make his own clothing, even while president.
He looks hilariously similar to Tommy Lee Jones.
Civil War general and next president Ulysses S. Grant had a major falling out with Johnson during Johnson’s presidency, presumably because of Johnson’s whole “trying to undo all the progress of the Civil War” thing. Grant wouldn’t allow his kids to attend Johnson’s 60th birthday party, and Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration.
Lincoln’s assassination was actually supposed to be part of a three-assassination trifecta, all in the same night. Two of Booth’s co-conspirators had plans to shoot VP Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. The attempt on Seward nearly succeeded, injuring him badly. But apparently Johnson’s would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, didn’t even attempt to kill Johnson because he got drunk instead. Pretty funny picturing Booth walking into Atzerodt’s apartment the next day and asking what the hell happened and Atzerodt being like, “Huh? OOOOHHH SHIT…oh RIGHT….shit I am SO sorry man, totally slipped my mind.”
 Last Words: After having a stroke and falling off his chair: “My right side is paralyzed. I need no doctor. I can overcome my troubles.” He couldn’t.
 Next (Ulysses S. Grant) → 
 All Pages: 
 Andrew Johnson (and Intro) 
Ulysses S. Grant 
Rutherford B. Hayes 
James A. Garfield 
Chester A. Arthur 
Grover Cleveland 
Benjamin Harrison 
William McKinley
The American Presidents—Johnson to McKinley — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/02/american-presidents-johnson-mckinley.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/popular-posts-2014.html
Our Most Popular Posts of 2014 — Wait But Why
2014-12-31
Wait But Why
<div><article>
	<div><p><em>The gargantuan SpaceX post is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our 2014 end-of-year post with the year’s most popular posts.</em></p>
<p>Every year, the last few days of December are full of every site aggressively reviewing the year for us. It’s time to reflect, whether you like it or not.</p>
<p>Well fuck it—we’re a website, and it’s time to join the coercive reflection party.</p>
<p>2014 was a fun year for us at Wait But Why—we explored a bunch of new kinds of topics, took our first crack at making a <a href="http://store.waitbutwhy.com/">store</a>, launched a new way for readers to interact with the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/table">Dinner Table</a>, and the summer travel <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/odd-things-odd-places-7-travel-posts.html">series</a> was definitely a thing that was a thing. On the personal side, my New Year’s resolution a year ago was “Next year, Tuesday means <em>Tuesday</em>” and then I proceeded to post on time between 0 and 2 times. Exciting year all around.</p>
<p>We posted a bunch of large and small things throughout the year on different parts of the site—but at the core were 35 big, long posts (you can find all of them in the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/archive">Archive</a>). So which of them did best?</p>
<p><strong>Here are the ten most popular posts of 2014:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox</a></strong> – Scientists estimate that there are over 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy—but we never see evidence of anyone. Here are 13 reasons why.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/04/everything-dont-know-tipping.html">Everything You Don’t Know About Tipping</a></strong> – Whenever you’re not sure what to tip someone, you risk ending up in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation. This post is here to help.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html">How to Pick Your Life Partner</a></strong> – Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up getting it so wrong?</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think</a></strong> – We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here’s why it makes no sense.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html">The Great Perils of Social Interaction</a></strong> – It’s a tough world out there.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story</a></strong> – If you’re not that clear on how Iraq, ISIS, or the conflicts within Islam came to be the way they are, this post will help.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html">Your Life in Weeks</a></strong> – Seeing all the weeks of your life in one chart is a weird experience.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">10 Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of</a></strong> – When you’re young, you make friends kind of by accident. Then they stick. That’s why you’re now part of these 10 odd friendships.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-future.html">Your Family: Past, Present, and Future</a></strong> – The past, present, and future of your family tree are all more fascinating than you realize.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">A Religion for the Nonreligious</a></strong> – A post that tied together a bunch of the ideas we’ve discussed on the site.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>And here are 2013’s Top Ten:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html">Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">Putting Time in Perspective</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/07/7-ways-to-be-insufferable-on-facebook.html">7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">How to Name a Baby</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-i-learned-while-i-was-in.html">20 Things I Learned in North Korea</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html">10 Types of Single 30-Year-Old Guys</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/creepy-kids-in-creepy-vintage-ads.html">Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/11-awkward-things-about-email.html">11 Awkward Things About Email</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel</a></p>
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 Our Most Popular Posts of 2014

 December 31, 2014 By Wait But Why


 The gargantuan SpaceX post is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our 2014 end-of-year post with the year’s most popular posts.

 Every year, the last few days of December are full of every site aggressively reviewing the year for us. It’s time to reflect, whether you like it or not.

 Well fuck it—we’re a website, and it’s time to join the coercive reflection party.

 2014 was a fun year for us at Wait But Why—we explored a bunch of new kinds of topics, took our first crack at making a store, launched a new way for readers to interact with the Dinner Table, and the summer travel series was definitely a thing that was a thing. On the personal side, my New Year’s resolution a year ago was “Next year, Tuesday means Tuesday” and then I proceeded to post on time between 0 and 2 times. Exciting year all around.

 We posted a bunch of large and small things throughout the year on different parts of the site—but at the core were 35 big, long posts (you can find all of them in the Archive). So which of them did best?

 Here are the ten most popular posts of 2014:

 The Fermi Paradox – Scientists estimate that there are over 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy—but we never see evidence of anyone. Here are 13 reasons why.

 Everything You Don’t Know About Tipping – Whenever you’re not sure what to tip someone, you risk ending up in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation. This post is here to help.

 How to Pick Your Life Partner – Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up getting it so wrong?

 Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think – We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here’s why it makes no sense.

 The Great Perils of Social Interaction – It’s a tough world out there.

 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story – If you’re not that clear on how Iraq, ISIS, or the conflicts within Islam came to be the way they are, this post will help.

 Your Life in Weeks – Seeing all the weeks of your life in one chart is a weird experience.

 10 Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of – When you’re young, you make friends kind of by accident. Then they stick. That’s why you’re now part of these 10 odd friendships.

 Your Family: Past, Present, and Future – The past, present, and future of your family tree are all more fascinating than you realize.

 A Religion for the Nonreligious – A post that tied together a bunch of the ideas we’ve discussed on the site.

 ___________

 And here are 2013’s Top Ten:

 Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy
 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
 Putting Time in Perspective
 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook
 How to Name a Baby
 20 Things I Learned in North Korea
 10 Types of Single 30-Year-Old Guys
 Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads
 11 Awkward Things About Email
 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

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 October 30, 2013 566

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 May 21, 2014 1,391

 * The Elon Musk Series

 May 7, 2015 511

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 February 12, 2014 341

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 September 9, 2013 1,197

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 July 8, 2013 973

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 August 22, 2013 559

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 December 11, 2013 327

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 June 13, 2014 351

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 October 19, 2014 830

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 * 
The gargantuan SpaceX post is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our 2014 end-of-year post with the year’s most popular posts. 
Every year, the last few days of December are full of every site aggressively reviewing the year for us. It’s time to reflect, whether you like it or not.
Well fuck it—we’re a website, and it’s time to join the coercive reflection party.
2014 was a fun year for us at Wait But Why—we explored a bunch of new kinds of topics, took our first crack at making a store, launched a new way for readers to interact with the Dinner Table, and the summer travel series was definitely a thing that was a thing. On the personal side, my New Year’s resolution a year ago was “Next year, Tuesday means Tuesday” and then I proceeded to post on time between 0 and 2 times. Exciting year all around.
We posted a bunch of large and small things throughout the year on different parts of the site—but at the core were 35 big, long posts (you can find all of them in the Archive). So which of them did best?
 Here are the ten most popular posts of 2014: 
  The Fermi Paradox  – Scientists estimate that there are over 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy—but we never see evidence of anyone. Here are 13 reasons why.
  Everything You Don’t Know About Tipping  – Whenever you’re not sure what to tip someone, you risk ending up in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation. This post is here to help.
  How to Pick Your Life Partner  – Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up getting it so wrong?
  Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think  – We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here’s why it makes no sense.
  The Great Perils of Social Interaction  – It’s a tough world out there.
  From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story  – If you’re not that clear on how Iraq, ISIS, or the conflicts within Islam came to be the way they are, this post will help.
  Your Life in Weeks  – Seeing all the weeks of your life in one chart is a weird experience.
  10 Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of  – When you’re young, you make friends kind of by accident. Then they stick. That’s why you’re now part of these 10 odd friendships.
  Your Family: Past, Present, and Future  – The past, present, and future of your family tree are all more fascinating than you realize.
  A Religion for the Nonreligious  – A post that tied together a bunch of the ideas we’ve discussed on the site.
___________
 And here are 2013’s Top Ten: 
 Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy 
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate 
Putting Time in Perspective 
7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook 
How to Name a Baby 
20 Things I Learned in North Korea 
10 Types of Single 30-Year-Old Guys 
Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads 
11 Awkward Things About Email 
Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel
Our Most Popular Posts of 2014 — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/popular-posts-2014.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/combined-wealth-world.html
What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion? — Wait But Why
2014-03-25
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>What would happen if you sold everything you own, liquidated any investments you have, paid off all of your debts, and withdrew whatever cash you have in bank accounts?</p>
<p>You’d be standing on the street naked, with nowhere to go, holding a bunch of cash, and people would be looking at you.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/naked1.png"></a></p>
<p>And whatever cash you were holding would be your net worth.</p>
<p>Okay now, imagine that everyone else in the world does that too (just pretend that makes sense), and all the people of the world, naked and holding their wealth in cash, come together and throw their wealth into a big pile together. How much money would be in that pile?</p>
<p>$241,000,000,000,000.<sup><br />
</sup></p>
<p>The combined wealth of all the people of the world is $241 trillion.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>So at this point, the whole human race would be standing there together, all naked, all broke, looking at a massive pile of cash.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/money-pile.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>Okay, so we’re all in a bit of an odd situation here. Let’s start by organizing the pile, converting it all into $100 bills and making a huge stack of them.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bills-to-moon.png"></a></p>
<p>One hundred $100 bills ($10,000) makes a 1.09cm-thick stack, so a million dollars stacked is a little over a meter, a billion dollars is a little over a kilometer, and $241 trillion makes a 262,000km-high stack, which reaches 68% of the way to the moon.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bills-to-moon-2.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>Now let’s spread all those bills out on the ground in a single layer. The area of a bill is 103cm<sup>2</sup>, so 2.41 trillion of them would just about cover Vermont.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vermont.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p>And converting them all to $1 bills, 241 trillion $1 bills would cover Algeria.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/algeria.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p>Okay enough bills. Let’s try gold. If you took all the gold ever mined in the world and melted it down into a cube, it would have a side of 20.7 meters<sup> </sup>(and be worth $8.6 trillion).<sup>2</sup></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/mined-cube-pyramid.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Kind of surprisingly small, right? Well how big would the gold cube be if we had enough gold to represent all $241 trillion of the world’s wealth?</p>
<p>It would be a cube with sides of about 63 meters.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/big-cube-pyramid.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p>So that cube is what we’re all working with here. And if the world’s wealth were distributed completely evenly and every adult human had an even share, everyone would have $51,600, or this much gold:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/56000.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>But wealth isn’t evenly distributed. Let’s look at what the world’s wealthiest 1% of people have versus the other 99% of people?</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/1-percent.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>How about the top 10%?</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/10-percent.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>To further demonstrate just how uneven wealth distribution actually is, let’s bring out some of the world’s richest billionaires.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/billionaires-come-out1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/billionaires-in-a-line.png"></a></p>
<p>Who the hell is Amancio Ortega? I don’t know who you are, please leave.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ortega.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>So Credit Suisse came out with <a href="https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=BCDB1364-A105-0560-1332EC9100FF5C83">a report</a> recently that revealed that the bottom half of humanity—3.5 billion people—has less than 1% of the world’s total wealth. And starting from the top, it only takes the combined wealth of the richest 85 people to equal the wealth of the bottom 3.5 billion people.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/10x10-grid.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>To put that in perspective, 85 is 1/84 millionth of the world population. So if one jellybean represents 85 people, the human race could be represented with 84 million jellybeans, which would just about fill 2 five-meter-high cubes:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jellybean-boxes1.png"></a></p>
<p>So the richest jellybean in the rich-half box has the same wealth as<em> the entire poor-half box combined:</em></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jellybean-boxes-2.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>To further explore the kind of wealth these 85 people have, let’s take Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest of this group of 85 people that makes up the richest jellybean.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/zuck-hoodie.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>Mark is worth just about $30 billion. 1,074 cubic cm is about $1 million of gold. This amount of gold can be made into a big gold coin with a diameter of 26cm (about a foot) and a thickness of 2cm (about an inch). Mark Zuckerberg’s $30 billion can be converted into 30,000 of these million-dollar gold coins:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/zuck-wealth.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>To help us appreciate how much money that is, think about this: the tallest building in the world, <a href="http://dubaidhow.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/khalifa.jpg">the Burj Khalifa</a>, cost $1.5 billion to build. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg makes each year off the interest on his wealth (if he made 5% in interest)—enough to build a new Burj Khalifa each year without denting into his wealth.</p>
<p>Another way to look at it is by understanding how vastly richer a billionaire is than a millionaire. To help demonstrate this point, let’s bring Alex Rodriguez into the discussion, who is worth $300 million—right around the same level as the richest movie stars. And A-Rod’s wealth amounts to only 1% of Mark Zuckerberg’s.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/arod-wealth.png"></a></p>
<p>How about someone lower down in the wealthiest 1% group—a lesser millionaire? A rich lawyer might have a net worth of $3 million, which is 1% of what A-Rod has.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/lawyer-wealth.png"></a></strong><br />
The rich lawyer is rich by almost anyone’s standards, but he has <em>nothing </em>compared to A-Rod (1/100th) or Mark Zuckerberg (1/10,000th). Still, because he’s part of the wealthiest 1% of both the world and the US<sup>5</sup>, we routinely group these three people together in the “1%” category. Categorizing Zuckerberg with the lawyer is as crazy as grouping the lawyer together with someone who has 1/10,000th of what he has—a high school kid who has $300 to his name.</p>
<p>Moving on from the one percenters, let’s bring in an ordinary American. In fact, let’s bring in <em>the </em>ordinary American—the one with the exact median net worth, $44,911.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/average-american.png"></a></p>
<p>While the <em>mean </em>US<em> </em>net income, at $301,140,<sup>1</sup> is one of the world’s highest, the <em>median </em>US net income is far lower and only the 27th highest in the world. It’s a mistake to say that the mean, $301,140, represents the average American’s net worth—that’s just what the wealth of each American would be if all American wealth were divided evenly. For example, in a country of ten people, where nine of them hovered around $30,000 net worth and the tenth was worth $10 million, the mean ($1.027 million) would suggest that the average person was a millionaire. The median wealth would be around $30,000 and a much more accurate representation of how the average person was actually doing.</p>
<p>Likewise, our ordinary American above having the median US net worth means that half of Americans are richer than he is and half are poorer. He’s the average American, and with a net worth of just under $45,000, he’s doing worse than the average member of 26 other countries, including not-so-wealthy countries like Greece and Slovenia.<sup>1</sup> The US’s mean wealth / median wealth ratio of 6.7 is one of the highest in the world and suggests that wealth inequality is particularly high in the US.</p>
<p>And how about an average <em>human</em>? How much wealth does the median adult in the world have?</p>
<p>About $4,000.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/average-human.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>Even if you adjust for the cost of living in poorer countries, this is pretty low. And this is the <em>median</em> human wealth, meaning that <em>half of all adults </em>have less than $4,000 to their name.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hungry.png"></a></strong></p>
<p>Sure. What seems to be the problem?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hungry-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Okay annoying, but I guess also fair. Let’s fix this by converting the gold into a big potato of equal value.</p>
<p>How big a potato could you buy with all the world’s wealth? If a typical potato sells in the US for $.33 and a potato is about 15 cubic inches, or 246 cubic cm, so $241 trillion would buy you 179 cubic km of potato, or a potato about 60km long.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/potato-from-sky.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/potato-ground-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/potato-ground-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Ungrateful.</p>
<p>Fine. How big a pizza could we buy for $241 trillion?</p>
<p>A Domino’s 14″ pizza goes for $19 (at least in New York), which comes out to 52.3cm<sup>2 </sup>per dollar. Using that rate, we can convert all human wealth to a pizza with area 1.26 million km<sup>2</sup>, which is just about the area of Niger.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pizza-niger.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pizza-ground.png"></a></p>
<p>Okay yeah, you need water I guess. At Poland Spring’s rate of $1 for a 16.9oz bottle, I can convert the world’s wealth into a 31.8 trillion-gallon bottle with a height of 11.6km, just above where airplanes fly.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/poland-spring.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p>I’m sorry you’re in this situation, but there’s nothing more I can really do to help. Instead, I’ll wrap up by converting all $241 trillion of the world’s wealth into tortoise.</p>
<p>To assist with my calculations, I’ve called upon my pet tortoise and close friend of nine years, Winston.</p>
<p>To Winston’s displeasure, I used a tape measure to determine his proportions—he’s roughly 25cm long, 15cm wide, and 13cm high. His original price tag was $200, making the going tortoise rate $.20/cubic cm.</p>
<p>Using that rate, we can convert all the world’s wealth to tortoise and buy ourselves a 2.7km long tortoise.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Winston.jpg"></a></strong></p>
<p><strong>If you liked this, you’ll probably also like:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html">Fitting 7.3 billion people into one building</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html">What makes you you?</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/why-is-my-laptop-on.html">Why is my laptop on?</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/from-1-to-1000000.html"><br />
</a><strong>Sources</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=BCDB1364-A105-0560-1332EC9100FF5C83">Global Wealth Report, Credit Suisse, October 2013.</a><br />
2. <a href="https://forms.thomsonreuters.com/GS13_UPDATE2/">Thomas Reuters GFMS Release – Gold Survey 2013.</a><br />
3. <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/03/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-worlds-500-richest-people/">Forbes Billionaires: Full List of the World’s 500 Richest People.</a><br />
4. <a href="http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0717.pdf">http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0717.pdf</a><br />
5. <a href="http://www.joshuakennon.com/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-be-in-the-top-1-of-wealth-and-net-worth-in-the-united-states/">http://www.joshuakennon.com/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-be-in-the-top-1-of-wealth-and-net-worth-in-the-united-states/</a><br />
6. <a href="http://templatelab.com/working-for-the-few-research/">Oxfam Briefing Paper – Working for the Few</a><br />
7. United Nations – <a href="http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&amp;context=cgirs">The World Distribution of Household Wealth<br />
</a>8. Unicef – <a href="http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/files/Global_Inequality.pdf">Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion</a><br />
9. <a href="http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP">http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP</a></p>
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 What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion?

 March 25, 2014 By Tim Urban


 What would happen if you sold everything you own, liquidated any investments you have, paid off all of your debts, and withdrew whatever cash you have in bank accounts?

 You’d be standing on the street naked, with nowhere to go, holding a bunch of cash, and people would be looking at you.

 And whatever cash you were holding would be your net worth.

 Okay now, imagine that everyone else in the world does that too (just pretend that makes sense), and all the people of the world, naked and holding their wealth in cash, come together and throw their wealth into a big pile together. How much money would be in that pile?

 $241,000,000,000,000.

 The combined wealth of all the people of the world is $241 trillion.1

 So at this point, the whole human race would be standing there together, all naked, all broke, looking at a massive pile of cash.

 Okay, so we’re all in a bit of an odd situation here. Let’s start by organizing the pile, converting it all into $100 bills and making a huge stack of them.

 One hundred $100 bills ($10,000) makes a 1.09cm-thick stack, so a million dollars stacked is a little over a meter, a billion dollars is a little over a kilometer, and $241 trillion makes a 262,000km-high stack, which reaches 68% of the way to the moon.

 Now let’s spread all those bills out on the ground in a single layer. The area of a bill is 103cm2, so 2.41 trillion of them would just about cover Vermont.

 And converting them all to $1 bills, 241 trillion $1 bills would cover Algeria.

 Okay enough bills. Let’s try gold. If you took all the gold ever mined in the world and melted it down into a cube, it would have a side of 20.7 meters (and be worth $8.6 trillion).2

 Kind of surprisingly small, right? Well how big would the gold cube be if we had enough gold to represent all $241 trillion of the world’s wealth?

 It would be a cube with sides of about 63 meters.

 So that cube is what we’re all working with here. And if the world’s wealth were distributed completely evenly and every adult human had an even share, everyone would have $51,600, or this much gold:

 But wealth isn’t evenly distributed. Let’s look at what the world’s wealthiest 1% of people have versus the other 99% of people?

 How about the top 10%?

 To further demonstrate just how uneven wealth distribution actually is, let’s bring out some of the world’s richest billionaires.3

 Who the hell is Amancio Ortega? I don’t know who you are, please leave.

 So Credit Suisse came out with a report recently that revealed that the bottom half of humanity—3.5 billion people—has less than 1% of the world’s total wealth. And starting from the top, it only takes the combined wealth of the richest 85 people to equal the wealth of the bottom 3.5 billion people.

 To put that in perspective, 85 is 1/84 millionth of the world population. So if one jellybean represents 85 people, the human race could be represented with 84 million jellybeans, which would just about fill 2 five-meter-high cubes:

 So the richest jellybean in the rich-half box has the same wealth as the entire poor-half box combined:

 To further explore the kind of wealth these 85 people have, let’s take Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest of this group of 85 people that makes up the richest jellybean.

 Mark is worth just about $30 billion. 1,074 cubic cm is about $1 million of gold. This amount of gold can be made into a big gold coin with a diameter of 26cm (about a foot) and a thickness of 2cm (about an inch). Mark Zuckerberg’s $30 billion can be converted into 30,000 of these million-dollar gold coins:

 To help us appreciate how much money that is, think about this: the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, cost $1.5 billion to build. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg makes each year off the interest on his wealth (if he made 5% in interest)—enough to build a new Burj Khalifa each year without denting into his wealth.

 Another way to look at it is by understanding how vastly richer a billionaire is than a millionaire. To help demonstrate this point, let’s bring Alex Rodriguez into the discussion, who is worth $300 million—right around the same level as the richest movie stars. And A-Rod’s wealth amounts to only 1% of Mark Zuckerberg’s.

 How about someone lower down in the wealthiest 1% group—a lesser millionaire? A rich lawyer might have a net worth of $3 million, which is 1% of what A-Rod has.


 The rich lawyer is rich by almost anyone’s standards, but he has nothing compared to A-Rod (1/100th) or Mark Zuckerberg (1/10,000th). Still, because he’s part of the wealthiest 1% of both the world and the US5, we routinely group these three people together in the “1%” category. Categorizing Zuckerberg with the lawyer is as crazy as grouping the lawyer together with someone who has 1/10,000th of what he has—a high school kid who has $300 to his name.

 Moving on from the one percenters, let’s bring in an ordinary American. In fact, let’s bring in the ordinary American—the one with the exact median net worth, $44,911.1

 While the mean US net income, at $301,140,1 is one of the world’s highest, the median US net income is far lower and only the 27th highest in the world. It’s a mistake to say that the mean, $301,140, represents the average American’s net worth—that’s just what the wealth of each American would be if all American wealth were divided evenly. For example, in a country of ten people, where nine of them hovered around $30,000 net worth and the tenth was worth $10 million, the mean ($1.027 million) would suggest that the average person was a millionaire. The median wealth would be around $30,000 and a much more accurate representation of how the average person was actually doing.

 Likewise, our ordinary American above having the median US net worth means that half of Americans are richer than he is and half are poorer. He’s the average American, and with a net worth of just under $45,000, he’s doing worse than the average member of 26 other countries, including not-so-wealthy countries like Greece and Slovenia.1 The US’s mean wealth / median wealth ratio of 6.7 is one of the highest in the world and suggests that wealth inequality is particularly high in the US.

 And how about an average human? How much wealth does the median adult in the world have?

 About $4,000.1

 Even if you adjust for the cost of living in poorer countries, this is pretty low. And this is the median human wealth, meaning that half of all adults have less than $4,000 to their name.

 Sure. What seems to be the problem?

 Okay annoying, but I guess also fair. Let’s fix this by converting the gold into a big potato of equal value.

 How big a potato could you buy with all the world’s wealth? If a typical potato sells in the US for $.33 and a potato is about 15 cubic inches, or 246 cubic cm, so $241 trillion would buy you 179 cubic km of potato, or a potato about 60km long.

 Enjoy!

 Ungrateful.

 Fine. How big a pizza could we buy for $241 trillion?

 A Domino’s 14″ pizza goes for $19 (at least in New York), which comes out to 52.3cm2 per dollar. Using that rate, we can convert all human wealth to a pizza with area 1.26 million km2, which is just about the area of Niger.

 Okay yeah, you need water I guess. At Poland Spring’s rate of $1 for a 16.9oz bottle, I can convert the world’s wealth into a 31.8 trillion-gallon bottle with a height of 11.6km, just above where airplanes fly.

 I’m sorry you’re in this situation, but there’s nothing more I can really do to help. Instead, I’ll wrap up by converting all $241 trillion of the world’s wealth into tortoise.

 To assist with my calculations, I’ve called upon my pet tortoise and close friend of nine years, Winston.

 To Winston’s displeasure, I used a tape measure to determine his proportions—he’s roughly 25cm long, 15cm wide, and 13cm high. His original price tag was $200, making the going tortoise rate $.20/cubic cm.

 Using that rate, we can convert all the world’s wealth to tortoise and buy ourselves a 2.7km long tortoise.

 If you liked this, you’ll probably also like:

 Fitting 7.3 billion people into one building

 What makes you you?

 Why is my laptop on?


 Sources

 1. Global Wealth Report, Credit Suisse, October 2013.
 2. Thomas Reuters GFMS Release – Gold Survey 2013.
 3. Forbes Billionaires: Full List of the World’s 500 Richest People.
 4. http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0717.pdf
 5. http://www.joshuakennon.com/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-be-in-the-top-1-of-wealth-and-net-worth-in-the-united-states/
 6. Oxfam Briefing Paper – Working for the Few
 7. United Nations – The World Distribution of Household Wealth
 8. Unicef – Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion
 9. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP

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 * 
 * 
What would happen if you sold everything you own, liquidated any investments you have, paid off all of your debts, and withdrew whatever cash you have in bank accounts?
You’d be standing on the street naked, with nowhere to go, holding a bunch of cash, and people would be looking at you.
   
And whatever cash you were holding would be your net worth.
Okay now, imagine that everyone else in the world does that too (just pretend that makes sense), and all the people of the world, naked and holding their wealth in cash, come together and throw their wealth into a big pile together. How much money would be in that pile?
$241,000,000,000,000. 
 
The combined wealth of all the people of the world is $241 trillion.1 
So at this point, the whole human race would be standing there together, all naked, all broke, looking at a massive pile of cash.
     
Okay, so we’re all in a bit of an odd situation here. Let’s start by organizing the pile, converting it all into $100 bills and making a huge stack of them.
   
One hundred $100 bills ($10,000) makes a 1.09cm-thick stack, so a million dollars stacked is a little over a meter, a billion dollars is a little over a kilometer, and $241 trillion makes a 262,000km-high stack, which reaches 68% of the way to the moon.
     
Now let’s spread all those bills out on the ground in a single layer. The area of a bill is 103cm2, so 2.41 trillion of them would just about cover Vermont.
     
And converting them all to $1 bills, 241 trillion $1 bills would cover Algeria.
     
Okay enough bills. Let’s try gold. If you took all the gold ever mined in the world and melted it down into a cube, it would have a side of 20.7 meters (and be worth $8.6 trillion).2 
   
Kind of surprisingly small, right? Well how big would the gold cube be if we had enough gold to represent all $241 trillion of the world’s wealth?
It would be a cube with sides of about 63 meters.
     
So that cube is what we’re all working with here. And if the world’s wealth were distributed completely evenly and every adult human had an even share, everyone would have $51,600, or this much gold:
     
But wealth isn’t evenly distributed. Let’s look at what the world’s wealthiest 1% of people have versus the other 99% of people?
     
How about the top 10%?
     
To further demonstrate just how uneven wealth distribution actually is, let’s bring out some of the world’s richest billionaires.3 
   
   
Who the hell is Amancio Ortega? I don’t know who you are, please leave.
     
So Credit Suisse came out with a report recently that revealed that the bottom half of humanity—3.5 billion people—has less than 1% of the world’s total wealth. And starting from the top, it only takes the combined wealth of the richest 85 people to equal the wealth of the bottom 3.5 billion people.
     
To put that in perspective, 85 is 1/84 millionth of the world population. So if one jellybean represents 85 people, the human race could be represented with 84 million jellybeans, which would just about fill 2 five-meter-high cubes:
   
So the richest jellybean in the rich-half box has the same wealth as the entire poor-half box combined: 
     
To further explore the kind of wealth these 85 people have, let’s take Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest of this group of 85 people that makes up the richest jellybean.
     
Mark is worth just about $30 billion. 1,074 cubic cm is about $1 million of gold. This amount of gold can be made into a big gold coin with a diameter of 26cm (about a foot) and a thickness of 2cm (about an inch). Mark Zuckerberg’s $30 billion can be converted into 30,000 of these million-dollar gold coins:
     
To help us appreciate how much money that is, think about this: the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, cost $1.5 billion to build. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg makes each year off the interest on his wealth (if he made 5% in interest)—enough to build a new Burj Khalifa each year without denting into his wealth.
Another way to look at it is by understanding how vastly richer a billionaire is than a millionaire. To help demonstrate this point, let’s bring Alex Rodriguez into the discussion, who is worth $300 million—right around the same level as the richest movie stars. And A-Rod’s wealth amounts to only 1% of Mark Zuckerberg’s.
   
How about someone lower down in the wealthiest 1% group—a lesser millionaire? A rich lawyer might have a net worth of $3 million, which is 1% of what A-Rod has.
     
The rich lawyer is rich by almost anyone’s standards, but he has nothing compared to A-Rod (1/100th) or Mark Zuckerberg (1/10,000th). Still, because he’s part of the wealthiest 1% of both the world and the US5, we routinely group these three people together in the “1%” category. Categorizing Zuckerberg with the lawyer is as crazy as grouping the lawyer together with someone who has 1/10,000th of what he has—a high school kid who has $300 to his name.
Moving on from the one percenters, let’s bring in an ordinary American. In fact, let’s bring in the ordinary American—the one with the exact median net worth, $44,911.1 
   
While the mean US net income, at $301,140,1 is one of the world’s highest, the median US net income is far lower and only the 27th highest in the world. It’s a mistake to say that the mean, $301,140, represents the average American’s net worth—that’s just what the wealth of each American would be if all American wealth were divided evenly. For example, in a country of ten people, where nine of them hovered around $30,000 net worth and the tenth was worth $10 million, the mean ($1.027 million) would suggest that the average person was a millionaire. The median wealth would be around $30,000 and a much more accurate representation of how the average person was actually doing.
Likewise, our ordinary American above having the median US net worth means that half of Americans are richer than he is and half are poorer. He’s the average American, and with a net worth of just under $45,000, he’s doing worse than the average member of 26 other countries, including not-so-wealthy countries like Greece and Slovenia.1 The US’s mean wealth / median wealth ratio of 6.7 is one of the highest in the world and suggests that wealth inequality is particularly high in the US.
And how about an average human? How much wealth does the median adult in the world have?
About $4,000.1 
     
Even if you adjust for the cost of living in poorer countries, this is pretty low. And this is the median human wealth, meaning that half of all adults have less than $4,000 to their name.
     
Sure. What seems to be the problem?
   
Okay annoying, but I guess also fair. Let’s fix this by converting the gold into a big potato of equal value.
How big a potato could you buy with all the world’s wealth? If a typical potato sells in the US for $.33 and a potato is about 15 cubic inches, or 246 cubic cm, so $241 trillion would buy you 179 cubic km of potato, or a potato about 60km long.
   
Enjoy!
   
   
Ungrateful.
Fine. How big a pizza could we buy for $241 trillion?
A Domino’s 14″ pizza goes for $19 (at least in New York), which comes out to 52.3cm2 per dollar. Using that rate, we can convert all human wealth to a pizza with area 1.26 million km2, which is just about the area of Niger.
     
   
Okay yeah, you need water I guess. At Poland Spring’s rate of $1 for a 16.9oz bottle, I can convert the world’s wealth into a 31.8 trillion-gallon bottle with a height of 11.6km, just above where airplanes fly.
     
I’m sorry you’re in this situation, but there’s nothing more I can really do to help. Instead, I’ll wrap up by converting all $241 trillion of the world’s wealth into tortoise.
To assist with my calculations, I’ve called upon my pet tortoise and close friend of nine years, Winston.
To Winston’s displeasure, I used a tape measure to determine his proportions—he’s roughly 25cm long, 15cm wide, and 13cm high. His original price tag was $200, making the going tortoise rate $.20/cubic cm.
Using that rate, we can convert all the world’s wealth to tortoise and buy ourselves a 2.7km long tortoise.
     
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 Sources 
1. Global Wealth Report, Credit Suisse, October 2013. 
2. Thomas Reuters GFMS Release – Gold Survey 2013. 
3. Forbes Billionaires: Full List of the World’s 500 Richest People. 
4. http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0717.pdf 
5. http://www.joshuakennon.com/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-be-in-the-top-1-of-wealth-and-net-worth-in-the-united-states/ 
6. Oxfam Briefing Paper – Working for the Few 
7. United Nations – The World Distribution of Household Wealth
8. Unicef – Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion 
9. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP
What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion? — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/combined-wealth-world.html