Ross Douthat

Certainly.

How important is the human element in these missions?

Because I, you know, we keep gesturing to AI.

I think...

One of the assumptions that a lot of people working in artificial intelligence make is that AI revolutionizes spaceflight, but in part because it lets you send artificial intelligences deep into space where human beings can't go.

We obviously already do that with robots, but...

How important is it that it's actual human beings who are making these leaps?

I feel like that has been underplayed in the news because we have so many other things to cover.

No tentacles, just outside the frame.

And is it consequential, life on Mars, in part because it suggests that we could live on Mars?

But so there's a dark interpretation, though, of that, which is you realize life is everywhere, and yet...

We haven't heard from other civilizations.

We have no evidence of advanced civilizations anywhere else in our galaxy.

Or any civilizations.

Or any civilizations, advanced or non-advanced.

We have no evidence of life, direct evidence of life.

No direct evidence.

And there's a lot of smart people who've looked at that and said, well, maybe that means that there is what, you know, the term, I think it's from the economist Robin Hanson, that there's a great filter, right?

That basically...

It's so hard to become a multi-planetary species that even though life is everywhere, every species gets stuck somewhere around where we are, achieving some things and then never sort of getting off our initial planet.