Ross Douthat

Does that worry you, that possibility that there's just some limit that we're going to hit in terms of our ability to get off Earth?

Now, I think that, you know... Space is big, but it has been around.

It's big, but it's also pretty old, right?

And a universe that was teeming with life would presumably have...

generated some other industrial level civilizations, you know, a million years ago, 10 million years ago, right?

That could have sent probes and... No, we have no idea.

We don't... So it could be, right.

But that is back to, that's a kind of human exceptionalism, right?

Where you say the universe could be teeming with life

but our particular kind of life is sufficiently unique that you don't get lots and lots of intergalactic civilizations.

But you think human beings can become a multi-planetary species?

We're hollowing out the log to try and get across

the river, right?

But somewhere out there, there is the equivalent of the ore or the sail, right, in this metaphor.

And it seems like you could say, well, that's going to be when we figure out how to terraform Mars, or that's when we figure out we have a telescope that tells us that there's a habitable world that's X number of light years away, and we figure out a way to send human beings

I'll just be in cryo sleep, right, to be science fiction-y about it.

But when you're imagining that beyond your everyday duties as NASA administrator, are you imagining human beings primarily colonizing the solar system?

Are you imagining us going into deep space?

What is the sail or the oar that you're looking for?

And then we need the platinum mines.