For a moment I was struck by the oddness of the scene. We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed Earthly civilization. It made me recall the words of Sam Teller on his second day working for Musk, when he attended a SpaceX board meeting: “They’re sitting around seriously discussing plans to build a city on Mars and what people will wear there, and
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