A robot.
On an asteroid.
300 million kilometres away.
Alone.
Took this photo of the surface of the asteroid Ryugu.
Then it died there, and it's still there now.
We have never gone back.
Einstein died believing quantum mechanics was incomplete.
Not wrong. Incomplete.
“God does not play dice,” he said. He thought we’d eventually find what was hiding underneath the probabilities.
100 years later, every experiment still confirms the math. And we still cannot tell you what the math means.
Einstein wasn’t wrong about the discomfort. He was wrong about how long it would last.
This is even a debate because we think of intelligent life as a spontaneous accident of nature.
But intelligent life is a necessary feature of the universe.
So, yes, aliens are real, if we mean other intelligent life besides us.
The big question is: what feature do we serve?
One thing I learned at SpaceX. Good ideas aren’t worth anything. Lots of people have good ideas, and they are willing to share them. What actually is valuable is the implementation. If you can make a good idea a reality, that is the secret sauce.
There were several times when someone felt guilty about getting credit for implementing someone else’s good idea. Good ideas aren’t worth took 5 seconds to spout out, implementation took 6 months of 12 hour work days and blood sweat and tears. Full credit always goes to the implementer