From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

rCLSpaceX & the Sentient SunrCY by Marc Andreessen and Michael McGuiness
https://www.a16z.news/p/spacex-and-the-sentient-sun

rCLEarth is the cradle of humanity, and you cannot stay in the cradle forever.rCY

rCLElon MuskrCOs compensation package at SpaceX is structured around two targets. The first award vests if the company reaches a valuation of
$7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent human colony on Mars of at
least one million people. The second vests if SpaceX operates data
centers in space that draw at least 100 terawatts of power, more than
1,000x the consumption of every data center on Earth combined. Miss
both, and Musk earns nothing but the $54,080 salary he has been paid
since 2019.rCY

"The board members who signed this package spent two decades watching
Musk make predictions about SpaceX that sounded impossible before they
came true. He said SpaceX would put humans in orbit when no private
company ever had; it now flies NASArCOs astronauts routinely. He said it
would land and reuse an orbital rocket when the entire industry treated boosters as disposable; SpaceX has since done it hundreds of times. He
said a satellite internet business could be worth tens of billions when satellite internet was a graveyard of bankruptcies; StarlinkrCOs revenue
has climbed from zero to $11.4 billion in a few years. The predictions
were often aggressive on timing but almost never wrong on direction. And
the original direction, written down in 2002 as the companyrCOs mission,
was to make humanity multiplanetary. So the board tied his pay to the
mission itself."

rCLIf that mission sounds like something from a science fiction novel,
that might be because it is.rCY

"Iain M. Banks spent twenty-five years writing about a civilization
called the Culture. It is, by most reasonable measures, the best utopian society ever imagined. Humans live alongside Minds, the superintelligent
AIs that run orbital habitats the size of small worlds, in a
relationship that is neither servitude nor rivalry but partnership.
Nobody works who doesnrCOt want to. Nobody starves. The Minds handle the staggering computational load of running cities in space. Humans handle
being human, which turns out to be a full-time job."

"SpaceXrCOs three autonomous drone ships, the floating platforms in the
oceans where Falcon 9 boosters land, are named after sentient starships
in BanksrCOs novels: Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the
Instructions, and A Shortfall of Gravitas. In a 2023 interview at the UK
AI Safety Summit, Musk was asked what a good AI future looks like. rCLThe Banks Culture books are by far the best envisioning of an AI future,rCY he answered. rCLThererCOs nothing even close thatrCOll give you a sense of what is a fairly utopian or protopian future with AI.rCY He has been telling
us, on the sides of his landing pads, exactly what he is trying to build."
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