Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
15 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I feel like I’ve got about 50 centuries of human history to back up my point of view, that we just generally make things better.”
02 / belief
“If everybody on Earth firmly believed in “The Egg,” I think the argument would quickly become who are the older souls.”
03 / belief
“I need to hear it with my ears, not just see it with my eyes, in order to make sure that the sentences flow. It’s just kind of how I think.”
04 / belief
“I think the first thing . . . Once again, for me, it always comes down to the tech and the details.”
05 / belief
“I think the best thing to do would be for both of us to pick an arbitrary great circle to walk, around the planet, and leave markings along the way denoting what direction you’re walking.”
06 / evaluation
“Because water isn’t consumed — when you drink water it doesn’t disappear from the universe.”
07 / evaluation
“Because one of the main things that gets in the way of private space exploration right now isn’t technology anymore, it’s policy.”
08 / preference
“I think the best self-replicating machines are ourselves. I mean, we’re really a lot better at it than any machines that we’ll have by 2080.”
09 / evaluation
“I have a very optimistic view of the future. It’s my belief that every century is better than the last.”
10 / evaluation
“” Well, it turns out those two dovetailed together very, very well, because being a funny smart-ass enabled me to dump enormous amounts of exposition on the reader, that ordinarily would have been painful to slog through.”
11 / prediction
“I think that’s how we will reach a point where we end up with a booming space industry, and I think that’s how the price to low Earth orbit will eventually be driven down far enough that middle-class people can afford it.”
12 / evaluation
“I think lately YA fiction, young adult science fiction, has all been basically the same story told about 20 different times.”
13 / prediction
“Partially because as long as we keep following the rules of the Outer Space Treaty, which I believe we will, there’s no such thing as sovereign territory outside of Earth.”
14 / prediction
“Because I worked out with my economics stuff, I worked out the price of transporting mass to the Moon, and it works out to be — in 2015 dollars, it works out to be about 160 2015 dollars to the kilogram.”
15 / evaluation
“I feel like technology generally makes things better. It’s also why I really don’t like the show Black Mirror, because it’s pretty much all about how technology is awful and will ruin the universe.”