Awe

I consider the following statements and achievements awe-inspiring, and I hope you do, too!

Voyager

In 1977, Jimmy Carter wrote the following statement, which hitched a ride into outer space with the Voyager space probe:

SpaceX

To make space accessible to the human race, we must make rocket launches much cheaper, and the only viable path to doing that is to make fully reusable rockets. This is fundamentally why SpaceX was born.

Richard Hamming

In 1986, Richard Hamming, who is best known for groundbreaking work in information theory, gave a speech called "You and Your Research", encouraging us all to work on the important problems in our respective fields rather than unimportant problems. It is one of very few things I have read many times.

Speech text: http://paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Neuralink

Radically increasing each human's intellectual capacities would be a profound development in the evolution of our species. Simultaneously merging human intelligence with machine intelligence -- or, rather, enabling our minds to seamlessly control machine intelligence -- would be profound squared.

Neuralink was created to achieve exactly this.

This is about the greatest thing I have ever read, simply (and entertainingly) describing much about the human brain, why Neuralink matters, and how crazy the future could soon become once very high-tech brain implants exist: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html .

[Meta]

If you are the kind of person willing to think big thoughts and you are serious about changing the world, email me at steve@tryingtobeawesome.com . If you are in the Bay Area, I hereby invite you to apply to join Revolutionizers.