You can just go to Mars.
You can just live forever.
You can just stop pandemics.
You can just solve intelligence.
You can just solve energy.

Turns out you can just do these things, and it's fine. Impossible problems are tractable. People tend to wildly underestimate the progress they can make long-term. Yet working on impossible problems could not be easier: you just sit down and... work on them.

But you failed to make it to Mars? Open-source your progress so that somebody else can pick up the baton. There is a certain class of problems where even failure pushes society forward. Few seem to take them.

Yet here we are, working on problems that don't matter. How many people are working on stopping the next pandemic? How many people are working on AI safety? How many people are working on making civilization last 1,000,000 years? Can they all fit in the same room?

Starting a company lets you choose what gives your life meaning, and then live by it. Why aren't more companies choosing meaning? Why aren't more companies tackling these problems?