Faster, Please! — The Podcast

Thanks to SpaceX, it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to launch stuff into orbit. But just imagine if instead of using rockets, we could send cargo and people to space on an incredibly tall elevator. This may sound like a total sci-fi idea, but it has some grounding in real-world physics. In theory, we could build a space elevator by putting a counterweight in geostationary orbit and attaching a cable between the satellite and Earth. An elevator could then climb the cable, delivering payloads to space at a fraction of the cost of propulsive rockets. As you can imagine, it isn't quite that easy, which is why I'm joined today by Stephen Cohen.Stephen teaches physics at Vanier College in Montreal and has been working on space elevator concepts for almost 20 years. Recently, he wrote “Space Elevators Are Less Sci-Fi Than You Think” for Scientific American. Stephen also has a new book, Getting Physics: Nature's Laws as a Guide to Life, which was released earlier this year.In This Episode* Space elevators 101 (1:42)* The engineering challenges (7:14)* The economics of space elevators (11:07)* Space elevators in sci-fi (19:21)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Space elevators 101James Pethokoukis: In the intro, I tried to do my best at explaining what a space elevator is. But the simple version is we have something big and heavy in orbit, a cable extends down from that thing, attaches somewhere on the Earth, and we run an elevator up and down it. That's a space elevator. Am I right?Stephen Cohen: Sure.Now that we have a picture in our heads, why is it something more than just an interesting engineering thought experiment? What attracts you to it, other than sort of a technical problem that would be interesting to solve on paper?Well, it's space infrastructure, which is something we don't currently have and never have had. Right now, and for all time we've accessed space, going to space is like a one-off each time. Sometimes you have some reusable parts, but basically what a space elevator is, is a bridge instead of just a bunch of boats.And the advantage of a bridge over boats is what?Access. Right now, each time you want to plan a mission, to simply put something into orbit requires a lot of planning. The weather has to be right. And then you want to plan another mission, you sort of have to begin again. With a space elevator, you can just days in advance say, “Okay, we're going to send something up to a desired orbit.” And just hours later after that one would be sent, you could send something else. And you basically have a housing — that's what the climber is, effectively — that you put the payload inside and up it goes. That's the transformative part. But we haven't talked about really the cost savings, the energy savings, and that's just basic physics.The way you get around in general is by applying forces. And that's something you do without thinking. When you walk, you push on the ground. When you fly through the air, you're basically pushing on air molecules and they push back. But in space, you have none of that. And so what rockets do is they literally are the medium. The fuel you bring is the medium you're pushing against — rather, you're throwing it out the back. It's a hugely wasteful, inefficient way to get around. It's preposterous when you think about it. But it's the only way we can get things to the speeds we need to get them to. Just as a mode of getting things into this is extremely practical. You can't compare the efficiencies. It’s orders of magnitude of difference.It really strikes people. When they hear the general concept, they really think it's something big and it sounds like it's amazing. It's something that is science fictional, but maybe we could turn into science fact. There's something else about it, I think, that just grabs people's attention.Yeah, for sure, because it's a physical connection to space. It's like, if you could just touch the cord at the Earth port, then you're in contact with something that's reaching out all the way into space, which is wild. But I think there's an element missing. People don't realize tethers in space are not a new thing. We've had missions since the ‘70s that are effectively two bodies orbiting earth connected by a long tether, sometimes kilometers long. Now, that's not in the ballpark of 100,000 kilometers long, which is a common number thrown out there for what the eventual space elevator might be. But a lot of the same technologies are involved. The biggest difference is of course, instead of two bodies connected by a tether, like a big spacecraft to a small spacecraft, say, this is a big structure connected all the way to Earth. The amount of tension is tremendous. That's the big difference. That's what effectively becomes the big engineering challenge about it all.To be clear, the cable would be connected to something large in orbit, and that could be something we build, but I've also heard maybe it could be a small asteroid? Am I confusing two different things there?It doesn't have to be something we build, but likely it won't be an asteroid. The way at least the first space elevator will likely be constructed would be you send the cable up in a spacecraft and you drop it, you sort of spool down the cable over time. And it would be a lengthy unspooling. The dynamics of that are super interesting. But the point is, at the end of it you can now connect that cable to the ground. It's good to have something functional at the other end, not just some mass. Of course, the mass you're going to have at the far end, the particular value of that mass, that depends on how long the cable will be. So to achieve an equilibrium, you can't just choose any random mass. It would have to be planned.The engineering challengesLet's get to some of the challenges. And as you answer those questions, we may also find out why you think this is something that can be done. You mentioned that cable. That seems to be the chief engineering issue, as you mentioned: finding an ultra-strong lightweight material to make up that cable. Is that something that needs to be invented? Are we talking an innovation? Do we need radical new science, or can you see how that cable could be manufactured in a decade if we got serious about funding that kind of research?The key property is called specific strength. It's not just strength, but it's the strength-to-density ratio. And that property in the material existed since the mid-‘90s. But it's very costly to produce. Time consuming as well. Now, on both fronts, there have been big improvements since then.Are these carbon nanotubes? I always hear about carbon nanotubes. Is that what you're talking about?The two candidates that are talked about these days are carbon nanotubes and just graphene. These options, there are some issues with repeatability. So the process, you think you're doing it the same twice, but you don't get exactly the same properties each time. It still needs to mature, but the basic science is there. It's become a materials engineering kind of problem.Is it an engineering problem that we just sort of have to work the problem, and it'd be great if we had funding, but it doesn't require a radical breakthrough? We think we know how to get there. It's just sort of resources and effort and time.Yeah. Yeah. There are probably solutions to every problem that stand in its way. I would say as the material problem is getting solved and as time is going on, a new problem is entering that is on the same level as the material problem. And that's our very, very crowded space environment. That is only becoming a bigger issue. That problem is only going to get worse with time. And the equator is a fairly busy area. It's very likely that the space elevator will be situated slightly off-equator, and the mechanics of that are sound. That's not a big issue.On land or in the ocean?Probably in the ocean, is the proposals I've seen. Those are sort of the details, I would say. And it will come down to economics, won't it? We're still at the stages of design, but there's really no company that is clearly in charge and no administration, institution is pulling all the strings. What we have right now is a big project with a bunch of academics scattered around the world that are, I would say, dabbling in it. A lot of work has taken place. I would say low-intensity work. That is, you get 10 very useful studies done in the course of a year. That's peanuts for something on this scale. There needs to be probably a champion or several on the business side, I guess. But also governments need to get involved for this to really take off.The economics of space elevatorsIt must be annoying that you can't find a super billionaire — they seem to be very interested in rockets. You need to find one who's interested in a space elevator. That would seem to be an important piece to the puzzle when you look at how things are going in space and rocketry.Yeah, on the economic side of things, if you want return on investment, you probably need to work on steps to get there. So partial space elevator, that's something which is basically a larger space tether. Space tether on the order of thousands of kilometers. So it's an easier challenge, but the payoff isn't nearly as high. There need to be small aspects that are worked on that have return on investment that get you there. There are several that could be listed. If I could speak about the big investor of which you just mentioned, there's another project that really reminds me of the space elevator: something called Breakthrough Starshot that you haven't heard of it. It's an attempt to send something interstellar. To send to another star system a very small payload, on the order of grams, that we could then once we get there take a picture of, say, an exoplanet and send it back. And we’d get something way cooler than what our best satellites can do. That project also has a few major engineering challenges, but I wouldn't say science challenges. We're now at the point where there's a road to it. It's also probably decades away. It has spinoff technologies. They're really very similar. And the interesting thing is, there seem to be investors putting more money into that one than space elevators. That's my impression. Not boat loads of money.Isn't that a Mark Zuckerberg thing? Hasn't he put money in that?I don't think he's the only one.Yeah.I'm not fully aware of all the happening surrounding Breakthrough Starshot, but it's worth mentioning that the space elevator is completely transformative for life in our solar system, really. We talk about colonizing the Moon and Mars, and that would be really neat. But it's sort of a pipe dream if you can't support it. Sending a single person or several to Mars, that's a big, big undertaking. But now for them to live there in a supported way? The amount of mass you have to get there is tremendous. And you can't do this in a sustainable way without infrastructure. The point I'm making is, a space elevator [is] really transformative for the solar system. And I don't want to speak down on Breakthrough Starshot. I don't want to speak ill of that project. Totally cool. I'm on board. But that one, I would say, is transformative in the sense that you can actually send something to another star. We've never done that before. But it wouldn't change life as we know it, unless our picture happens to show something living on an exoplanet.Someone else's space elevator, perhaps!.It's really the economics and efficiency of getting something off the ground, into orbit. Has that economic potential calculus been changed, or would it be changed, by reusable rockets? I mean, when you first got interested it was probably either pre-SpaceX or maybe SpaceX’s early days, and those costs have come down and are expected to continue come down. At some point, does that make a space elevator irrelevant?Before we get to the cheaper chemical rockets, there are other changes that have taken place. For example, nuclear rocketry. There's also the idea of solar sails and things like that. But of course, none of those can address the primary reason why a space elevator is useful, and that's to get out of the Earth's gravity well. That's where you need chemical rockets or, well, nothing else. Nothing else will do it, because you need a tremendous amount of power in order to reach those speeds, unless you can just climb along a cable. Of course, those chemical rockets get cheaper. It doesn't mean they necessarily become routine, in the sense that weather will always be an issue, safety always a concern. They're not green, and if you intend to get really serious about space in the way people are talking about it, we are talking about such wasteful practices there. It's just unconscionable in a way. That's not the economic side, I realize. But an economic study needs to probably be repeated regularly to see whether this is the best way forward, purely based on economics. Access, environmental considerations: Those are other elements that also need consideration. But the economic story, I'd say, is evolving. Chemical rockets will always have a certain ceiling that you just can't beat, and we're maybe getting close to it.If I got into a space elevator capsule on Earth, how long would it actually take to get up to a space station?In all likelihood, there will be a station at geosynchronous that's 36,000 kilometers high — so about three Earths away — and it will probably take a week to get there if you could go in the area of the high-speed trains we've become accustomed to on Earth. That would be beautiful views for a week. What's cool is as you go up, the weight you feel goes down gradually until you reach this geo place. And then you are indeed weightless, just floating there like they do in the ISS. However, you'll have passed the ISS a long, long time ago, because that's only 300 kilometers off the surface of Earth. You couldn't put a station there on the space elevator. Physically that just wouldn't work. Geostationary is the ideal place for a space station because it imposes no new tension on the cable. In any case, it would take a week, is the short answer to that question.But that week would be a far more relaxing experience than taking a rocket.And let's be clear, this would be way cheaper once you've got it. Operating one of these, you wouldn't pay millions of dollars a person. Not even close. I can't know exactly what the number would be, but it could be 100 times less for one person once this thing's really up and running. Plus you don't have to spend a week going to geo and a week coming back. If we're trying to recreate the experience of going up to 300 kilometers, it could be an hour up and down and you've achieved a nice view of Earth.Space elevators in sci-fiIt's an interesting concept, but one which is probably used more in scientific literature than in movies and TV shows. I think the first time I ever saw one on a screen was in the recent TV series based on Foundation by Isaac Asimov where they had a space elevator. Now, of course, the space elevator — spoilers — the space elevator in that show, there's a terrorist attack and it falls down and just kills…Is there a portrayal of this technology in science fiction that you're aware of or that you think is interesting?There's some artistic license, perhaps, going on there. What would happen if it's severed, if that's the conversation we're having, the portion beyond the severance likely is gone never to be seen again. And then the portion below, its future really depends on where the severance happens, exactly what that looks like. There was a study done when I was doing my master's — in like 2005, 2006, I think — [by] someone named Paul Williams, if I remember right. He did animations on exactly this question. It flies down to Earth, the lower portion below severance. And it would, like, paint a line on the equator —whatever didn't burn up in the atmosphere on the way down. But we're talking about a cable that's like one meter wide and very thin. So don't imagine a building collapsing that's wrapping around the equator. It's a rubber band, if you want to imagine something.The piece you wrote in Scientific American, have you gotten any feedback on that from other scientists, astrophysicists, engineers? What kind of response have you gotten, if any?Oh, I've gotten letters from high school students. “Can you tell me this? Can you tell me that?”It was a completely honest piece. I am not what I would even call a space elevator advocate. But the moment I start talking about it, I get excited. To be clear, a quick perusal of some of the online message boards reveals a lot of, well, trolling where some people who may be informed, some people who aren't, just write a thousand reasons why this will never happen, X, Y, Z. But most of the feedback I've gotten in the circles I would ask through are just: “That was delightful to read.”I think it approached it with the appropriate level of seriousness for something that's interesting, it's not tomorrow, but it's possible. And let's give it some thought. That seems like a very reasonable approach to the issue.I'm a college teacher at this point. I've worked in the space industry. But my goal is to capture people's imagination when I'm in the classroom. That's at least a big part of it. The space elevator ticks a lot of boxes in that department. Exactly where it'll go in terms of economics and all that, I don't really know. And in my day-to-day life, space elevator is something I dabble in when I have free time and when I feel like it. It is something I write about in a small part of the book that I published recently, but it's mostly a general physics book, for example. It's not the focus of my life.Let's say we elected an American president who said, “This is something we can do. We're going devote resources. This is a new Apollo.” With enough effort, could you say within a decade we could have a space elevator, if we had that kind of enthusiasm and allocation of resources?I think in a decade we could have a design that is pretty mature, and I think a decade after that it could be built. But again, that would take the kind of backing that is associated with serious projects. And you’d talk about many countries coming together. To go on a little tangent, there was a film that had a space elevator recently released in China. I cannot recall what it was, but a lot of the recent conversations I've had because of that Scientific American article were from that. Journalists in China wanted to know more about space elevators. Their question for me was along the lines of what you just asked me, is this realistic? And I said it’s probably true that the engineering challenge becomes a bit smaller than the challenge of getting all the groups to do this thing together. The scale of the teamwork, cooperation for a project on this scale, this is a lot bigger than the International Space Station. Not just in terms of its physical size, in terms of things like space law that come into play, all kinds of areas, some of which we haven't even considered yet.That may sound like a bug, but maybe that's actually a feature. Get everybody together working on something. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics," said Nobel laureate economic Robert Solow in 1987. A decade later, the '90s productivity boom was in full swing. Likewise, it took decades for electrification to have an impact on productivity growth in the early 20th century. Today, artificial intelligence can write a coherent paragraph or generate an image from a simple prompt. But when will AI show up in the statistics, boosting productivity and then economic growth? Avi Goldfarb joins Faster, Please! — The Podcast to discuss that question and more.Avi holds the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare at the University of Toronto's Rotman School Of Management. He's also co-author, along with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans, of 2022's Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence.In This Episode* Prediction at scale (1:34)* How AI has transformed ride hailing and marketing (5:37)* The potential for “system-level” changes (11:26)* When will AI show up in the statistics? (16:12)* The impact of ChatGPT and DALL-E (19:46)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Prediction at scaleJames Pethokoukis: What this book is about—and then you can tell me if I've gotten it horribly wrong—this is a book about machines making predictions using advanced statistical techniques. 1) Is that more or less right? And 2) why is that an important capability?Avi Goldfarb: That's more or less right. The only place where I [would offer] a little correction there is, the reason we're talking about artificial intelligence today is almost entirely due to advances in computational statistics. Yes, it is just stats and that sounds kind of unexciting. But once we have prediction at scale, it can be really transformative to all aspects of business in the economy. There's a reason why we're calling computational stats “artificial intelligence” and we didn't use to.Prediction at scale. That's a great three-word description. Probably why you used it. To what extent is that now happening? The name of the book is Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Is this prediction at scale already disruptive to some degree or is it, will be disruptive?The technology, for the most part, is pretty close to there, in the sense that we can do prediction at scale because we have the data and we have computational power to do all sorts of amazing things. For the most part, it hasn't been disruptive yet. And it hasn't been disruptive yet, just because we have the technology doesn't mean we know how to use it well and we know how to use it productively in our processes and systems in order to get the most out of it.Are there sectors currently doing this, but they're not doing it well yet? It’s in a variety of sectors, but not enough companies doing it? Lots of companies are already using these machine learning tools, but they tend to be using them for things they were already doing before. If you had some prediction process to predict, if you're a bank, whether somebody's going to pay back a loan. In the very old days you'd have some human, the loan officer, look the customer up and down and go with their gut. And then, starting in the 1960s and especially in the ‘90s and beyond, we started to use scoring rules, partly your credit score and partly other things, to get a sense of whether people are going to pay them back. And so we were already doing a prediction task done by a machine. And now increasingly we're using these machine learning tools. We're using what we're calling AI, over the past five to 10 years, to predict whether people are going to pay back a loan. We're seeing those kinds of things all over the place, which is: You had some prediction, maybe you’ve used even a machine prediction before, and now we're using machine learning. We're using AI to make those predictions a little bit better. Lots of companies are using that.That sounds incremental. That sounds like an incremental advance.It's absolutely an incremental advance. We call these point solutions, which is, you look at your workflow, you identify something that a human is doing. You take out that human; you drop in a machine. You don't mess with a workflow because it's always easier to do things when you don't mess with a workflow. The problem is, when you don't mess with a workflow, there's only so much gain you can get. We've seen AI-based point solutions, prediction point solutions, all over the place. We haven't seen real transformation in very many industries. We've seen it in a couple. We haven't seen it in very many industries because real transformation requires doing things differently.How AI has transformed ride hailing and marketingDo you think that it has happened in one or two industries that you think would actually meet that bar of transformational? Can you give me an example?Absolutely. If you wanted to be a cab driver in the city of London 20 years ago, or even today, it takes three years of schooling. Learning to navigate those streets is really, really hard. And especially learning to navigate and predict where the traffic is going to be is really, really hard. And so there is a really rigorous process to screen people to be taxi drivers. In the US 30 years ago, there was something like 200 or 300 taxi drivers in the whole country. About 15 years ago, two technologies came about. The first one being digital dispatch, which is essentially tools for drivers to find riders, sometimes through prediction and sometimes through other tools. And then the second part was what's been disruptive with respect to that three years of schooling in the city of London, which is prediction tools for navigating a city. This is your GPS system.In the early days, many people selling digital dispatch and navigational predictions were selling them into professional driving companies, into taxi companies. “Hey, your taxi drivers can be 15 percent more efficient if they know the best route at this time.” That's what we call a point solution. You’re already doing this, you take out some part of the human process, you drop in a machine, and you do it a little bit better. A couple of companies realized that digital dispatch combined with navigational prediction could create an entirely new type of industry. And this is the ride-hailing industry led by Uber and Lyft and others. That's a totally new kind of way to do personal transportation that made millions of amateur drivers as good as professional because they could navigate the city and find riders.Example number one is the taxi industry. Personal ride-hailing, for lack of a better word, has been transformed partly through digital and really those maps are important—and a big part of those maps is machine learning tools and figuring out where the traffic is, etc. So industry number one.Industry number two is advertising. I don't know if you've seen the TV show Mad Men. That was really how the advertising industry operated well into the ‘90s. Maybe not the soap opera aspect of it. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But the idea that there's a lot of wining and dining and charming people to convince them to spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign. And whether a campaign worked or not was largely based on gut feel. And which kinds of customers you targeted and which TV show and which magazine, all of that was priced based on intuition and not much else.Digital advertising came along in the late 1990s, and the first ways we thought about digital advertising was that it was like the magazine industry. So instead of advertising in People magazine, you're going to advertise on Yahoo using the exact same processes you did in People magazine. There was a rate card and it was going to be so many dollars per thousand users. And if you were doing general search, it might be $10, and if you're looking for real estate, it might be $50. And that's exactly how the magazine industry was priced. Some magazines were more than others based on readership and topic. And it was all based on personal selling, intuition, deals, etc.Then people realize that digital advertising created an opportunity to predict who the user was, who might see your ad. A user arrives at a publisher and an ad needs to be served, and you can predict who that user is and what they might want and when they might want it. Based on those predictions, rather than just do the magazine industry old way of doing things, you can now serve the right ad to the right person at the right time. Starting around 2000, there were all these innovations in online advertising that led to an industry that today looks almost nothing like the industry that you saw in Mad Men. Every time a user goes to a website, there is a real-time auction, in fractions of a second, between, in effect, thousands of advertisers for that user's attention. And there are all these intermediary steps, lots and lots of intermediaries—largely led by Google, but some other players that complement Google in that process—to create an entirely new kind of ad industry. The ad industry has had a system-level change because we can now predict, for a given impression or given user who's looking at a page, what they might want and when they might want it. Predictions changed the industry.The potential for “system-level” changesHow confident are you that this technology is powerful enough that we'll see system-level changes across the economy? That this is a general-purpose technology that will be significant? And do we have any idea what those changes will be, or is it, “They'll be big, but we don't know exactly what they are.”The technology itself is pretty extraordinary. And so in lots and lots of contexts, I'm pretty confident the technology's going to get there. There are some constraints on it, which is that you need data on the thing you're trying to predict in order for the predictions to work. But there are lots and lots of industries where we have great data. The technology barriers, I think, are being overcome. In some industries faster than others, but they're being overcome in lots and lots of places.That's not the only barrier. The technology is barrier number one. Think of an industry that I'm particularly excited about the potential of the technology, which is healthcare. Why is it so exciting for healthcare? Because diagnosis is at the center of how healthcare operates. If you know what's wrong with somebody, it's much easier to treat them, it's much less costly to treat them, and you can deliver the right treatment to the right person at the right time. Diagnosis, by the way, is prediction. It wasn't obvious, the way we thought about that in the past. But really, what it is, it can be solved [with] statistical prediction by using the information you have, the data on your symptoms, to fill in the information you don't have, which is what's actually causing your symptoms. If you do a Google Scholar search for something like “artificial intelligence healthcare,” you'll get a few million hits. There are lots of people who've done research producing AI for diagnosis. The technology, in many cases, is there. And in lots of other cases, it's pretty close.That doesn't mean it's going to transform healthcare. Why not? What's an AI doing diagnosis? They're doing a thing that makes doctors special. Yes, a good doctor in their workflow does all sorts of other things — they help patients navigate the stress of the healthcare system, they provide some treatments, etc. — but the thing that they went to school for all those years for, and for many of them the thing that they have that nurses and pharmacists and other medical professionals don't, is the ability to diagnose. When you bring in machine diagnosis into the healthcare system, that's going to be very disruptive to doctors. There are lots of reasons why, then, doctors might resist. First, they might be worried about their own jobs. Second, they might just not trust the machines and believe they're good enough. Because [in] the medical system doctors are a core source of power—they help determine how things work—they're going to resist many of the biggest system-level changes from AI-based diagnosis.And so you may have regulatory barriers, you may have organizational incentive barriers, and you may have barriers from the individual people on the ground who sabotage the machines that are trying to replace them. All of these are reasons — even if the technology is good enough — that AI in healthcare may be a long way away, even though we can see what that vision looks like. In other industries, it might be closer. In lots of retail contexts, you’re trying to figure out who wants what and when — Amazon's pretty good at that in lots of ways — and in-store retailers can do that too. And so there are reasons to think that disruption in many retail industries will come faster.I just want to be a little careful here. I see the technology is there. There are some barriers on the technology side. If the payoff is big enough, I think most of the technology-related barriers can be overcome. To give you a sense of this: We hear a lot something like, “We don't want to do AI in our company because it's just so difficult to get the data organized and get the right data to build those predictions.” Well, yeah, it's difficult. But if the payoff is going to be transformative to the company and make the company millions or billions of dollars, then they'll spend thousands or millions in order to make it happen. And so a lot of the challenges aren't tech specific. They're incentives and organization based.When will AI show up in the statistics?I think of the classic Paul David paper about the dynamo. It took a while before factories used electricity, and they actually had to redo how the factory was designed to get full productivity value. And you say that we are sort of in the “between times.” And that makes me think of a classic Solow paradox: We see computers everywhere but in the statistics. He said that in ’87. Are we, like, in the 1987 period with this technology? Or are we now in the late ‘90s where it's starting to happen and the boom is about to begin?I think we're in the early ‘80s.Not even the late ‘80s?He said that in 1987. By 1990 it was showing up in the data. So he just missed it.[We’re in the early 1980s] in the sense that we don't quite know what the organization of the future looks like. There are reasons to think for many industries it might take a long time, like many years or decades, for it to show up in the productivity stats. While I do say we're in the early ‘80s because we haven't figured it out yet, I'm a little more optimistic that maybe it won't be 30 years to really have the impact. Mostly because we just have the lessons of history. We know from past technologies, and business leaders know from past technologies, electricity and the internet and the steam engine and others, that it requires some system-level change. And we now have the toolkits to think through, how do you build system-level change without destroying your company?When electricity was diffusing in the 1890s, there wasn't really any idea that this might take 40 years to figure out what the factory of the future looks like. It just wasn't on anybody's mind. The management challenges of redesign were unstudied, and there was no easily accessible knowledge to figure that out. Jump forward to the ‘80s and computing: Again, we hadn't even learned the lessons of electricity back then. Paul David's paper came out in 1990. It was a solution to the Solow paradox.But since then, we have a much better understanding of what's required for technological change. There has been decades of economics literature Erik Brynjolfsson, Tim Bresnahan, Paul David, and others. And there's been decades of management literature taking a lot of those ideas from econ and trying to communicate them to a broader audience to say, “Yes, it's hard. But doing nothing can also be a disaster. So being proactive is useful.” Then there's another piece about optimism here, which is that the entrepreneurial ecosystem is different than it used to be. And we have lots and lots of very smart people building tech companies, trying to make the system-level change happen. And that gives us more effectively more kicks at the can to actually figure out what the right system looks like.The impact of ChatGPT and DALL-EChatGPT and these text-to-image generators like DALL-E, are these significant innovations that can cause system change? Or are they toys that can't figure out how many arms people have and are able to produce B-level middle school essays?They're both. What do I mean by that? The technology is incredible. What ChatGPT can do and DALL-E can do is really, at least to me, it's amazing. Especially what ChatGPT can do. It's much better than I… That came much faster than at least I thought it was going to come. When I first saw it, I was blown away. So far it's a toy. So far, most applications have been “Hey, isn't this cool? I can do this kind of thing.” In a handful of places, it’s moved beyond a toy to a point solution. Joshua [Gans], Ajay [Agrawal], and I wrote a piece in HBR. We drafted it out, and rather than reread it and edit it 60 times like we normally do, we sent it into ChatGPT and said, “Write this in a way that's easy to read.” And it did. We had to do some final edits afterwards. But like, we are already doing the same thing. It made a piece of our workflow a little bit more efficient. Point solution.A lot of the talk here in universities, “Uh-oh, we have to change the way we do final exams because ChatGPT can write those exams for our students.” Sure. But that's really not thinking through the potential of what the technology can do. What we've seen so far are toys and point solutions, but I do see extraordinary potential for system solutions in both. Both DALL-E and ChatGPT, and all these generative models. ChatGPT, if you think about it, what does it do? One thing it does is it allows anybody to write well. Like I told my students, you no longer have an excuse to write a bad essay with terrible grammar and punctuation that's not structured like a five-paragraph essay. No excuse anymore. It used to be, okay, maybe there's an excuse because there was some time crunch and you had other things due. Or your language skills — you're a math person, not an English person. No excuse anymore. ChatGPT upskills all those people who are good at other things but whose opportunities were constrained by their ability to write. So what's that new system? I don't know. But there are a lot more people around the world who are bad at writing English than are good at writing English. And if now everybody is a B high school-level student, able to write an essay or able to write well in English, an email or whatever it might be, that's going to be amazing. We just have to figure out how to harness that. We haven't yet.You’ve sort of given us a potential timeframe, broadly, for when we might see this in the data. When we see it in the data, how significant do you think this technology can be? What is, do you think, the potential impact once you can find it in the data, the productivity growth, which is kind of the end goal is here?That’s a great question. Let me reframe it and say, the thing I'm worried about is that it won't reach its potential. A lot of people are worried about the impact of AI on jobs and what are people going to do if machines are intelligent? Jason Furman attended our first Economics of AI conference. This was in 2017. He was formerly chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. And the thing I'm worried about is that there's not going to be enough AI. The productivity booms that we've had in history from way back to the steam engine and then electricity and then the computer age and the internet have been driven by system-level change, where we've figured out how to reinvent the economy. And that's led to sustained productivity growth: first the steam engine at 0.5 percent and then maybe 1 percent with electricity and then 2 percent after the war or more. I don’t know what the number is going to be. I know you wanted me to give you a number. I don’t know what the number's going to be. But this technology has potential to be like all those others, assuming we figure out what that system-level change looks like and we overcome the various sources of resistance.To sum it up, your concern is less about, can we solve the technical problems, versus, will society accept the results?Exactly. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

It was only three decades ago that astronomers first discovered planets outside our solar system. Since then, astrophysicists have found more of these "exoplanets" — including some Earth-like worlds that exist in their star's habitable zone. Today, astronomy has moved far beyond pointing a lens at the night sky, so I've brought on Gioia Rau to describe her work on exoplanets, as well as how AI and recent declines in launch costs will change astronomy.Gioia is an astrophysicist and program scientist at Schmidt Futures. Previous to joining Schmidt Futures, Gioia was a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.In This Episode* NASA’s exoplanet discoveries (1:19)* Innovation in telescopes and astronomy (5:57)* The near future for astronomy (16:02)* Americans’ enthusiasm for space (22:04)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.NASA’s exoplanet discoveriesJames Pethokoukis: When I hear that there's been a discovery, that NASA has discovered an Earth-sized world inside the habitable zone of its star, I think, are there people there? Is there intelligent life there? When you hear that, what do you think? What strikes you? What are the implications you draw? What do you want know more of?Gioia Rau: That's a great question. As a scientist, I have many questions after this discovery. I would like to … discover which other molecules are in there. I would like to understand better what the size of this planet [is], what is its atmosphere and its surroundings. But as a human, as a person, and also as a scientist, it completely blows my mind. I'm so excited by the multiple discoveries. The James Webb Space Telescope is great to understand the atmosphere of these exoplanets, but what really kept us going from zero to 5,300—where we are now in terms of how many exoplanets have been confirmed—is first Kepler and then TESS.What is TESS?TESS is another telescope of NASA. It has discovered many, many exoplanets. It has scanned both atmospheres of the sky. And actually, at NASA, my group has used TESS with light curves … [and a] neural network, and so through artificial intelligence we were able to discover 181 new planet candidates. Those are incredible machines. Let's say TESS is our searcher, but then to really understand what is in there, what's the composition of this planet, we need …How many Earth-like, in a very broad sense, worlds have we found that are in habitable zones?That’s a very good question, and I don't have the number on the top of my head, but those are just a bunch.At some point we had discovered none. And it wasn't that long ago that we probably had not discovered any of these?Right. The difficulty is in defining what is Earth-like. There are multiple meanings of this. One is the distance from the parent star that is similar to the distance between the Earth and our own sun. So this is called a “habitable zone.” But another measure of Earth-like is the size of the planet, or the fact that it's rocky versus gaseous. Definitely, TESS is the telescope that has helped us a lot with such discoveries.And even before we had found any of these, I imagine there was considerable speculation that obviously they had to exist, there had to be all kinds of planets outside our solar system. But we had not discovered them. And yet, I imagine it's been a pretty wonderful run we've had from going from pure speculation to beginning to analyze what these planets, whether they're Earth-sized or not, what other worlds are like.Absolutely, and it's just about 30 years, 33 years, that we’ve known that, actually, other planets, exoplanets—which by definition are planets outside our own solar system­­­­­­—exist. Before it was, as you mentioned, just a speculation. But the first ever planet was discovered around 33 years ago. And so since then, really our revolution began. And, actually, these two scientists that co-authored and discovered the first exoplanet have just recently been awarded the Nobel Prize.Innovation in telescopes and astronomyIt might seem to some people that NASA hasn't really done much since the Apollo program. But there's a lot more to space science than crewed missions. It seems to me like NASA’s doing a whole lot of things right now.Absolutely. The time we are living now is a time of revolution for so many aspects in space exploration. Not only human exploration, which of course during the Apollo time peaked, and now hopefully also with the Artemis mission, named after the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is coming. But the James Webb Space Telescope, which is really a marvel of engineering. We never before have thought that we could put a telescope inside the rocket like an origami and then deploy it in the atmosphere. And we are discovering with Webb so many different things about the universe. Our early universe: Webb is basically a machine to look back in time. With its infrared vision, we will be able to look back over 13.5 billion years. But also with Webb we can discover galaxies over time, again, with the infrared sensitivity. So to discover even the earliest and faintest galaxies. We can discover the life cycle of the stars, as in the infrared, Webb which is able to look through the dust clouds which are otherwise opaque to the visible light. But also we are, as we mentioned before, able to see the atmosphere of these exoplanets, and so understand if in there there are building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe, but also understand how our own solar system was formed.Currently, we're learning about exoplanets through astronomy. We aren't sending probes. Are we nearing the point where there isn't much we can learn without getting closer to these worlds? Or can you imagine further innovations which would allow us to learn a lot more about an exoplanet without sending something there?This is a great question. We had Hubble in the past, the Hubble Space Telescope, through Kepler and TESS, now with James Webb and in the future with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we will be able to understand so many different aspects of the “zoology” of this planet, so to say, but also on the composition of the atmosphere and so on. And so basically up to now, [there are] five principle methods to discover exoplanets. For example, one of those is transit, the method that Kepler and TESS use; but another one is gravitational microlensing, which the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use.Now, what is that?Gravitational microlensing is basically an observational effect that was predicted in 1936 by Einstein using the theory of general relativity. But this effect was never actually proved up to now in space. Basically when one star in the sky passes near or in front of another, then the light rays of the background star become basically bent due to the gravitational force, the gravitational attraction of the foreground star. And so this star then is actually acting as a virtual magnifying glass or a lens, and so it amplifies the brightness of the background source star. And so we refer to the foreground star as a lens star, and if the lens star harbors a planetary system, so an exoplanetary system, then those planets can actually also act as lenses, and so each of these planets will be producing a sharp division in the brightness of the source. And so we discovered the presence of each of the planets in this way, and we are able to measure also its mass and separation from the star. And this technique also tells us how common Earth-like planets are. This is a great method for Earth-like planets and has guided also the design of this future space mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.What would you like to be able to find out about an exoplanet, that you currently can't, but you think you might be able to 10 years from now or 20 years from now?There are several aspects that are currently unknown, probably what we need the most, that the Roman space telescope will also help us understand—Roman will be launched in May, 2027, according to the forecast, and it'll be operational a few months after—but basically Roman will have a wide field instrument that will bring us a panoramic view, a wide field of view, that is 200 times larger than Hubble Space Telescope in the infrared. It will also combine the power of imaging and spectroscopy, and so in this way, we will uncover thousands of exoplanets beyond our own solar system. We will have basically a sense of the “zoology” of the exoplanets, but also, we will have in the future, hopefully, much higher resolution of spectroscopy which will really [help us] understand what molecules are there beyond what JWST is able to tell us. And also if there is water, if we can go there, considering that many of these planets are not that far away, I mean in an astronomical point of view, right? They are just a dozen or hundreds of light years away, which is not that far away.How did you get involved in this to begin with? As a kid were you a space nut, you loved reading about it or watching documentaries? What got you interested in the field?Since I was a little kid, I was literally dreaming about space. I was very curious about everything about science in general. But something about space was extremely fascinating for me. This feeling of looking at the universe and feeling small in comparison of the immensity of the cosmos, dreaming of exploration while watching the space shuttle launches in the ‘90s. And also, you know, this question that we are still trying to uncover: What is out there? How does the universe work? How did we get here? Those were all fascinating to me as a kid. And yes, since I [was] very little kid, I wanted to work for NASA. I even wrote NASA a letter when I was about age eight. I wanted to attend their summer camp—obviously from my accent, I was not born in the US, so unfortunately at the time, it was precluded for foreigners to attend their summer camps. But they wrote me back. They were like, “Study and one day you'll come back here.” And so I didn't give up.And just explain a little bit about the thrust of your work now at Schmidt Futures.At Schmidt Futures we do several things for astronomy in general and for space. Fascination of space, of course, drove me to do research. Like very hands-on research. And then of course, I evolved and I started to lead research groups and to have my own students and interns and so on, which I love. I love to mentor young students and get them inspired to do science. But then also I like this more managerial or programmatic aspect, at Schmidt Futures we are really forging what the future of astronomy and astrophysics will be in the next five­­, 10 years and beyond. And so this has been extremely thrilling to me.The near future for astronomyYou were talking about how this is kind of a revolutionary period in space science. How important in this period, and let's say over the next decade, are two things? (1) Artificial intelligence to help process all this data, and (2) the fact that it's getting cheaper to put probes in space and put telescopes in space. I imagine those costs are going to continue to come down.Absolutely. I believe that the future of astronomy and astrophysics in general will be about an accelerated timeline and about cutting, drastically, costs. And so this is where also I really want to focus, especially for future of astrophysics. Concerning artificial intelligence and its use in astronomy, this is truly revolutionizing how we do astronomy. NASA is doing a lot in this sense. As I mentioned earlier, through AI we discovered a bunch of new planet candidates. But AI in general is revolutionizing astronomy in many ways from understanding cosmology to understanding the shape of galaxies and how they form. And I'm noticing more and more AI-based applications to the exploration of astronomical data. And so this is definitely, I believe, the future of astronomy. In a decade or so there will be more AI-based applications to analyze astronomical data than manual ones.I know there's ideas about putting a variety of telescopes on the Moon. And there's all this concern lately about our sky being cluttered with satellites, and a lot of astronomers are complaining about the Elon Musk Starlink, that it's obscuring views. But I would imagine that putting some kind of telescope—and radio telescopes, I imagine a variety of them—that would be helpful, right? Putting them on the Moon as opposed to having them on Earth?Oh yeah, absolutely. Actually, I believe that the future of [ground]-based astronomy, as we call it, versus space-based—“space-based” are all the telescopes that [orbit] around earth or in space …, versus [ground]-based are the telescope that we build on Earth—but the future of space-based astronomy is actually from the Moon and also beyond the Moon. In particular, for the radio wavelength domain, our radio telescope on the far side of the Moon will have tremendous advantages compared to Earth-based and also Earth-orbiting telescopes. For example, such a telescope could observe the universe at wavelengths greater than 10 meters, which are reflected actually by Earth’s ionosphere and so are up to now completely, largely unexplored by humans. But also the Moon acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar surface telescope from any radio interferences or noises from the Earth-based sources, from the ionosphere and from Earth-orbiting satellites, and also from the sun's radio noise, during the lunar night. And so, such a radio lunar-based telescope will enable tremendous scientific discoveries, for example, in the field of cosmology, by observing the early universe in this range of 10- to 50-meter wavelength span, which has been unexplored completely by humans to date.Is there any film that you think portrays what you do at all realistically? If the answer is no, what space, science-fiction movies do you find inspirational? I'm guessing maybe Contact, but maybe there are some others?Exactly. Contact inspired me when I was growing up for several reasons. I started during the holiday—but I didn't have the time to finish it—to watch Don't Look Up. But I watched the first half an hour, and I have to say that Leonardo DiCaprio was very much into the professor type. And so all the dynamics that happened had a scientific but also a bureaucratic level, so to say. But since we are talking about movies, a movie that I love, and it's really inspirational for very many points of view, is Interstellar. Many scientists will say that it’s a movie that is completely wrong and so forth. When I watch a movie, I like to watch a movie as a person detached from my scientific point of view, just because it's a movie and it's fiction. Many movies are completely untrue for several aspects, so why are we going to investigate how physically true it is? It’s a movie, right? We need to enjoy it.Americans’ enthusiasm for spaceWhen you're traveling and you tell people what you do, I imagine people are pretty enthusiastic, because my theory is that people are super interested if we popularize and we let people know what actually is happening. There's been a lot happening other than Moon landings over the past half century, and maybe a lot more happening over the next 10 or 20 years.Absolutely, yeah. I completely agree with you. When I travel and I get to speak with people and “What do you do?” I say I'm an astrophysicist. It blows their mind just because people don't have any idea about actually what we do. They think that we look through a telescope. That’s part of what we do in the free time, maybe. But the reality is way beyond that. I believe space is such a source of huge inspiration for mankind, for all of us. And so it's definitely on us, the scientists, astrophysicists, to be a great outreach source, to be great communicators, to make space and science in general more accessible and comprehensible to society and to all people. This will benefit the knowledge of all, but also it'll benefit science as a return of making it more accessible, more comprehensible.When was the last time that you looked into the IP of a physical telescope? Was it 20 years ago? Was it yesterday?Fun fact: for my nephews, the sons of my brother—they’re twins—for their birthday I gave them a small, few inches refractor Newtonian telescope, and so now that they went off to college, they were like, “Hey aunt, you want it?” And I was like, “Are you sure? Because I will say yes.” And so with our very young daughter we've looked at it very recently, so it was not that so long ago. That's why I say it's something that we do in our free time, and many astrophysicists have this passion also to have more telescopes or to be astrophotographers, because this is a passion of many of us. In general, coming back to what you said before, and why space is important and why the US, with all the problems that are in the world, why we should actually invest in space and use this money there and not on other problems: First of all, I hope it was clear that all of this space can be very inspiring for young kids and to motivate them, but also for adults to look at the beauty of our universe, and also as a reminder to us all to be humble. We are just one extremely small piece in the huge cosmic puzzle of the universe. But also there are so many other benefits of space exploration: [NASA’s impact on the US economy], how when we apply ourselves to the challenges of space exploration, we make discoveries that can help the world in many ways. For example, studying how food grows in orbit or on Mars might yield insight into growing food in extreme conditions on Earth or when climate change will hit even harder.Also, now the budget is not that expensive. It's only about 0.5 percent of the total federal budget. It's even smaller than for other nations. And also a cosmic perspective can also give us insight on the importance of protecting our own planet’s sustainability and so encouraging investments and efforts then. And not to mention, of course, that studying space may one day save us all. And so we have to explore space to find and study asteroids and comets in our cosmic neighborhoods to defend our own Earth and to understand that, actually, Earth is unique in its habitability up to now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

On previous episodes of Faster, Please! — The Podcast and in my newsletter essays, I've argued for the importance of optimistic science fiction. But what exactly qualifies as future-optimistic fiction, and how is it different from utopian literature? To discuss one of my favorite science-fiction book and TV series, The Expanse, and to consider the importance of what fiction tells us about the future, I've brought on Peter Suderman.Peter is features editor at Reason magazine. He has written a number of fantastic pieces on science fiction including "The Fractal, Fractious Politics of The Expanse" in the December 2022 issue of Reason.In This Episode* Does The Expanse count as optimistic science fiction? (1:15)* Optimistic—not utopian—visions of the future (9:10)* The evolution of science fiction (19:30)* The importance of the future sci-fi shows us (27:09)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Does The Expanse count as optimistic science fiction?French film director François Truffaut famously claimed it was impossible to make an anti-war film. He said, “I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” And that quote, which has always stuck in my head, reemerged in my brain when I came across a somewhat similar observation from Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, who said, “Futuristic science fiction tends to be pessimistic. If you imagine a future that’s wonderful, you don’t have a story.” I think some people may interpret that as meaning you cannot write optimistic science fiction.And I think of a show that you have written a long essay about, and I've written about—not as intelligently, but I've written about it from time to time: the TV show The Expanse. And I find The Expanse to be optimistic sci-fi. It takes place in the future, a couple hundred years in the future. Humanity has spread out to Mars and the asteroid belts. There's certainly conflict. As an Expanse fan, someone just wrote an essay on it, would you agree that it’s optimistic science fiction?I think it is, with some caveats. The first one is that it's optimistic but it's not utopian. And I think a lot of the argument against optimistic science fiction is actually not really arguing against optimism. It's arguing against utopianism and this idea that you sometimes see—there are hints of it sometimes in Star Trek, especially in Star Trek: The Next Generation—of, in the future humanity will have all of its problems solved, we won't have money, there will be no poverty. If you think about the Earth of Star Trek: The Next Generation's future, it's actually kind of boring, right? There isn't a lot of conflict. Writers eventually found ways to drive conflict out of conflicts between the Federation and other planets and even within the Federation. Because of course, they realized the utopian surface is just a surface. And if you dig down at all beneath it, of course humans would have conflict.But I think a lot of the opposition to the idea of optimistic science fiction just comes from this idea of, “Well, wouldn't it be utopian?” And what The Expanse does is it tells a story that is, I think, inherently optimistic but really deeply not utopian, because it recognizes that progress is not an easy, straight linear line in which everybody comes together and holds hands, and there's a rainbow and My Little Ponies, and everybody just sort of sings, and it's wonderful. That's not how it works. In fact, the way that progress happens is that people have things they want in their lives, and then they seek, either on their own or in coalitions, factions, organizations—whether that's governments, whether that's the private sector, whether that's unions, whatever it is—they organize somehow or another to get the thing that they want. And sometimes they build things. Sometimes they build habitats.And so this is something you see a lot of in The Expanse. Humans have colonized the solar system, as the story begins, and there are just all of these fascinating habitats that humans have built. Some of those habitats actually have problems with them. There are air filtration issues, where you have to constantly be supplying ice from asteroid mining. That sort of thing. Some of the main characters, when we first meet them, are working as ice haulers. Because of course, you would have to have some sort of trade of important resources in space in order to make these habitats work. And you could call this, “That’s not optimistic. In fact, a lot of these lives are sort of grubby and unpleasant, and people don't get everything they want.” But I think that misunderstands the idea of progress, because the idea of progress isn't that suddenly everything will be happy and My Little Pony-ish. It's not My Little Pony. It's actually conflict and it's clashing desires and it's clashing ideals about how humans should live. And then it's people kind of working that stuff out amongst themselves, day by day, hour by hour, through coalitions, through organizations, through institutions, through technology, through politics sometimes. And all of those sort of tools and all of those organizational forms have a role. Sometimes they also have drawbacks. All of them have drawbacks to some extent. And then it's just a matter of how are people going work out the problems they have at the moment in order to get to the next place, in order to build the thing they want to build, in order to start the society they want to have.It's a six-season TV show based on a nine-novel series. The six-season TV show adapts the first six books, and then there are three additional books, plus there's a bunch of short stories, novellas, interstitial material. There's this moment that happens in both the TV show and in the books that's really important. And it's about it when humanity finds a way to other solar systems. There are 1300 gates that open up and they can sort of go out and colonize the rest of space. All of these colonies are settled, and each one of them takes on an idea and a culture and often technological capability. There's one of them that's really funny that you meet called Freehold. Frankly, it's a bunch of anarchist libertarian gun nuts who decide to basically ignore all the rules that the trade union that is managing a lot of the trade between the gates has put in place. And they are managing that trade for a good reason. Because if you mess with the gates, if you go through them the wrong way, it kills people, it kills ships, it destroys them. And so you have to go through in order, and you have to go through slowly, and it's this whole sort of process. In Freehold, they‘re a bunch of difficult, crazy anarchist-like libertarian gun nuts who don't want to play by the rules. And at first they're a problem. You can see why that would be a problem for the social organizational form that has come up in these books from managing the gates and making sure that they don't kill people. But later, when basically a super powerful high-tech imperial planet that has designs on controlling all of humanity and putting all of humanity under the thumb of basically one emperor who has plans to live forever—it's sort of this, become a kind of a god who is ruling over all of humanity and then basically turn all of humans into like a hive mind but for the good of humanity so that we'll survive—when you have that all-encompassing, super powerful collectivist impulse that is threatening human civilization, it turns out that the libertarian anarchist gun nuts at Freehold are actually pretty good friends to have. This series does a bunch of interesting work of noting that, yes, of course those people can be difficult at times, and they can present problems to social cohesion. At the same time, it's not bad to have them as allies when you are threatened by an authoritarian.Optimistic—not utopian—visions of the futureYou've nailed it. Well done. I view it as optimistic but not utopian—I think that's a key point—particularly compared to how the future is often portrayed. I think it's pretty optimistic because no zombies. We're still around. And the world looks like it's doing okay. Was there climate change? Sure. But New York is surrounded by barriers. Clearly there's been disruption, but we kept moving forward. Now we're this multi-planetary civilization, so it doesn't look like we're going to get killed by an asteroid anytime soon.I think a big mistake that a lot of the pessimists about the future in politics and our culture generally, but in science fiction as well—a big mistake that they make is that they think only in terms of grand plans. They think in terms of mass systems of social control and social organization. And so when you see an apocalypse, it's “all the governments have failed and so has capitalism.” When you see an apocalypse, it's “the oceans swallowed us because we used too much energy or the wrong kind of energy.” And that's it. The grand plan didn't work. And then we're in a hellscape after that. And what you see in The Expanse, what makes it so smart, is grand plans actually do fail.Almost any time somebody has a big sweeping theory of how we're going to reorganize human social organization, of how humanity is going to be totally different from now on—almost anytime that someone has that sort of theory in The Expanse series, it doesn't work out. And often that person is revealed to be a bad guy, or at least somebody who has a bad way of thinking about the world. Instead, progress comes in fits and starts, and it's made on a much smaller scale by these ad hoc coalitions of people who are constantly changing their coalitions. Sometimes you want something that requires building something, that requires a new technology. And so you ally with people who are engineer types, and you work with them to build something. At the end of it, you've got the thing that they've built, and your life is a little bit better, or at least you've accomplished one of your goals. And then maybe after that, those people, the engineers, actually it turns out that they have a culture that is not cooperative with yours. And so you're going to ally with a different political faction and the engineers are going to be on the other side of it, but they've still built the little thing that you needed them to build. And it's just this idea that big systems and big plans that assume that everything falls in line, those plans don't work, and they do fail. And if that's your idea of how we're going to make progress, that's a bad idea. The way we make progress is…In a Hayekian sense, all our individual wants and needs cannot be incorporated in this grand system or grand plan. Our wants and needs today, much less how those will evolve over time. Our future wants and needs don't fit into the plan either.Yeah, this is right. This is one of the issues I have with a lot of zombie fiction, is that it just sort of assumes that after the zombie apocalypse—the zombie apocalypse is not all that realistic, but you can imagine a scenario in which there is something environmental that really goes very bad for humanity; that's not out of the realm of possibility—but what a lot of the zombie apocalypse fiction assumes, then, is that in the decades or years afterwards no one will really find ways to work with other people towards shared goals. Or at best, they'll do so in a really ugly and simplistic way where somebody sets up a society that's walled off but it's ruled by some evil authoritarian and you're living under this person's thumb.I grew up in Florida, and so we had hurricanes. One of the things you see when you have hurricanes is that, yes, there is a government response and they send out trucks and power company officials and all of that sort of thing. But people drive around the neighborhood with chainsaws and cut up the trees that have fallen across your driveway. And other people who may not have chainsaws go and help their friends move the stuff out of their bedroom where the tree fell into the bedroom through the ceiling and there's been some leakages. It's just sort of people working together in these informal coalitions, these little neighborhood local groups, to help each other out and to try to fix things that have broken and gone wrong. It’s not fun. It’s not like, “Oh man, hurricanes, they're wonderful. We shouldn't worry about them at all!” We should, and we should try to build resilience against them and that sort of thing.At the same time, when disaster strikes, often what you see—not always, but often what you see—is that people come back together and they survey the problems and they work to fix them minute by minute, hour by hour in little ways. And sometimes the first thing you do is, “Well, I got a hole in my roof. I'm going to stretch garbage bags across it so that the next time it rains…” And then you got a hole in your roof with garbage bags across it for a couple of weeks. But that's a solution for the time. It's better than a hole in your roof. On the other hand, you got a hole in your roof. It sucks. But that's progress relative to the hole that's there. That’s a way that a lot of people who don't think about engineering, who don't think in a Hayekian manner, it's something that they miss. Because they only think about big systems and big plans. And big systems and big plans do have big risks, and they do often fail. But that's not how humans figure out how to move forward and how to make their life better.An interesting aspect is that, you mentioned how at some point these gates open so we're no longer stuck in the solar system. We can go to any of these other planetary systems. And what's interesting is the devastating effect this has on the planet Mars, which is its own world, its own government, it has its own military, it's independent of Earth. But it's a society that was built around one big idea, which is terraforming Mars and creating a sustainable civilization. And when that goal didn't look important anymore, that was it. It fell apart. People left. There was no resilience, there was no ability to adapt. To me, that's one of the most interesting twists I've seen in science fiction. When the grand plan fails, the whole thing falls apart because they never assumed the grand plan wouldn't work.The Mars example is great because it shows what I think is one of the biggest problems in political thinking and in kind of bad science-fiction storytelling. It's a great demonstration of steady state thinking, where people think that the current arrangement of power and resources is going to persist forever. And so Mars in The Expanse story was basically a competitor with Earth, which in The Expanse universe was the sort of political home of humanity as well as the bread basket. It's where of all the food was produced. And then the asteroid belt, which is sort of the rough and tumble outer world—the outer world were the resource extractors. They provided for the inner systems. They kind of had a blue-collar vibe to them. There was some terrorist activity that came out of this because they were resentful. There's sort of some interesting cultural and subcultural effects there. And then Mars was heavily military and high tech, and they thought that would be their competitive advantage.Almost a quasi-fascist state, in a way. It was very militaristic and authoritarian.Yes, which comes back to pay off in a big way in the final three books of the trilogy which, unfortunately, the shows don't adapt, but are in some ways, I think, the best of the books. And so much of our politics is built around that idea that this power structure, this arrangement of resources that we have right now where everybody's on Facebook, where everybody is on Twitter, where everybody uses Google search, that's going to last forever. And the only way you can dislodge it is through government and through regulation and through interventions that are designed to break that sort of thing up. I'm thinking very specifically of antitrust, and a lot of antitrust theories are predicated on this. But there are other realms in which this sort of approach to regulation and to politics is quite common as well.And in The Expanse, you see, guess what? Those power structures—even power structures that have persisted in the case of The Expanse books at least for decades and I think for a couple of hundred years that's basically been the arrangement as we sort of enter the story—even those arrangements that seem like they're immutable facts of human organization—Oh, this is how politics has always been; this is how the arrangement of national power (effectively in this story) has always been arranged—those things can change, and they can change because of environmental changes and they can change because of technological developments that people don't foresee.The evolution of science fictionIt seems to me that you had this period during the Space Race, the Atomic Age, ‘50s, ‘60s, in which there was lots of somewhat optimistic science fiction. You obviously had Star Trek and even I would say 2001: A Space Odyssey. You could go to the Jetsons, but then you started not seeing that. And to me, it seems like there's a pretty sharp dividing line there in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, and I've written about that. Am I making too much out of that, that there was a change? Or has it always been like this and we started noticing it more because we started doing more science fiction?I don't think you're wrong to notice that. And I think there was a big change in the 1970s. I think maybe one place to start, if you're thinking about that, though, is actually something like 100 years before the 1970s.That would be the 1870s!Yeah. In the 1870s, in the 1890s, maybe even a little bit before then. This maybe tells you how naive I was as a seven- or an eight-year-old, but I started reading science fiction when I was around eight years old. My parents were big fans, and I of course watched Star Trek even starting when I was four or five. Star Wars, that sort of thing. I grew up in a real nerd household, and something that I heard when I was I believe in fourth grade that just blew my mind—but of course, it is super obvious when you hear it—is for a long time in human history, we didn't have science fiction. We didn't have it at all. And you go back to the 1700s, to the 1800s, you start to see little bits of it. Jules Verne, even maybe some of Edgar Allan Poe. But it wasn't until the Industrial Revolution and then some of the fiction that sort of came out decades into the Industrial Revolution. It wasn't until relatively recently in human history that people had the idea that the future would be different, because that's the heart of what science fiction is. It is the idea that the future will be different because humans will organize themselves differently, and/or because we will have invented new technologies that make our lives different.And you go back to 1000 AD or 1200 or 1500 even, and you just don't see that idea present in fiction and in storytelling because essentially no one imagined that the future would be different. They thought it would be the way it was in their time forever. And they assumed that it had basically been the same forever. That humanity’s social and technological and resource arrangements would be steady state. And something happened in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the early science fiction that really predicated on this idea that, “Oh, wait! The future will be different and it will be better.” And then you get to the 1970s and things start to look a little bit shaky in world affairs, especially in the Western world, right? And what happens is that then is reflected in a lot of popular science fiction, where you start to see this more pessimistic view, this idea that the future will be different but it will be worse. And it will be worse because all of the things we rely on for the present will fail. I don't think that that's an illegitimate mode of storytelling in any way. I, in fact, really like a lot of…Even as I've harangued against them, those are all super enjoyable movies. I just wish there were the other kind too. And it seems to me that maybe we're starting to get more of the other kind again. I mean, we don't have a lot of examples.So about 10 or 15 years ago, there was literally a movement in science fiction led by people like Neal Stephenson, the author of most prominently Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, and Snow Crash in the 1990s, but also some more recent stuff as well. And he was like, “We need ideas about the future that are, if not utopian, then at least sort of optimistic. Ideas about things that we will do that will be better, not things that we will do that will make everything worse and that will sort of contribute to suffering and to collapse.” And Stevenson has been a leading proponent both of other writers doing that but then of doing it himself.Since we were talking about ad hoc coalitions and small-scale problem solving, his novel Termination Shock, I think from two years ago, is a quasi-science-fiction novel about global warming set in the near future in which global warming has both become a real problem and also one that people have started to find a lot of small-scale ways to, not solve exactly, but to address on a personal level. When the novel begins, there are a lot of houses on stilts in Texas because there are flooding issues. But what, they just picked up their houses and they put them on stilts. And people have to wear these sort of Dune-like suits that cool them. There are all these sort of crazy traveling caravans of people who live not in any particular place, but then there are these mega truck stops that have sprung up to meet their needs and sort of become these kind of travel hubs. And then, of course, people start trying to not solve global warming, exactly, but to mitigate global warming kind of locally by shooting stuff into the air that blocks reflections of the atmosphere. Of course, that causes some problems. He's not just sort of like, “Yeah, we can just fix this.” But he's like, “This sort of thing is how problems get solve solved. They don’t get solved through politics and grand, multi-lateral agreements.”Of course, I would also point to another Stephenson novel, which is Seveneves, which is a novel in which things get about as dark for humanity as possible. We're down to seven people, and then we come all the way back and beyond.And it's all through distributed solutions. There’s a great bit: You get down to the final seven people and then you flash forward, I think it's like 5,000 years. There's just a great like section header in this book. You're like 700 pages into a 1000-page book and suddenly it just says, “5,000 years later.” Okay, okay, I guess. Sure, Neal Stephenson, you can do that. 5,000 years later. And you see that humanity is flourishing again because somehow or another you have distributed rings, habitat systems around the Earth. You have the submarine people. We don't really know what they did, but the submarine people somehow or another figured it out. There are still some Earth-dwellers who survived in caves, like probably the Mars people who just like took off for Mars in the middle of the catastrophe. We think they survived somehow too. Part of this is, there's a kind of cheat in that book in which he doesn't tell you how all of these people survived, but there's also a kind of genius and a truth in that, in that we don't know how it's going to go. But what we know is that when put to the test, people have—not always, I don't want to say it just works 100 percent of the time, because sometimes there are true catastrophes in the world—but people, when put to the test, when your survival, the survival of you, your family, your friends, and the future of your race is on the line, people have figured out ways to survive that their predecessors would never have imagined because they never had to.The importance of the future sci-fi shows usIs it important that we have popular culture that gives us images of the future, a variety of images, to shoot for?I think it's incredibly important. I think even people who think it's important underrate how important it is. Because most people, even the smartest, most innovative people, they're… People are modelers. They kind of do things that they've seen done, even if it's that they've seen it in a story. And I just think about my own history and my own life. I grew up in a household where there wasn't, I would say, a lot of political ideology. It was in the background, but my parents like didn't actually talk about politics that much. It was just that one of them was quite liberal and the other one was quite conservative. And there were differing radio programs that I would hear in the company of one versus the other.But they were both, like I said, science fiction readers. And there was science fiction just all over our house. The first adult science-fiction novel I read was The Caves of Steel, which I was given when I was in fourth grade, eight-years-old. It’s like Isaac Asimov's sort of Agatha Christie murder-mystery-in-the-future, in a futuristic New York, story. I was totally hooked after that. I just didn't ever go back. Read science fiction. And like I said, what science fiction gave me was this idea that the future would be different and that maybe—maybe—it could be better in some ways. And I think that if you just listen to interviews and talk to the people who are at the head of some of the most innovative companies in the world and in the United States right now, one through-line you see is that maybe not all of them, but a surprising number of them were science fiction readers growing up as kids.And they spent a lot of time, as a result, just sort of imagining the future. And imagining that it would be different. And I think that exercise, just being drawn into that kind of imagination of a world that is different than the one we live in now and different because people have invented things, because people have reorganized politics, because of whatever it is, but a world that is different because the future will be different—that is an exercise that we need more people to engage in. And when people do it, I think the results… I frankly think that even reading pessimistic science fiction is better than reading none at all, because again, it just constantly hammers home this idea [that] the future will be different. It's not a steady state. That progress or maybe anti-progress can be made.I think it certainly matters on that sort of doer, elite level, where you do have all these entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley folks, who obviously were really inspired by science fiction. Also, I think it's just important for everybody else. I just can't imagine, if people have gotten more of that, not only would they be a bit more resilient to the super negativity. It would just create more dreamers among people about what the future can be. Not utopia, but better. I'll take better.I'll take better as well. And I think that storytellers have a big role to play in that. And I think that anybody who creates images, who is an imaginer for the popular consciousness, has some influence here. Because like I said, people call to mind what they have seen before and people operate based on the ideas that have been handed to them. I certainly would like to see more of those stories. And I would also just like to say that if you're a person who tells stories and who makes images and who tries to sort of worm your way into the public consciousness, obviously you can do it through fear. But wouldn't it be better, wouldn't you feel a little more proud of yourself if you could do it through hope and through making people think that maybe there's something wonderful coming?Star Trek and Star Wars, which is the capitalist show, which is the communist show?Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode is about how basically energy capitalism is inherently bad. The Ferengi are the super capitalists. It's really hard to make like a strong “Star Trek is a pro-capitalist show” argument. Maybe. You get a little bit into that with some of the Deep Space Nine stuff later. But even there, that's mostly just about political conflict. Does that mean that Star Wars is the pro-capitalist show? I don't know. I mean, people do seem to have jobs and buy and sell stuff and make things. I guess I’d have to go with Star Wars just because you can buy droids when you need help on your farm? That’s all I got. This is a public episode. 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If humanity is to become a multi-planetary species, we can't forever remain dependent on Earth's resources. That's where space resource extraction comes in. So how would space mining work, what problems would it solve, and how long will we have to wait? To answer those questions, I'm joined in this episode by Kevin Cannon. Kevin is a professor of space resources and geology and geological engineering at Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He's also author of the Planetary Intelligence newsletter on Substack.In This Episode* How mining in space could benefit Earth (1:13)* The basic economics of space mining (3:56)* Space resources and multi-planetary civilization (9:32)* Public and private sector space exploitation (14:00)* The next steps for space resource extraction (17:56)* The criticisms and hurdles facing space mining (26:15)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.How mining in space could benefit EarthJames Pethokoukis: You've written that building a space-based civilization is all about raw materials. Given your academic specialty, these are raw materials out there, not down here. But if I am not interested in building a space-based civilization, do I care what's out there, what materials, what elements I can find out there?Kevin Cannon: Let me give you two examples of how this could kind of come back to Earth. One is something that's being talked about increasingly lately, and that's this idea of space-based solar power. We want to undergo this energy transition, switch to renewables. Solar power, the issue there is the scaling and the land that's available. You only have so much land that you can put up more solar panels on. So if we wanted to have a truly energy-abundant future, one way to do that is to actually put up structures, satellites, in orbit that collect solar power and beam it back to the Earth via microwaves. And it turns out the only way to really make this economic is to actually make those structures out of raw materials that are found in space, either from the Moon or from asteroids. If you try to launch everything that you need, it's just too expensive. It's too difficult. So that's one example.A second example related to that, there's obviously a lot of talk about climate in general, and there's still this idea out there that we can get through this climate issue by just reducing emissions. I think at a higher level, the discussions out there are that that's not going to be enough, that we're not drawing down those emissions fast enough, and that we may need to use different geoengineering techniques. There are different ways to do that. You can inject stuff into the atmosphere. You can put stuff into the ocean. Those are a little bit problematic politically. One alternative is to actually just block out a small fraction of the sun's radiation with something called a planetary sun shade. You put up a structure in space at the L-1, the Lagrangian point between the sun and the Earth, and that structure blocks out, say, 1 to 2 percent of the sunlight and cools the planet and helps as a mitigation effort. And again, that structure is so large that we could not possibly launch that into the space. We would have to build that out of materials that we find. So even if you don't want to leave the Earth, you're happy here, you still have problems on Earth. And there are solutions to those that could potentially be found by using raw material on the Moon or on asteroids.The basic economics of space miningYou're saying that even with the decline we've seen in launch costs in recent years, and even assuming some continued progress, it would be more affordable to build these two examples with the regolith — or the surface dirt from the Moon or Mars or from some other place, some asteroid — than just getting it out into space with a rocket, even if it's a rocket that goes up pretty cheaply compared to the rockets of the past.The thing you have to understand is that as those launch costs come down, it also becomes cheaper to put the factory on the Moon that makes the components, that assembles the structure in space. And it's also the case that we wouldn't build 100 percent of the structure. You would still be launching the intricate parts, the dopants for your solar panels, the wiring, things like that. It's kind of the bulk structure that we would make, what we call the “dumb mass” as opposed to the “smart mass.” But yes, as the launch costs come down, it's easier to put things in orbit, but it's also easier to put construction material and assembly material to do this kind of space-based construction effort.That’s always the big concern: trying to make the economics work. I find that people aren't fully aware of what possibilities have been opened up because it's gotten a lot cheaper to launch rockets into space. And hopefully it will get a bit cheaper still.We're anticipating right now in the months ahead, the first orbital launch of the SpaceX Starship. SpaceX has brought the launch costs down dramatically just with the Falcon 9, through reuse, through the Falcon Heavy. But the possibility for Starship is really a step function. It's not just a continuation of that smooth decline, but really a potential leap in our ability to put massive amounts of stuff into space. If that design is proved out, then hopefully other competitors will start to copy that and improve on it and we'll see an even more dramatic reduction.People have a hard time understanding the economics of going and mining an asteroid to bring back to build things on Earth. Would that be economical versus using that material to build things out in space?There's only a very narrow case you could make for a certain class of materials. And specifically, that would be things like the platinum-group metals. Those meet a number of criteria: They're very expensive — for example, the metal rhodium sells for about $400,000 per kilogram — and we only mine a very small amount of those per year. It's measured in single-digit or double-digit tons: 20 or 30 tons of these materials per year. Possibly, you could make an economic case to bring back some of those platinum-group metals. But for something like copper, we mine millions of tons per year, and that's never going to make sense. That's kind of the big misnomer about space resources that's out there in the public perception: that what we're talking about is going out into space and bringing stuff back and selling it into existing commodity markets. And that's really not what the main focus is. The main focus is using local materials that we find to help expand civilization into space rather than bringing everything with us. But maybe, just maybe, you could make a case for something like some of these platinum-group metals.What you're doing is not speculative. This is something that you think will have practical application and you're graduating students who are getting hired to begin to think and do this, right?It's still in the early stages, but it's not science fiction and it's not theoretical. Let me give you a couple examples of what's been happening in the last few years. Last year on Mars, there's a small instrument on board the Mars Perseverance rover, the NASA rover, called MOXIE. And this is a demonstration that sucks up a little bit of the CO2 atmosphere of Mars and converts it into breathable oxygen. This is the first time in history we've taken a raw material on another planetary body and actually turned it into a valuable product. It's the first creation of a resource in space.Second example: A couple months ago, we had the launch of a private lander from the company ispace. This is going to be the first attempt at a commercial landing on the Moon. And as part of that mission, they're going to try to scoop up a small amount of the regolith. And NASA has already signed a contract to purchase that material. It's a very small dollar amount. The real point of that is to set a precedent that if you go out and mine material in space, that it is yours to then sell to someone else. So if that's successful, around April that will be the first sale of a resource in outer space. There are a wide variety of companies working on this. We have the Space Resources Program at Colorado School of Mines. And just an example there, Blue Origin — not a lot of people know about this — in the past year or so they've hired about 30 full-time employees working just on space resources [in situ resource utilization].Space resources and multi-planetary civilizationAs you've been talking, I've been trying to quickly dig up a quote from one of my favorite books and TV shows, The Expanse, which touches on this issue of the resources out there. Let me just quickly read it to you: “Platinum, iron, and titanium from the Belt. Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. A river of wealth and power unrivaled in human history came through Ceres.” That’s the big sci-fi dream, that there is this vast field of resources out there that we can tap into. And if we can tap into it, it will be primarily for creating this space civilization.Yeah, that's exactly right. The atoms are out there. We know all of the atoms in the periodic table are found on every planetary body. It's a matter of concentration, and it's a matter of having the energy to separate those out and turn them into useful products. As long as we can figure out how to do that, then we have the resources available, just in the solar system, to support a massive population of people to live at a very high level of well-being. The long-term promise is that we can expand into space and have a thriving civilization that is built on top of those resources.I love how you put it in one of your tweets. You wrote, “Space resources are optional to gain a foothold in space, but necessary to gain a stronghold.”If you look back at what we've done so far in human space exploration, we've landed 12 people on the Moon, they walked around for a few days, and then they came back. Since then, we've sent people up to low-Earth orbit to the International Space Station or the Chinese equivalent. They stay up there for a few months, and they come back. In those cases, it makes sense to bring everything that you need with you: all the food, all the water, all the oxygen. If we have greater ambitions than that, though — if we want to not just walk around on the Moon, but have a permanent installation, we want to start growing a city on Mars that becomes self-sufficient, we want to have these O'Neill cylinders — you simply just can't launch that material with you. And that's because we live in this deep gravity well. We can just barely get these small payloads off the surface with chemical rockets. It just economically, physically does not make sense to try to bring everything with you if you have these larger ambitions. The only way to enable that kind of future is to make use of the material that you find when you get to your destination.The question I always get is, why bother doing any of this? Is that a question you spend a lot of time trying to answer? Or are you convinced it's going to happen and you've just moved beyond the question?I think enough people have made the case for why we need to do this. You can look at it from different perspectives, from one of scientific discovery to one of existential risk to the planet that, if we stay here on Earth, eventually something is going to come along that presents an existential risk to civilization. What I'm trying to do is work with the people, with the companies who are actually trying to do this and help them using my perspective, this kind of unique perspective that's based around the science and the composition of these planetary bodies and how to make use of these resources. I don't concern myself too much with the question of why we should do that. I'll kind of leave that to more of the philosophers, the other people who have worked on that. I agree that I'm kind of past that and I am really deep in the nitty-gritty details of how to actually do this: how to turn the regolith into metals and ceramics; how to get rocket propellant out of ice at the pools of the Moon. That's what I spend my time focused on.Public and private sector space exploitationThere was a boom in some planetary resource startups a few years ago which didn't last. What has changed between now and back then? Is it just the drop in launch costs? The technology has gotten better? Up until very recently, we had very low interest rates, it was easy to finance things? We're in like a second wave of this. What is making this second wave possible?I think the launch costs and technology do make a difference. I think the other thing is the way that some of these newer companies are going about it. That first wave that started back around 2012, you had these two main companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, and they tried to do this as kind of a typical venture capital–funded endeavor where they went through their seed round, their series A, series B. And that's pretty difficult to do if you want a return on your investment in five to seven years. So what we're seeing lately are companies coming into this space who have already amassed a lot of capital. They might have founders or backers who have the money to actually put up missions without first raising capital.I think that's what's going to start to make more of a difference and make this second wave last and have longer legs. Some of the companies that are coming into this: I mentioned one, of course, Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos, who is pumping in about a billion dollars a year, very active in this space, not talking about it a lot publicly. But there are some newcomers that have also shown up in the last couple of years. One that we're working with is called KarmanPlus. They are a new asteroid mining company who are going to be setting up shop here in Colorado. They have the money upfront to be able to make a splash without having to go through the typical kind of VC funding route at the very beginning.How supportive is NASA of this general concept of seeing space as a resource to be extracted or exploited, whether it's to do things here on Earth or build a space civilization? Are they all on board? Do they view this as, “This is a private sector thing; we're going to focus on exploration and doing science, and this is a different thing and we really don't care”?NASA historically has always put a little bit of money into this field and the field of space resources. They have kept it going even as interest has waxed and waned. What they've never done, though, is made it a critical part of their missions. For example, right now they're working towards the Artemis program: landing people back on the surface of the Moon. They're exploring ideas of prospecting for ice at the poles of the Moon. They have this upcoming VIPER mission. They're funding technology to extract oxygen from the lunar regolith. But what they're not doing is saying the Artemis astronauts are going to breathe that oxygen and that's going to be a critical part of the Artemis program. So they're funding it; they're bringing it along. They are supporting it to some extent, but they're not making it a key part of their missions. I think what we're going to see is continued activity in the private sector. And then what we're also seeing, though, is a lot more interest lately from the Space Force and from DARPA. Those government agencies are starting to get a lot more interested in these topics.The next steps for space resource extractionWhen you think about this, what is the timeline that is reasonable using space resources to create a permanent base on the Moon, on Mars, to go further out and extract resources, not from the regolith on the Moon, but from actual asteroids and using those resources? What is your loose timeline of how you think about it? You don't have to give months and days and dates. But just broadly.Right now we're in the phase where we're testing and developing the technology in the laboratory space and then just starting to deploy it as these kind of demonstrations on the Moon or on Mars. I mentioned the MOXIE experiment converting the atmosphere of Mars into oxygen. In the next couple years, there are going to be a lot of these small commercial landers going to the Moon. A lot of those have demonstration payloads where they're going to do things like trying to 3D print with the regolith or trying to extract oxygen from it. The next step, I'd say maybe three to five years from now, is to get to the point where we have kind of a pilot plant. Maybe we're extracting water from the poles of the Moon or oxygen from the regolith and we have something a little bit bigger than these tiny experiments. So we’d have something like a pilot plant. Maybe 10 years out, we have full-scale production of a simple resource like rocket propellant. And then I think we're in maybe the 15- to 20-year time scale for starting some of those larger efforts: starting to land supplies on Mars that would go towards this city that SpaceX has talked about, starting to 3D print a structure on the Moon that would be a permanent installation. That's kind of the timeline that I think about.And then in terms of the investment part of this, there is another piece to this in that a lot of the companies who are working on these technologies also have a component of it that's focused on Earth-based technologies. One example is a company in Texas called ICON Technologies. Their main business is actually on Earth, and it's to 3D print entire houses to address the housing crisis. But then they also have a segment where they're applying those same techniques to be able to 3D print structures on the Moon or Mars. So for investors looking to get into this, there are a set of companies that have those shorter-horizon terrestrial applications, but then those also feed into these longer-term space-based goals.In 2019, you co-wrote a piece, “Feeding One Million People on Mars.” That would certainly qualify as a pretty large space colony. Can you briefly tell me how you would do that, and are we talking that being possible this century?The thing that I think a lot of people get wrong about the food piece of this is that they assume we're going to keep this paradigm that we've had for 10,000 years of growing our food in the dirt. There's a lot of work out there that's being done — it's not always very good quality — of, “Let's try to grow plants in the regolith. Let's add fertilizer to these fake regolith samples and try to grow plants.” And that's simply not very efficient. I think that as we go into space, we're going to abandon this idea of growing all of our food in dirt. I think it's going to be all through bioreactors, through cellular agriculture. I think that's kind of the main way that we're going to produce food in space.In terms of the logistics to do that on Mars, the challenge there is, let's say your end goal is you want a city with a million people on Mars — and that's what Elon has stated is kind of the end goal — the question is, how do you get there? And what you eventually want is for that city to be self-sustaining so that if the ships stopped coming from Earth, it would be able to persist. What you have to do is you have to transition from that city or that base making zero percent of the calories that are being consumed on Mars to eventually 100 percent. The challenge is figuring out how you scale from that zero to 100 percent. It's going to involve a massive number of ships that are sending supplies. But the question is, do you try to switch to being 100 percent self-sufficient at the beginning, or do you kind of slowly ramp up over time? That's kind of the main problem with the logistics: When do you stop sending the material from Earth and when do you send the machine that makes the material on Mars? That's a tricky problem.I would assume you were pretty happy to hear about this nuclear fusion breakthrough, because I doubt any of this really works, probably, unless you have nuclear fusion reactors?In space, there are some advantages to solar panels. If you are in orbit or on the Moon or near an asteroid, you don't have clouds, you don't have an atmosphere to attenuate the solar radiation. But I think, eventually, we are going to have to make that transition to something like fusion. People have talked about the potential for helium-3 on the Moon. I'm not 100 percent sold on that. There are other roots to get to fusion. But I think certainly that extra energy, that ability to scale the energy, really opens up the resources that are available. One thing we find is that on Earth we have a lot of ore bodies where certain elements have become very concentrated relative to the rest of the crust of the Earth. And that's where we set up mines and extract these materials. On other planetary bodies, those processes haven't happened to the same extent. And so we don't really have a lot of good ores that we could mine. And so what we're going to have to do is actually figure out how to extract something like rare-earth elements or copper from a raw material that doesn't have very much of those elements, doesn't have those ore minerals. And that's going to take an enormous jump in energy. Something like fusion is probably necessary to really achieve that self-sufficiency, to be able to get every element of the periodic table we need from raw materials that don't have very high concentrations.Perhaps a question I should have asked earlier: What is there a lot of out there that there's just not very much of here? I imagine whatever that is, it’s the stuff that we're going to focus on first or potentially bring here. Is there stuff that's particularly abundant that we just don't have very much here?If we think of this from the level of chemical elements the answer is, not really. I mean, you could make a case that Helium-3 falls into that. But that's only true if you go out to the outer planets, Neptune and Uranus, they have a lot more helium-3 than the tiny amount that's kind of sprinkled in the lunar soil. The thing that's most abundant in space in terms of solid material is just the dirt. Almost every planetary body — the Moon, Mars, asteroids — they're all covered in this layer of regolith or dirt. And that really is the raw material that is going to have to be the feedstock for all these things we're talking about: the metals, the ceramics…We're going to have to make a lot of aluminum.Fortunately, actually, that is one thing: If we look up at the Moon at night, you have the bright regions, those are the lunar highlands. Those are almost entirely made of a mineral called anorthite that has a lot of aluminum. So there are very good sources of those kind of light structural metals on the Moon in particular.The criticisms and hurdles facing space miningDo you anticipate somebody at some point saying, “We've already overexploited the Earth. Now we're going to ruin the Moon too? And we're going to ruin Mars and asteroids — is this our galactic heritage?”Those conversations are already happening. For example, last month there was a preprint published that made the case that we should declare a moratorium on the entire north pole of the Moon, that it should be set aside for only scientific activities. Those conversations are just starting. Right now, there's no kind of legal framework to prohibit this kind of activity. Certainly, people are free to express their concerns and to propose ideas like this. But as of yet, we don't have some kind of widely ratified agreement or framework for how to responsibly use resources in space. Certainly, the people in the field of space resources, we're conscious of this. And we're not proposing to go out and strip mine the entire solar system. But I think the argument is that the potential benefits, especially in terms of well-being, just how many people could be supported with those resources, that outweighs the concerns about disturbing these natural environments.Are there types of mining that we do here right now which are kind of proofs of concept or might resemble what we would do on the Moon or Mars or an asteroid? Or would it just be totally different and these are all new technologies that we would have to innovate?Yes, there is a very good analogy, and it's something called heavy mineral sands deposits. These are not like your typical open-pit mines or your underground mines. These are kind of vast areas of loose sand on the Earth that have some very valuable elements locked up in these dense minerals. And so what happens is you go out and just scoop up these loose sediments and then you're sifting them to sort out those dense minerals that you want. So because almost every planetary body is covered in this loose unconsolidated regolith, I think that is a pretty good analogy for what we'll be looking at. You'll have excavators that scoop up that loose material, they bring it back to a processing site, and then you're sorting the minerals. It's kind of like a needle in a haystack to get the ones you want. And then the ones you don't want, you could still use those for other applications. You can melt them down, turn them into bricks, and do other things with them. That's probably the best analogy on Earth, these heavy mineral sands depositsAre the biggest hurdles making the economics work? Is it getting the basic science and technology to work? Is it sort of political support, because, at least for a long time, I would imagine even if it's a private effort there’s going to be a lot of government money floating around here?I'm not worried about the fundamental technology to take material in space and turn it into useful resources. I think that's been well demonstrated in the lab, and there's a lot of research being put into that right now. It's a tractable problem. I think on the technical side, the biggest challenge is getting Starship into orbit in the near term. The progress on that seems to have stalled a little bit. And that's getting a little bit concerning, because something like that, that kind of launch capability and the cadence that allows, is really going to be necessary to enable the kind of kinds of things we talked about. On the technology side, it's really just the launch piece of it.The economics: I think people have made some pretty good business cases for things like propellant mined from the poles of the Moon and, I think, with some of these ideas around things like space-based solar power, planetary sunshades. So that's not too concerning. I think it's the combination of the launch piece of it and then the political support for this. If that were to really take a turn for the worse, that would not be good for these kinds of ambitions. I do think, though, this emerging space race with China…As long as China's interested, we're going to be interested, right?Yes. That is what's drawing in the interest of the Space Force, of DARPA. I think that's going to kind of keep things going for at least the medium term, as long as we're in that competition. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

It's been more than 50 years since humans last set foot on the lunar surface. But the recent success of NASA's Artemis I mission has put the US back on track to return man to the Moon. As the Artemis program proceeds, space enthusiasts remain skeptical of NASA's timeline and its expensive Space Launch System rocket — especially as the reusable SpaceX Starship rocket comes online. To find out more about the future for NASA as well as private companies like SpaceX, I'm joined today by Eric Berger.Eric is the senior space editor at Ars Technica and author of 2021's excellent Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX.In This Episode* When will the US return to the Moon? (1:19)* How SpaceX’s Starship will change the game (5:58)* Reusability and launch costs (12:04)* The future of America’s space program (15:59)* Is the window for Mars colonization closing? (24:13)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.When will the US return to the Moon?James Pethokoukis: I think you have one of the best journalism jobs in America. I hope you feel that way too.Eric Berger: I have a fantastic job. I love space, I live and breathe it every day, and I get to write about what I think is really happening out there. It's pretty nice.It's almost like someone who is covering the internet in the late ‘90s, when all of a sudden there's just so much happening. I remember you at year end recounting what happened in 2022, and it was a pretty long list of space achievements.I first got into space more than 15 years ago, and at the time it was really pretty dull — not to downgrade the space shuttle program, but it was kind of dull. They would do six or seven launches a year, go up, work on the International Space Station, come down. Everything pretty much worked like clockwork. There just wasn't a whole lot happening. It's really accelerated and accelerated since then. And you just have so much happening in the United States commercially, abroad. It is just a very vibrant field. And as you say, it feels like we're in the early days of this space flight revolution.When will the United States return to the Moon, and what is going to take us there?We returned to the Moon last year, right? We sent an uncrewed spacecraft, Orion, around the Moon. That really was the first step back to the Moon. And I think probably in about two years from now, we'll send the first crewed mission up there. This was going to be a mission where they fly out to the Moon, loop around, and come back. So it's not like they're going to go to the surface or anything like that. But that will be the first people going into deep space in more than 50 years. And then we're going to have a lunar landing later this decade. I don't really feel comfortable putting a date out there. I think it's probably 2027, 2028 maybe. And most likely, they're going to launch on the Space Launch System rocket built by NASA and its contractors, and go up on Orion, and land on the Moon in a SpaceX Starship.Is there a current official target date?It's 2025, but that's completely unrealistic.What hasn't happened to make a 2025 mission seem highly unlikely to you?The first thing is they have got to do the crewed flight, the Artemis II mission, around the Moon. And we're probably 22 to 24 months away from that happening. They're not going to turn around then and do Artemis III the same year. And then you've got two other really important pieces to put together. SpaceX has to fly its Starship, it has to do a bunch of orbital refueling tests, then it has to actually go and land on the Moon and take off and show that everything's ready ahead of that lunar landing. And the other big piece of this is there's a private company in Houston, Axiom Space, that is building the space suits for Artemis III. These are the suits that will allow the crew to get out on the surface of the Moon, walk around and explore. And this company has never built a space suit before, and they just got the contract last fall. It's going to take time for Artemis II to happen, and everything has to go right there. There's a bunch of planning that has to go on, and then you've got to have the Starship and the space suit pieces come together.Is there a chance that the rocket that ends up taking Americans to the surface will end up being a Starship rocket?There is a chance. But at this point, I would think it's a fairly low one. The fact is, the Space Launch System rocket, which took a decade and billions and billions and billions of dollars to develop, finally did fly in November of last year. And by all accounts, the flight was flawless. It's pretty impressive for the debut launch of this rocket for it to perform as well as it did. I think NASA has pretty high confidence now in that launch vehicle. And it will have more confidence in Orion after the second mission. I do think that, initially, that's how we're going to get to the Moon. I think eventually that will change. It would not surprise me to see astronauts launching on, say, a Crew Dragon and rendezvousing with Starship and going to the Moon that way. Because the fact of the matter is, if you can do that, you don't need to spend the $3 or $4 billion every mission to go to the Moon on an SLS rocket and an Orion. You can do it with SpaceX vehicles for probably one-quarter of the cost.How SpaceX’s Starship will change the gameBased on that cost structure that you mentioned, why are we even doing this? Why are we even using a rocket that may never fly again after that Moon mission, Artemis III? It just seems like a lot of wasted money. Why don't we just wait for Starship to get out the kinks, launch, and go that way?That's a great question. The reality is that we built the SLS rocket because in 2010 there were two senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Bill Nelson of Florida, who were looking at the end of the space shuttle program and all the jobs in Florida and Texas that were bound up by that and said, “Well, we've got to have a replacement for this.” There were contractors who had been working on the space shuttle program, building the solid rocket boosters, the engines, and the structures and so forth saying, “Hey, we’ve got to preserve all these jobs.”If you look at the Space Launch System rocket, it uses the same engines as the space shuttle. It uses very similar solid rocket boosters on the sides. And the diameter of that core stage is the same diameter as the external tank of the space shuttle. All of those jobs were essentially rolled from the space shuttle into the Space Launch System rocket. Now, at the time that decision was made, SpaceX had not launched a single Falcon 9 rocket, so I don't think there was the confidence in the private sector then that there is today. The fact of the matter is SLS will continue flying for as long, I think, as Starship is not shown to be a viable vehicle. Once Starship starts flying like the Falcon 9 rocket — which by the way flew 61 times last year — once it starts flying like that, there will be no need for a rocket that costs five or 10 times as much, is not reusable, and can only fly once a year. There'll be no need for that. But 1) it's a political thing. Lots of political support for that program. And 2) as of today, there is no viable alternative, even though we all know one is coming down the line.What is the best estimate of the Starship launch agenda, launch tempo from here on out? Do we have a good idea of what that's going to look like?I'm happy to make predictions with the proviso that they're going to be almost certainly wrong.Duly noted.I do think we're getting closer to the first Starship orbital test flight. This is going to be a big moment. You're going to have a rocket with 33 very powerful Raptor engines taking off from south Texas. That's the first stage. And then the second stage is the Starship upper stage. It's going to go up and go briefly into orbit before it comes back down near Hawaii. That is going to prove that A) the rocket works. And I still think that's kind of a crapshoot because this is a rocket with 33 engines, it's never flown, we haven't seen these Raptor engines in space flight before. It's also very important to get data on bringing Starship back from orbit, if it does make it there. I think we'll see maybe two or three test flights this year. And then next year, maybe half a dozen test flights. And then perhaps in late 2024, 2025, we'll start to see some operational missions carrying Starlink. And also they'll start doing some fueling tests. One of the things that Starship has to do is … it's got enough fuel to get to orbit this massive vehicle — and it can carry like 100 tons to low-Earth orbit, and then it lands back on Earth — but to go anywhere, to go to the Moon, to go to Mars, or what have you, it needs to be refueled. And that's a technology we've never really demonstrated in space: the storage of these cryogenic propellants. Starship runs on liquid oxygen and liquid methane. And we've never shown the ability to store these propellants in space, because you have concerns like boil off. These propellant depots, if they're sitting in the sun, the temperature is much higher than is able to keep them at liquid temperatures. And then you've got to show you can transfer them from one vehicle to another. SpaceX will be doing those tests almost from the beginning of their Starship test program.When I was a full-time journalist, I'm pretty sure that when I would use the word “game changer,” editors would hate that. They would strike that word out. But Starship seems like it would be, if all those “ifs” are solved, it would be kind of a game changer. It's a big rocket.If you think about it, everyone remembers the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program, this massive launch vehicle. But all that came back to Earth was that tiny little capsule at the top. The first stage, second stage, third stage all fell into the ocean. The capsule came back, but then they were put in museums because they weren't reusable. The goal of Starship is for that whole stack to be reusable. So the first stage comes back, Starship comes back, and then you fly them again at some point. I think we're probably years and years away from those kinds of operations. But if and when SpaceX gets there, it does entirely change the paradigm of spaceflight that we've known since the late 1950s when Sputnik first went to orbit, which is now 65 years ago.It's always been a premium on size — you want small vehicles that can fit on top of rockets in the payload fairings—and mass, because it costs so much to get to low-Earth orbit. If Starship works, it completely or almost completely removes those constraints: You can launch often, and it's got this huge payload fairing that you could fit elephants inside them, you could fit just massive structures inside of this thing. All of a sudden, the problem of scarcity, of getting stuff to orbit, no longer exists. It becomes not about the one thing we can do in orbit, but all the things we can do because it costs so much less to get there. And you can bring much larger structures.Reusability and launch costsRight now when we look at SpaceX, we're looking at partial reusability. What you’re talking about is the whole thing: everything you can use more than once.Yeah. Right now with the Falcon 9 rocket, which I would submit is really a modern-day miracle, you're reusing the first stage, which is about 60 percent of the mass of the rocket. You get all those nine engines back, and they're now reflying relining those first stages 15 times. I think they're going to continue to push the limits. They're also getting back the payload fairing, which is that protective structure on top that then falls away once the rocket gets to orbit and the satellite comes out and pops out like a jack-in-the-box. That payload fairing costs like $5 or $6 million. So it's not insubstantial that they're collecting those, refurbishing them, and flying again. What is not reusable right now is the upper stage. It has a single Merlin vacuum engine, and those probably cost $10 to $12 million to manufacture. So that's a significant piece that they have to build. Every time they launch, they have to build a second stage.An SLS launch versus a Starship launch where everything is reusable: Do we have a guess at the difference of each of those launches?The cost difference? The NASA Inspector General has put a cost on a single SLS launch with an Orion spacecraft on, and it said that's $4.1 billion. That is exclusive of development costs, which for those vehicles are now about $40 billion. So if you just say, “Okay, we're going to ignore the fact that we spent all this money,” it's still $4.1 billion to launch one of these a year. Starship, we don't know how much it's going to cost. But if it's made out of stainless steel, and you're getting all those Raptor engines back, and you're flying each vehicle like 10 times or 20 times, the incremental cost of launch is going to be on the order of $100 million or less. So that's a 40x cost difference. Again, once Starship becomes operational. It's probably at least five years away from that point. But that's the future we're headed into. And it is coming. [If] you look at what's happened with the Falcon 9, they will get there. Or get close.We talk a lot about the reusability of these rockets. Does SpaceX also just make them cheaper than competitors? Is that the only factor in the decline in launch costs?Yes, they also have … Musk is pretty cutthroat on costs.I hear.The whole Twitter experiment, right? He runs a tight ship. One of the very important things that SpaceX did, and a lot of the new space companies that have come afterward have tried to emulate, is they very much did vertical integration. And that just means that prior to 2000, the way you built your rocket in this country was, okay, you’re United Launch Alliance: You buy your engines from Aerojet, you buy your structures from someone, you buy your software from someone, you buy your payload fairing from RUAG, you buy your upper-stage engine from Aerojet. And then you sort of integrate that all together into your factory after paying a premium for all these different products. And you launch the rocket. You're the operator.SpaceX came along and said, “No, no, we're going to build the engines. We're going to build as much of each of these rockets as we can in-house. And when we need to outsource some components, we will.” And a lot of these other companies that have come since, like Rocket Lab, have tried to do the same. Relativity Space is trying to additively manufacture, so 3D print, its entire rocket inside its factory. And so they've really changed the game. And that vertical integration has allowed them to control costs and move more quickly.The future of America’s space programAfter we land on the Moon via an SLS rocket and a SpaceX lander, is the American space program at that point government doing more science-y things and the private sector doing private sector things, whether it's, you know you know, orbiting space platforms. What does the Americas program comprehensively look like after that landing?We don't really know. We're talking about something that's probably about four or five years in the future, and it's very difficult to say where we're headed.I'm very glad, by the way, that you say four or five years in the future, not four or five decades. I like the fact that we keep talking years, single digits.After the success of Artemis I, we are definitively on the way back to the Moon. This is a great time in US space policy. It's healthier than I've ever seen it, I think, in my lifetime or certainly since I've been covering this. The NASA and United States space program has problems, has difficulties, has challenges, but we are on a healthy trajectory, I think. So we can all feel good about that. It's just going to take a little longer than I think any of us would like. But the way NASA has been going, and I don't see this trend changing, is it wants to be a customer and not the customer. It is looking to buy services from companies rather than top-down build processes. The SLS rocket was procured through a cost-plus program where NASA designed the rocket, its engineers were side by side with the contractors at Boeing and elsewhere. And it costs a lot. It takes a long time. And NASA oversees every step of the process, and it's the only customer. No one else wants to fly in the SLS rocket. The military doesn't. Private customers don't because it costs way too much. NASA’s science program doesn't want to use it. NASA would rather be a customer. SpaceX launched 60 Falcon 9 rockets last year. NASA bought like six or seven of them, and the rest of them were other customers and SpaceX’s Starlink missions. It's buying services, like this spacesuit contract it's giving to Axiom and to another company: It's basically leasing spacesuits. And the lander, it's like buying the landing service on the Moon. It's going to private space stations next decade, and it's buying time on those space stations. It’s not going to own those space stations. NASA wants to procure services. NASA would like to see an ecosystem where it is one customer for activity on the Moon alongside maybe the European Space Agency or private companies or Hilton Hotels, I don't know. They sort of want to be one customer in that area. I think the question in my mind is, will there be more entities that want to get involved in human space flight or exploration of the Moon? Or will this be a NASA-led program for a long time, simply because it's so expensive and there's not that much there for people to do beyond collecting rocks and doing science experiments for NASA? And that's the question I don't think we've answered. It may be NASA for a long time, unless you do really get vehicles like Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn that come along and really do bring down the costs of transportation to and from the Moon.How far behind is Blue Origin?Very far behind. They were founded before SpaceX was, and they still haven't put anyone in orbit. They just move slowly. That's kind of Jeff Bezos' philosophy in space fight. He wants to go very methodically. I don't think their CEO, a guy named Bob Smith, has been particularly dynamic in terms of getting them moving forward quickly. But if they ever do get their act together, they have a large and talented team of engineers. They could really kick some butt in this field. But they're way behind SpaceX in terms of building rockets. The New Glenn rocket probably doesn't launch for at least two years. That's a massive vehicle, but then they're going to have to go through some growing pains. And it's going to take a while. I don't think New Glenn will ever be able to catch up to Starship.I’m interested in there being a permanent Moon base. Would that be operated by NASA? Would that be operated by somebody else?That's a great question. I think NASA would love for Lockheed, or I don't know who, to say, “We are going to build a lunar surface station.” And NASA says, “Great, we want to buy 50 percent of the capacity. And we'll give you $2 billion a year for that service.” The question is whether any private company is going to step up and do something as audacious as that. That's one of the real ways in which SpaceX has changed the game: They have sort of stepped forward with these audacious visions. And then NASA has kind of come in and bought. When SpaceX created Starship, NASA wasn't interested. NASA wasn't a customer. And now, look, they're giving them $3 billion to land on the Moon twice. I think if you had a big enough vision to do that, then you could get NASA to come on board. The problem is, if you're a publicly traded company — it's really hard for a company other than SpaceX or Blue Origin, which have these well-endowed founders — it's really hard to convince your board of directors to go along with something like that.How many space stations will there be in orbit by the end of this decade?It’s just all fluid. So the International Space Station comes down in 2030. That's down. China's Space Station is still flying, I think, Tiangong. And Russia is talking about a space station, but I don't think there's any way they have a replacement up by then. So then the question becomes, there are four different companies trying to build commercial space stations for NASA. And again, NASA has given them some money for development, but they're not paying for the stations. They ultimately want to be customers on them. And of those four, one is Blue Origin led by them, one is Nanoracks and Lockheed Martin, another is Axiom Space, and then a fourth is Northrop Grumman. I would put the over-under at one-and-a-half of those. And I think NASA is very happy if one was demonstrative functionable by 2030.The skeptics will say, “Okay, so what are we going to do in those space stations? Some science?” How satisfying is the answer, “We don't know what we're going to do; we have to get there and figure it out — who knew what the internet was going to look like in 1990 versus what it looks like today”?I think you've got to build it and see if people will come. NASA is going to continue to do scientific research, human research, astronauts living in space for long durations. But then you've got to see how much interest there is in sports or filming movies or holidays or from other countries like UAE who want to have their own astronauts up there doing research or from private astronauts. For about two years now, we've had the capability to put astronauts in a low-Earth orbit on private space missions. SpaceX has that capability. There's been some interest, but there hasn't been an overwhelming amount of interest. And so the jury is very much out on commercial potential. And I think the only real way to answer that question is when someone figures out how to make money by having people living and working and doing things in space, then that market explodes. And until that happens, it's very tenuous.Is the window for Mars colonization closing?I am very excited about the notion of going to Mars and humans permanently living on Mars. Is that a 2030s thing? A 2040s, a 2070s thing?The way I would look at it is, that kind of thing is never happening without the private sector, because there is no reason at all, no good reason, for NASA to send people to Mars. The amount of science that can be done by rovers at one-100th the cost without having to worry about safety issues. The rovers can do a lot of science. They can't do it all. There are some things humans can do better and faster, but it's just not worth it to send people there. Maybe if it's like a US-China-Russia-Japan pan-worldwide mission to promote peace and go to Mars. I could see something like that. But there's just no good reason for NASA to send humans to Mars.They will talk about it. They will say, “We're going to the Moon and Mars.” But NASA's not going to Mars before 2050, and probably not by then. So then the question becomes, is SpaceX sincere about going to Mars? Yes. Do they have the wherewithal to work together with NASA to send human missions to Mars? Not right now. But if Starlink, this internet from space, is a successful business — and there are some signs that it will be, and some signs that, no, they have a long way to go — but if that is a success, then the plan is for SpaceX to use that money to help finance Starship and take steps to building some kind of settlement on Mars. And I think if SpaceX can build a credible transportation system to Mars, then NASA comes along for those first couple of missions because there are lots of reasons for them to want to go. And there are lots of reasons for SpaceX to want NASA to go. Most notably, probably, just it clears the regulatory hurdles away for them. If it's going to happen before 2050, it would be a public-private partnership with SpaceX leading the way in terms of the vision.It's sort of amazing how much of this seems to depend on the interest and will of one person: Elon Musk.It’s true. If you look at the space industry today, SpaceX dominates it. They launched more rockets than all the other companies in the United States by like a factor of three, two or three. They equaled China in terms of launch output. They're one of three entities in the world that has the capability to put humans into orbit. They operate more satellites than any company or country in the world. They're building the world's largest and most powerful rocket. They are kind of at the forefront of all these areas. And they're the ones pushing and pushing. If you take SpaceX out of the equation, then NASA's Moon program looks an awful lot like Apollo, which was not sustainable. A lot of it does hinge on the success of SpaceX and their ability to push and pull this commercial space flight initiative forward. And hopefully, by lowering the cost of access to space, you can find ways to make money in space, which in turn fuels more commercial space flight activity.Have you watched the TV show For All Mankind?I have, yes.Do you enjoy that television program?Yeah. It's an interesting take on the future that's really well done.I think Elon Musk may have said that at that SpaceX event where they showed that fantastic video, which I've used about 30 times in my newsletter, where he said the window is open but it might not be open forever, to do what we're doing. Do you think he's wrong? Do you think it is permanently open because of the advances, because of declining costs, because of the geopolitical competition from China and from other nations? Is the space window open, and it's going to just stay open?I don't know if it's going to stay open. He's concerned that it won't stay open. And one of the reasons that he would've cited a couple years ago is this era of cheap money ending. And that era of cheap money has ended. This is going to have a profound impact on a lot of the commercial space companies that have started up over the last five to 10 years. A lot of those are not going to survive the next few years. Congress is talking about holding budgets flat, and that probably may impair space flight activity as well. That's one area of, is this funding opportunity window going to be open long enough for it to happen? And he's also worried about existential threats to humanity. Whether any of those really come up in the next five to 10 years or 50 years, I don't know. But we're a little closer to nuclear war than we were 12 months ago.If there's an accident, another Challenger or another Columbia, do you think we're into this enough and there's been enough progress that we'll push forward? Or will we retreat?It's a great question. I think about that a lot because if, God forbid, something happens with the Crew Dragon spacecraft or the Falcon 9 rocket with people on board and NASAs astronauts die, that really would bring out the critics of SpaceX who have been awfully quiet in the last few years. Think about it, the only way we're getting to space right now with people is on the Falcon 9 rocket. And imagine if we'd had these last 10 months or 11 months of tensions with Russian and still had to rely on them to get our people into space. A lot of the critics of SpaceX have kind of shut up because it's clear that they have done such a service for this country.But if they have some major accent, then all those questions come again. He is reckless. Elon self-sabotages himself a lot in that regard. The way he acts on Twitter sometimes is pretty unserious. And officials at the DOD and NASA see that. That would embolden critics to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Why are we giving SpaceX all this money if they're not acting responsibly?” And especially if the accident was caused by some negligent act on SpaceX, trying to move too fast or save money or something like that. I don't think an accident like that will happen. NASA and SpaceX work very diligently to ensure it doesn't happen. But I do think that would be a setback, whether it would be an absolute killer, I don't think so, because I suspect NASA would stand by SpaceX regardless. They're very good about that when their contractors have an accident. NASA sort of stands by them and goes through the accident investigation and so forth. But if you put people’s lives at risk, then that may change. It's a great question, and I hope we don't have to find an answer to it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Skeptics joke that nuclear fusion is the energy source of the future … and always will be. But when the Biden White House made a big announcement about the progress of fusion research last week, even diehard skeptics surely took note. My guest on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast is Arthur Turrell, plasma physicist and author of 2021's excellent and must-read The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet.In This Episode* The consequences of fusion’s latest breakthrough (1:06)* Where does fusion go from here? (3:55)* The best path forward for fusion (8:14)* The importance of fusion for an energy-abundant future (13:13)* Will star power take us to the stars? (24:09)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The consequences of fusion’s latest breakthroughJames Pethokoukis: On December 14, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that researchers at Lawrence Livermore had succeeded in generating a net-energy-gain fusion reaction. Just how consequential is this?Arthur Turrell: Jim, I would say that we're witnessing a moment of history, really. Controlling the power source of stars, I think, is the greatest technological challenge humanity has ever undertaken. If you look back at human history, there are different stages where we've unlocked different types of energy sources. You can think about unlocking wood. You can think about when humans started to use coal, which packs in more energy than wood. You can think about nuclear fission, which has even more energy than coal. A lot more, because it's a nuclear technology instead of a chemical one. And then you can think about this moment when we have the first proof of concept of using fusion for energy. And of course, fusion unlocks huge amounts of energy: 10 million times, kilogram for kilogram, as compared to coal.There are two main approaches to fusion as I understand it. This was what they call inertial confinement, and then there's magnetic confinement. Does it make a difference, as far as where this technology goes, that it was inertial confinement versus magnetic?It's absolutely a huge scientific achievement. The level of precision and the level of innovation and invention that the researchers at Lawrence Livermore have had to deploy to get here is just an astonishing feat on its own, even if we weren't talking about how this could eventually change the supply of energy.Does it get us anywhere? I think the honest answer is we don't know. We, today, don't know what version of fusion, what way of doing fusion is going to ultimately be the one that is the most economical and the most useful for society. But what I think this result will do is have a huge psychological effect because throughout fusion's history, researchers have said, “Hey, I'd really like to, you know, build a reactor, a prototype reactor.” And funders have quite reasonably said, “We don't even know if the principle works. Go off and show us that it can produce, in principle, more energy out than is put in.” And of course, fusion research has been trying to do that since the 1950s. Now we finally and absolutely have proof of that. I think that it's going to crowd in innovation, interest, and investment in all types of fusion because even though this approach got to that milestone first, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is going be the most economical or the best in the long run.Where does fusion go from here?I think it's Benjamin Franklin who gets the credit, at least that's what I learned in third grade, for discovering electricity in the 1700s. We didn't get the first electric motor until the 1820s, and we really didn't get factories electrifying their factory floors really until the first decades of the 20th century. So this could be an amazing discovery, but it could be a long time just based on how fast it takes advances to be modified and diffuse into an economy. It could be quite some time, if ever, before this actually gets plugged into a grid.Right. Traditionally, these new energy sources take a long time to come onstream. One of my favorite facts, and I have to double check that I've got the year right here, but I think the first solar cell was working in 1883. And only now in the last few years has solar energy become commercially viable in terms of cost. These things take a long time, or they have historically. And here's the really important point. It's never about the amount of time. It's about the amount of investment and political will that we put behind it.If our elected representatives choose to really push this and put lots of funding behind it, and the private sector decides that it's really going to push this, things will move much faster. Correspondingly, if we don't put lots of investment behind it, things will move more slowly. But you are absolutely right when you say that there is a gap here between what we've seen — which is an astonishing experiment, but only scientific feasibility — and what you'd have to have for fusion energy to be on the grid — which is solving some of the engineering and economics challenges that stand in the way between this one-off experiment and doing this repeatedly and economically at scale.For decades, there was very little in the news about fusion research. And since 2019, there have been some big stories about the advances happening in government labs and about the work in the private sector. It seemed like there was already a lot of excitement before this advancement. I can't believe this won't generate even more interest.Absolutely. I think this has been building for quite a long time. It's very tempting to say not much has happened in fusion. But I think if you look back over the decades, there have been improvements. They've been quite steady, and they've probably been coming at the rate you would expect with the level of investment and dedicated resources it's had. But the improvements have been arriving quite steadily. And looking at the history of this particular experiment, the National Ignition Facility, when they've got improvements since 2012 when they really started this type of campaign, the improvements have resulted in a five- or six-times increase in the release of energy. Back in 2019 when the book I wrote about this came out, I sort of said, “Well, they're not actually that many improvements away, so if they can carry on the same trajectory, they're going to crack it at some point.” And last August in 2021, they got to 70 percent, which at the time was a world record as well. And it’s kind of like, because fusion scales nonlinearly, especially in this type of doing fusion, this laser fusion, actually they're almost there and it's just a matter of time until they crack it. So I think it's been building for a while. And the huge successes, because things have just happened to have gotten close now after all of this time in both magnetic confinement fusion and in inertial or laser-based fusion, mean that has really stimulated the private sector as well. The whole thing is starting to build on its momentum. And I think that now this is going to cause the wave to crash over and we're going to see efforts to turn this into a power source be completely electrified by this news.The best path forward for fusionIf what happened at Lawrence Livermore Lab does not present an obvious path to commercialization, what else is going on that seems more obvious? We differentiated between magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. Other people will point to deuterium-tritium fusion versus aneutronic fusion. Where is the most likely path, and does it come from government, from the private sector, that will lead us to a commercial reactor?Of course, it's hard to know exactly, but we can certainly make some sensible guesses based on what we know today. To answer the second part about deuterium-tritium fusion or aneutronic fusion, just so your listeners are aware, these are about different types of fuel that we're putting into fusion reactions. So the first kind, deuterium-tritium, those are just special types of hydrogen. Frankly, all of the really serious attempts to do fusion today using these because they require much, much less extreme conditions than the other types of fusion reaction, though people get very excited about the type of fusion that doesn't produce any neutrons, aneutronic fusion, because it has less radioactivity. But it's much, much harder to do.Would it be a better power source? Some people have said that with deuterium-tritium fusion, you would still need some sort of boiler. You'd be using a steam turbine, just like you would if it was coal. While aneutronic actually creates electricity itself.In principle, yes. People haven't really demonstrated that principle in practice. But yeah, that's why people are excited about it, because every time you change energy from one type to another you lose some of the useful energy and you just have a more direct setup with the aneutronic fusion. But I think that's some way away. In terms of what's practical for the next steps to getting to an energy source, there are paths using both this inertial approach and using the magnetic approach.Some of the private-sector companies are using this magnetic confinement approach. I think Commonwealth Fusion Systems, that's what they do.That's right. And Tokamak Energy as well. There are pros and cons of both different approaches. In terms of the kind of approach that the National Ignition Facility is taking, there are some big technological gaps in terms of something that looks more like a power source. This was a single shot of a laser on a single experiment. If it was to be anywhere close to being a useful power source, they would have to do probably 10 shots on that laser a second. And instead of a gain of 1.5, so instead of getting 1.5 units of energy out for every unit of energy you put in, you'd have to probably get at least 30 units of energy out than you put in. Now, as I say, this thing scales nonlinearly, which means that you might get there faster than you think. But it's still a big technological gap.And even if you solve all of that, of course you've then got to do what you said. Ultimately, we're extracting the heat energy and we're using it to turn water into steam, and we're powering a turbine. Now, what some of the people who are working on this magnetic confinement approach would say is that even if they haven't got to net energy gain yet, they have created a lot of gross energy. So they have generated about 30 times more gross energy than NIF produced in output energy in a single experiment. And they would say that some of the steps further down the line are a bit easier to achieve on magnetic confinement fusion. But honestly, I don't think we really know yet. And because we don't know, it's a good thing that we have both public and private sector exploring a range of different options here.How seriously should I take anybody who gives me a date? How confident should I take any of these predictions at this point?Well, that does depend, Jim. Was it the president of the United States who said this to you? Because I feel like he's got some control over it. I think the first question to ask when anyone says that is, at what level of investment? Because that's the thing that's going to make the difference. If we stop all funding to fusion tomorrow, if people decide to do that, then it's going to take forever. But equally, if President Biden says it's going to take 10 years, and he makes a commitment to put in the money that could potentially make that happen, then I'd take it a bit more seriously. I think 10 years is a very tight time scale. But as I've probably mentioned before we saw in the pandemic how even untested technologies can be deployed at great speeds, faster than anyone could have imagined, where there is the political will and the societal need and the money to make it happen.The importance of fusion for an energy-abundant futureWhy is this an interesting source of energy?Nuclear fusion, it's interesting scientifically because every time you go outside on a sunny day, those rays you're feeling on your face from the sun are generated by nuclear fusion. So this is literally the reaction that lights up the universe. It's the reaction that created a lot of the elements that we are made out of, particularly bigger elements. And it was right there at the start of the universe as well, creating some of those fundamental building blocks of life. So it's an extraordinary reaction, and it's amazing to start to be able to control it. But there are practical reasons, even if you don't care about the science at all, to get excited about nuclear fusion as well.It's potentially a very safe source of energy. There's just no chance of meltdown. It's not a chain reaction. If you turn off the laser or you turn off the magnets, the whole thing just stops. So it's hard to start, easy to stop. It also, as far as we can tell, isn't going to produce any long-lived radioactive waste. It will produce some from the reactor chamber itself, so not as a byproduct of the fuel, unlike fission. Maybe the reactor chamber at the end of the plant's life might be rated low-level radioactive for about 100 years as opposed to the potentially thousands of years in fission. So that's another advantage. I should say, though, that fission is an amazing power source and we should be doing a lot more with it. And actually, if you look at the data, it's very safe. But some people don't like it, regardless. It’s difficult to get it built. And then the other thing is that renewables are fantastic as well. They work today. They're never going to run out in any practical sense. But they do have this problem that they need to use a lot of land area or a lot of sea area to generate relatively small amounts of energy. I think you've always got pros and cons of these different energy sources.You would need batteries, too, right? Because of the intermittency, potentially, you would need a lot of batteries. Big batteries.Potentially you would need batteries too. Are batteries a bigger technological challenge than getting fusion working on the grid? I don't know. I'm probably a bit more relaxed about the batteries thing. Intermittency can be a problem with them, but also land is such a premium for other things — for food, for people to live — that I think that ultimately might be the bigger issue. And also people don't want to have these things built. They get blocked often. Whereas fusion and fission potentially — definitely in the case of fission, but almost certainly with fusion as well — the actual land area for the amount of energy generated is very, very attractive. So that's another reason. And finally, the fuel for nuclear fusion isn't going to run out anytime soon. There's enough of it on the planet to keep everyone on Earth…The fuel for the kind of fusion we're talking about, deuterium-tritium, where does that fuel come from?They're both special types of hydrogen. Ignore these quite wacky names. They're kind of special, rare types of hydrogen. But the thing is, they're not that rare. Deuterium is one of the ingredients, and about five grams of every bathtub of seawater is deuterium. So there's just absolutely phenomenal amounts of it in the sea. And chemically, it's exactly the same as normal hydrogen. So if we extract it, it doesn't really matter. It's not going to change anything, the fact that we're using it up. And then the other ingredient is a bit more tricky. It's something called tritium. It's very, very weakly radioactive. It's only harmful if you were to ingest it. But the problem is it decays over time into other things, so there's not very much of it around at any one time. But you can create it, and you can create it from another element called lithium.Lithium is very common in the Earth both in ore and in seawater, and there's plenty of that to go around as well. Although of course, it does have some other uses, for example in batteries. So between those two, that's how you do it. Now there are problems: how do we turn the lithium into tritium, that needs to be solved on the kind of engineering side. But in principle, we've got enough fuel for thousands, if not millions, of years of energy for everyone on the planet to have the same level of consumption as people in the US, which you might be surprised to hear is quite high.So this was net energy gain: more energy out than put in. But then you talk about wall plug energy gain in your book. Is that the next big step?You know what, it kind of depends on where we want to focus our efforts, actually. There are a few ways we could go right now. For the benefit of your listeners, in this experiment, what they're measuring is the energy in, the energy that was carried by those laser beams to the target, and the energy that came out of that target from fusion reactions. Now, to actually power up and create those laser beams took a lot more energy. While about three megajoules of energy came out of the target, it took 400 megajoules to actually charge up the batteries, or the capacitor banks that they're called, to actually create those laser beams that had the two megajoules of energy. Wall-plug efficiency would be generating more energy than this entire system, so more than the 400 megajoules and more than the entire facility.The thing to say about the National Ignition facility is it was built to do ignition. It was built to do the scientific bit. They never cared about the fact that their lasers are horribly inefficient, because they knew that wasn't really what they were aiming for. What I suspect they will do on this machine, which is really built for optimizing what happens at the target end, is to try and up the gain as much as they can. Perhaps to a factor of four or five times rather than one-and-a-half times as they've done here, which is probably about the limit of this particular machine.But in the long run, of course, we've got to generate more energy than the facility as a whole. And that means probably going up to gains of at least 30 times. And eventually, if you're doing this form of fusion in a power plant, you'd use way more efficient lasers. This thing was designed 20-plus years ago and the laser efficiency is below 1 percent. There are lasers around today that can fire much faster and which have a 25 percent efficiency. And they're still not quite there in terms of energy terms. But with a bit more technological tweaking, maybe they could be. There are lots of ways to get over this wall-plug efficiency issue in the future. We haven't optimized for that. That is a good next challenge. But there are other parts of the problem that you could work on too.When you look at what government is doing, what some of these private sector companies are doing, what ultimately is the path that you get most excited by and you're like, “I don't know for sure, but this could be it.” This is not investment advice!No, it’s absolutely not. It really depends on what kind of a commitment… Assuming things carry on in much the way they did yesterday and the day before, which is not a given, of course, I think probably the most promising path is a big magnetic confinement fusion device called ITER, which is currently being built in the south of France. And ITER is very expensive and on a very big scale but will probably show net energy gain using the magnetic approach. We'll start to test out some of the engineering issues around a prototype power plant. Now, it is not a prototype power plant, but it will start to look at least some of those engineering challenges. I think one possible path for fusion could be ITER gets finished, they're successful in testing out net energy gain and showing it can work in the magnetic way, which I think they almost certainly will (previous experiments with magnetic confinement have got very close), and they'll test out some of the engineering things. And then the private sector could come in at that point and say, “If you're doing it on that scale, it's going to be really expensive and we're going to have really low learning rates” — the smaller you can make a technology, the faster you learn how to make it even cheaper. That could be the time when the private sector really comes in and says, “We can do it for you. We can make them smaller and cheaper, and therefore, we can make the learning rate higher, making this technology more effective.” But that's just one scenario. There are lots of other ones. If the US government, and maybe other nations too, decided to really, really push the laser-based approach, then maybe that could be the one where we see the most progress towards a prototype power plant.Do you think some of these existing private sector companies, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, I think another one is TAE Technologies, do you see them as legitimate players?Absolutely. Some of them are working on really interesting approaches. And like I say, because we don't know what works, I think it makes a huge amount of sense to let entrepreneurs and innovators just see what sticks to the wall. A lot of them aren't going to get there, because a lot of the designs won't work or they'll have to pivot to slightly different designs. And that's absolutely fine. The ones that are looking at fusion reactions that aren't deuterium and tritium, I am more skeptical of, personally, because that reaction just takes so much more energy to get going. Obviously never say never. The one that I'm probably most excited about, on paper anyway, is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. What the public laboratories have done is build up this huge body of knowledge about what does work. And no one is anywhere near as far ahead as the public laboratories in the UK and the US and the international collaboration ones. They’re really the only people who've gotten anywhere close to doing this, because they're the only ones who've actually run with real fusion fuel for a start. Or at least they were until about two years ago. The thing that's quite nice about Commonwealth Fusion Systems is they're really building on tried and tested tokamak technology, but then they're saying, “Hey, the thing that really makes this work is having really powerful magnetic fields. So if we could just find a way to dramatically improve that part of the technology, we could make this dramatically smaller and dramatically easier as well.” I like that approach because they're really just doing this one change. And they've got some really promising technology to do it as well. Some of the advances they've made in superconductors are really exciting and probably stand alone as inventions.Will star power take us to the stars?Finally, we talked about the use case for fusion. It seems to me that there would be a strong use case, as you just mentioned, right here on Earth. But also in space, where we're going to need energy. I haven't really heard much of that mentioned in all the excitement about fusion, but I’ve thought about it, and I bet you have too.I certainly have. Just for the benefit of people listening, once you are wanting to explore space — and I think it's part of the human psyche to want to explore unknown frontiers, so I think we want to do that; I think most people would take that as a given — if you want to go beyond the very local area, like the Moon and Mars, it's very difficult to do it with conventional rocket technology, because essentially you have to carry the fuel with you. Imagine if you are trying to have a wood-fired interstellar rocket: The amount of wood you have to carry with you is just going to make life much more difficult. It's going to be difficult to get into orbit and then to actually get the thrust you need.Now, one of the great things about nuclear fusion is that it is the most high-energy-density, so amount of energy per kilogram, reaction that we have access to on Earth. It's the highest energy fuel stuff that we can possibly imagine, and it is basically the only one that is going to be able to do this longer-distance travel, because it can get us up to the speeds that we need to actually make some real progress across space. As I like to say, star power is literally the only energy source that can take us to the stars. So we should be doing it for that reason as well. Absolutely. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

I often write about the need for Up Wing thinking. Despite the political drama that unfolds on cable news and social media, the key divide in America is not Left versus Right but Up versus Down. Up Wingers are all about acceleration for solving big problems, effectively tackling new ones, and creating maximum opportunity for all Americans. Down Wingers, on the other hand, are soaked in nostalgia, scarcity, and risk minimization. In this episode, I'm joined by Steve Fuller to discuss the political implications of Up Wing and Down Wing thinking.Steve holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick's Department of Sociology. He's the author of several books, including 2014's The Proactionary Imperative.In This Episode* Up-Wing versus Down-Wing thinking (1:25)* America’s emerging Down-Wing coalition (9:45)* Towards an Up-Wing environmentalism (18:54)* Up-Wing politics and risk (25:31)* How Up Wingers should think of Elon Musk (31:30)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Up-Wing versus Down-Wing thinkingJames Pethokoukis: In 1973, almost 50 years ago, the futurist F.M. Esfandiary wrote the book Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto, where he posited a new political axis, where future-oriented Up Wingers and more traditionalist Down Wingers would replace the existing Left Wing-Right Wing axis. You've also framed this as Green — meaning traditional environmentalist — versus Black — the sky is the limit, perhaps space is the limit.I wonder if you could just speak for a moment or two about the tenets of being Up Wing or on the Black pole versus Down Wing, Green pole. What does that look like in the modern political environment?Steve Fuller: I think the first thing to say, given that you started with Esfandiary, who's known as FM-2030 to his fans in transhumanism, is that the book Up-Wingers actually only talked about Up Wingers but didn't talk about Down Wingers, because he was an incredibly optimistic guy, you might say. What he was really arguing in that book back in the ‘70s was that the Left-Right political axis would just be replaced by Up Wingers. There wouldn't be Down Wingers. That's an interesting aspect of what was going on back then in the ‘70s. And in fact, what he thought about as so-called “black sky thinking” — which is what you were alluding to in your question about Black being the kind of signal color for Up Wingers — he was actually talking about something rather close to the kind of internet that we have now, basically. Especially in terms of the personalized aspects of it: social media, the world-wide web, all of this kind of stuff. That was kind of what he was getting at. He wasn't really getting at some of the more profound things that I would say is now part of the political landscape in the contemporary world, which in a way makes the Up Winger or Down Winger distinction a much more visible distinction and much more salient than it was back 50 years ago.Now, I think there is an Up Wing or Down Wing distinction in a very clear kind of way. I'm the one who kind of brings in the Down Wing aspect of this. And so as you said in your introductory remarks, at least in the European political spectrum, Red means Left and Blue means Right. Whereas I understand the United States these days, with the way the states get mapped, it's the other way around. But the point is, in any case, that color scheme is gone. And what we instead have is Black versus Green. The idea of Black for the Up Wingers is that the sky is the limit. You're imagining sort of the “black sky” kind of thing. That's the stellar cosmos color. Whereas the Down Wingers are Green in the sense that they basically want human beings to be planted on Earth. It's a very Earth orientation. It is a sky versus Earth thing in a way, Up Wing or Down Wing, in the way I'm talking about it.The interesting thing about this distinction, as I think it plays out now, is that it shows a fundamental instability, you might say, in the concept of the human. Insofar as we've thought about social life and political life as revolving around humanity — how to organize humanity, what humanity is about, and so forth — we generally have had a kind of common understanding of what a human being is. And that's, roughly speaking, homo sapiens. Homo sapiens, in a way, provides a kind of outer limit to what we think about as a human. But now, with a lot of things going on — not just the stuff that has to do with information technology, where we can perhaps upload our consciousness or merge with machines in some way, even in some kind of Elon Musk-Neuralink fashion where we become cyborgs in a sense — it's not just that that's going on: There are all these potential biological transformations, biomedical transformations, which in a way could really destabilize even the biological nature of the human being. For example: human beings living indefinitely. All of that stuff would have incredible knock-on effects with regard to how we organize our social and political life, which to a large extent depends on the idea that human beings are more or less upright apes who live a finite period of time and then they succeed to another generation. Up Wingers are, in a sense, open to everything like this. It kind of explodes the category of the human, and that's why the term “transhumanism” is an appropriate term for those people, because they want to transcend the limits of the human.The Down Wingers take the exact opposite view and think the Up Wingers are completely dangerous. The [Down] Wingers think that, if anything, the problems that we have now on Earth — let's say the climate issues, but also even maybe the pandemic issue and so forth — have to do with the extent to which humans have overextended themselves on the planet. They don't know their limits. And in some sense, what human beings need to do is not to think that we're somehow above animals and nature, but rather to return, as it were, to our natural origins. And that homo sapiens may not be so special after all, and that our survival may depend on our having a more modest understanding of what our nature is. The Down Wingers basically want to get us down there. That's why these people like to talk about the precautionary principle, for example, which is to say that when you introduce any innovations or whatever, you minimize risk. You do no harm. It's like a Hippocratic Oath for the Earth. This is a view that has a lot of prominence these days. This view is even called “post-humanist,” because, in a sense, it wants to minimize the significance of the human in order to return to something that is a more stable, Earthly existence. So this is where the polarities are: some want to go into the skies and some want to really implant themselves on the Earth.In the book 50 years ago, Down Wing was not mentioned, yet it seems as though that view, broadly speaking — concerns about scarcity, about limits, thinking going to space would be a waste of money, also looking at technological stagnation over the past half century — it seems like even though Down Wing was not mentioned, Down Wing has been winning and has been the dominant ethos.I think there's a certain truth to that. I think the Silicon Valley people are very attuned to this point. Peter Thiel, I suppose, would be the main one who talks about the great technological stagnation that's been taking place over the past 50 years. I think he's basically right, and probably for the kinds of reasons you've just cited: that there has been this kind of latent Down Winger tendency. But I think, in a way, it has converged in very interesting ways with other kinds of movements in recent years to make it stronger so that it becomes a kind of social justice movement. It is no longer just purely about ecologists, environmentalists in the narrow sense; but rather, it has this much broader sense, because if one thinks about who would be most vulnerable to any kind of climate catastrophe or something like that, then one starts to bring in the developing world, the poor, the people who are already kind of unprotected. This gets then rolled into a very large social justice agenda, which then makes the Down Wing movement much more powerful, you might say, than it would've appeared 50 years ago.America’s emerging Down-Wing coalitionWhat led me to some of your writings was really the 2016 election here in the United States, when you had this weird phenomenon of people who supported Bernie Sanders, but when he did not win the Democratic nomination said, “Then maybe we'll support Donald Trump.” At first, that seems crazy. But if you start to look at things with an Up Wing versus Down Wing perspective, it begins to make a little bit of sense. Do you see this sort of merging of the populists of the left and right coming together and making this scenario maybe actually happen?Yes, actually, I do. This is where I think the Democratic Party is really in a very tight, difficult situation, to be perfectly honest. If we're talking about the establishment of the Democratic Party, it's still very much on the sort of Hillary Clinton, technocratic, broadly Up Winger, you might say, way. And Bernie Sanders was just seen as a throwback to the past. If you’re Hillary Clinton, you're basically planning for all of that rust belt stuff, all of that kind of traditional working-class thing, to disappear over time. I think that's the scenario. But of course, the point about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is in a way to keep the consciousness of the working class kind of alive. And this sort of populism isn't going to go away. To be honest with you, nowadays there's a lot of inflammatory talk, especially in the United States, about fascism. But fascism, of course, fed on this kind of connection between basically working-class disenfranchised people, who in the past would've been voting on the left of the party, but then seeing the left somehow taking off into space and not really addressing their bread-and-butter concerns. And then some leader that might be called fascist actually galvanizes and organizes this group of people. It could happen. There are a lot of different kinds of ways in which the Down Winger thing can play itself out, because I do think the environmental aspect of this is also there. But then environmentalism also has a kind of connection with fascism, too, in a certain way. It's a very complicated story, and it plays itself differently in different countries. If we're talking about the United States, it's a bit different than if we're talking about Europe.I see these Bernie Sanders-style populists on the left who are very skeptical of corporate power. And now we have conservative populists who also seem to be against big corporations. Both groups seem to hate Silicon Valley. There's also a lot of overlap on housing density. Yet on cultural issues like abortion, for example, these groups remain divided. Is that how you see it?I see that 100 percent. I don't know exactly what to do about it. It's a very strange situation. But I do think it does point to the fact that the conventional political parties are going to end up realigning at some point. In other words, they're both going to kind of break apart, not only in this country, but certainly in Britain, the same sort of thing is happening as well. There's an interesting thing about, what does politics look like under these circumstances? Because I think one of the things that contributes to the destabilization of people's finding a political home is the fact that the state — which typically was the thing that political parties were fighting over: control of the state and control over state power — the power that the state actually wields nowadays is diminishing.There are so many other players, as it were, that in a way have competing powers to the state and often can kind of prevent the state from doing various things, that then when people start thinking about political identity, this is why young people, for example, don't vote. Because they don't see anything in it for them, because they're not sure that getting one set of politicians or another set of politicians is going to actually mobilize enough power to actually get things done. And so I think that's also part of the background of this story; namely, that the state isn't something worth fighting for or fighting about anymore, in a certain way. It doesn't really anchor, as it were, the common political reality that people understand.This is also part of the world we live in, where we have so many different competing understandings of what's actually happening on the ground. And there is nothing terribly authoritative and establishment to sort of say, “No, actually this is happening. This is not happening.” So a lot of this kind of anchoring effect, this common ground stuff, that used to make actually being in one party or another party important is disappearing as well. And so this is why it all seems very blurry and people are just kind of moving around from place to place.A typical median voter in Great Britain or the United States, do you think they're fundamentally more of an Up Wing person or more of a Down Wing person?I think, generally speaking, they're Up Wing, actually. I think they're Up Wing if you ask them their attitudes towards stuff. But the problem is, when you put it all together as part of a political agenda, it often seems very threatening. And I think that's kind of the public relations problem that Up Wingers have. Because there are a lot of the actual things, like: Do you want to be able to live longer? Do you want innovative medicines that will be able to cure diseases that in the past, let's say, killed your parents or something? Everybody is for this. And everybody is for all kinds of technological solutions to solve all sorts of problems. People are actually for all this stuff. The problem is that when you add it all together, and then you look in a sense not simply at the economic cost — I don't think the economic cost is really the big deal here — but rather you think about what the implications would be for the kind of world we would live in if all of this wonderful stuff came together, and you see Up Wingers are very sensitive to the point that we would be in a different world. This wouldn't be a better version of the current world, but this would be a different kind of world. I think this is where it starts to seem scary to a lot of people when it's actually presented as a political package.I'll give you an example: There’s this thing called telemedicine, which basically enables people to send in their symptoms, to look up stuff, and then they can have access to this amazing biomedical information base that would then enable them to get customized medicine in just the way they want. It would be a maximum use of the internet for purposes of healthcare. But of course, this would involve an unprecedented level of surveillance and violation of privacy. Especially if we're monitoring the effects of people who voluntarily decide to take certain kinds of experimental drugs and stuff. Everything they do would have to be monitored and checked. When you flesh out the picture of what the Up Wing view involves, then the opposition gets traction because they say, “So you're going to sell your privacy? Is that what you're going to do? And what are you selling it for? What, to take some experimental drugs that might not work and you might not even know what the side effects are?” And so it's quite easy, once you flesh out and you present the Up Winger program — as a program, not just as a set of isolated things you might want, but as an entire political program — it then becomes easy to enumerate the various implicit costs that this is going to have. And that's when you start to raise the fear factor in the electorate. “My privacy is going to be gone. This might be risky. Blah, blah, blah.” That's where we are. It's very hard to win elections when you're operating in that space.As you’re suggesting, it's not an easy thing to poll with a public opinion survey. But I suppose if I was going to try to find a single question that might tell me where the public is, it might be nuclear energy. If you're for it, you’re probably inherently more Up Wing. If you're against it, probably more Down Wing.This is true.Which means the public is pretty split.That's a good litmus test. Yes. It's the same thing in Europe, too. It's the same thing in Europe.Towards an Up-Wing environmentalismI sense that over the past year or two — I think it's because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and energy shortages, and I think a growing realization that all these climate goals are going to be very difficult to meet without nuclear energy — that people are specifically rethinking nuclear, but then maybe people are going to start rethinking, “Why are we even in this situation? Why do we not already have abundant clean power? What is this bill of goods that the environmental movement has been selling us for 50 years, that we're sitting here having to think about radically changing our lifestyles to meet some climate goal, that we have energy shortages in Europe when it was all entirely avoidable?”This is where it gets kind of interesting, because of course, nuclear is not risk free. I think this has always been the problem, especially in Europe. One thing you need to realize, especially if we're talking about the European Union, is that the European Union actually has the precautionary principle baked into a lot of its legislation. In other words, this minimization of risk is one of the things that, for example, makes it very difficult for biomedical innovations to actually get on stream in Europe. Environmental protection in Europe is incredibly high. For example: This enormous opposition to genetically modified organisms to put in the food system. All of this is very much to do with the precautionary principle being in there. The precautionary principle says above all “do no harm,” even if it means you do less good. That's going to be a killer for nuclear. The point is, yes, we could have had clean energy via nuclear many decades ago, but it would've also been risky. It was probably a risk worth taking, I would think. And I still think that now.But nevertheless, part of what's going on between the Up Wingers and the Down Wingers is basically the attitude toward risk. Because we can do a lot of amazing things right now if we're willing to absorb just a little bit more risk. This is a tough one for politicians, because politicians, at the end of the day… One way to think about what a politician is, in terms of serving their constituency, is protecting them. So if you are in a constituency where you’ve got a lot of eco-activists raising the alarm bells — if we put a nuclear reactor here, then your water will be poisoned, you'll have three-legged cats, whatever — how's a politician going to deal with that? Because there is a small chance that might happen. So it's a very tough sell. I think we could have had a much cleaner world by now if we were willing to take a little bit more risk with regard to things like nuclear and more experimental kinds of technologies. Even genetic modification, actually, in terms of our ability to adapt to climate change and stuff like that. And risk is one of the things that often makes the difference in terms of political debate. It ends up defining the limits of plausibility for what you can put forward as a policy.For some of the reasons I mentioned earlier, to me the environmental movement has been a very Down-Wing, limits-based movement. Do you sense that's changing because of the reality of trying to hit climate goals without technology? If there's anything we've learned during the pandemic and maybe with some of these energy shortages in Europe, it’s that people do not like scarcity. They like abundance. They don't like shortages. And I'm wondering if that revelation is going to create a more Up-Wing aspect to the environmental movement.First of all, there are some Up-Wing environmental movements. One of them, I'm a fellow, is the Breakthrough Institute in California. And those guys have been on this ticket for a long time. But to be honest, their degree of success in getting the message across has been limited. And this has been true of other such movements — eco-modernist, as they're called, movements around the world. There is the issue of fear mongering. There's the fear element that is very difficult to deal with in political discourse. Once it gets unleashed, it's very hard to combat it. In the case of nuclear (and this is true, I would say, of a lot of this more progressive technology), if you look at the agencies that would be promoting it, obviously we would be talking about state, corporate, we would be talking pretty heavy players that would enable this kind of new technology to go on stream in a big way. And to a large extent, some of this technology is already available, but it's been prevented from actually coming on stream. The look of that to people who are already distrustful of all kinds of establishments and all kinds of authorities is not good. It’s not a good look. If nuclear energy was something that could be promoted from a mom-and-pop store, it would probably be much more palatable. This is a basic kind of problem, the kind of general distrust. As you know, one of the things that has come about as a result of the pandemic is this efflorescence of conspiracy theories. And who's involved in the conspiracy theories? Well, big business, the state: all the kinds of big players who would, in fact, probably be among the supporters of nuclear among many other of these innovative technologies. The look of the sponsors does not create an aura of trust in a populace that is increasingly distrustful of authority. I think that's a real basic kind of public relations problem that this whole issue has to overcome. I'm not sure how you do it, but I think that's a much bigger issue than, let's say, making people aware of what the benefits of nuclear energy are.Up-Wing politics and riskDuring the pandemic we've learned something about the issue of trust in society. What do you think we've learned about the issue of risk tolerance in society? More people than I would've guessed are very risk averse.Yes, I think that's exactly right. It's an interesting picture. I think at some point, once the air has cleared on this matter, there needs to be a thorough cross-national comparison of the response to the pandemic. Nations of the world were all over the map on this in terms of the amount of social control they put on their citizenry and so forth. In that respect, it was a very interesting living experiment, the pandemic, because of the ways in which the different political systems responded to it. The state does have a lot of power in certain kinds of arenas like health. In a sense, the state shot itself in the foot by making people too risk averse. We have been living in a world where we've been promised that the risks are going to go away and that people are going to live longer, healthier lives forever. We've been expecting this kind of uninterrupted, upward trajectory, certainly since the end of the Second World War. Anything that might threaten that then becomes a source of fear. And if we lived in a world where we realized it's going to be a kind of bumpy ride up — death rates will vary; it’s not that we're going to continue to minimize death rates, but they will vary, but in the appropriate direction over time — then people would be more tolerant of situations like pandemics, where eventually people do die more than normally die. Because the pandemic was so publicized, on a 24/7 basis you could compare the death rates of all the countries of the world simultaneously as if this was some kind of sporting league where you say, “Hey, these guys are on the top of the league. They got the fewest per capita dying today.” This is a nonsense way of managing a pandemic. It does make it look like, if you avoid death, if you avoid contamination, then you're winning. That then undermines the kind of mindset that is required for any kind of technological progress, which is much more risk seeking than that.I think that if we end up being able to cure or significantly reduce the incidence of some big key diseases, that would send a powerful message to people that technology is good. We can radically change our lives. And I wonder if something like that might really tip the scale.I think so, actually. The public relations side of all this should never be underestimated. I think you need a big win. The polio vaccine, right? You need something like that. It's not just that it works well, but that the coverage of it, the relevance of it, to large numbers of people is immediate. It's obvious. People could see it. They don't need to know how the polio vaccine works. If they know someone with polio, they understand immediately. This is the point: You need something that has that kind of level of public salience. I think people who think about this, think that is what's got to happen. How it's going to happen, where it's going to happen — it's not obvious. But clearly, from a public relations standpoint, if you want something that's going to make this kind of a gestalt switch so that people go from being risk averse to being risk seeking, you need a big win on something that a couple of years ago you wouldn't think was possible.If over the next 25 years, 50 years, we saw the precautionary principle replaced with a more risk-taking principle, what does that world look like?We could have a whole half hour on this topic. One of the things I think would be necessary is that people would be allowed, at the very least, to be able to volunteer for quite risky kinds of experiments through private contracts with scientists and others, where there is some mutual understanding that one understands the terms of agreement and so forth. And so there would probably have to be a kind of insurance agency around this for compensation when things go wrong. But what that would replace is the current system, the research ethics codes that apply universally and in a blanket fashion across research establishments, especially in academia, which ends up preventing effectively a priori any kind of risky research from happening because of the possibility of harm to the subjects, even if the subject would voluntarily enter into the research.And so that, I think, is a minimum requirement: that you would have to change the legal structure that at the moment prevents the risky stuff from being done. Because the problem is, the risky stuff does get done anyway. It gets done in China, these ethics-free zones. It gets done underground. Black market, all kinds of crazy stuff I'm sure is going on around the world at the moment, and we might even be able to learn from it. But as long as there is this kind of very prohibitionist mentality in the legal system, it is the great inhibitor. We really need to turn this into a much more contract system, not a kind of blanket ban on certain kinds of research. That would be the first step.How Up Wingers should think of Elon MuskHow should up wingers think about Elon Musk?If you're an Up Winger, and you're someone who in a way is all about taking risks and encouraging others to take risks, what better person to take a risk than a billionaire? In a sense, he’s a very appropriate person to be an Up Winger. He can afford to lose. He’s doing a lot of stuff. Some of it people might regard as crazy, but nevertheless, if public agencies were doing it, it would be a nightmare. But in some sense, a lot of the stuff that he's doing, you sort of believe someone ought to be doing it. And it's his money.When we talk about all these rich people, “What do they do with their money?” I think the idea of risking the money, or at least amounts of it, in these kinds of projects is not so bad, actually. There are a lot of worse things Elon Musk could be doing. This man could be causing an enormous amount of damage in the world. He might not be saving the world's poor. He might not be vaccinating them to death. But what he's doing is he's trying various kinds of experimental, innovative things that would be beyond the financial range of most states and individuals around the world. So I'm willing to tolerate him. This is the kind of guy who is in a position to really take risks. That's what I see him doing. Is it guaranteed he's going to succeed in any of this stuff? Most of his income comes from PayPal still! And he's using that to bankroll all the other stuff. This is a public episode. 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This month, December 2022, marks the 50-year anniversary of when man last stood on the Moon. NASA's Apollo missions were an awe-inspiring triumph of human achievement, but do people really care about space anymore? To discuss the wonder of space exploration, the virtues involved, and why robotic missions just aren't enough, I'm joined by Charles T. Rubin.Charles is a contributing editor at The New Atlantis, where he has published several excellent essays on space exploration, his latest being "Middle Seat to the Moon" in the fall 2022 issue. He's also a professor emeritus of political science at Duquesne University and the author of several books, including 2014's Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress.In This Episode* Will space become mundane? (1:29)* The case for astronauts (10:10)* Billionaires in space (14:29)* Sci-fi and the future of space (19:41)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Will space become mundane?James Pethokoukis: In your New Atlantis essay, you write that “to make something routine is precisely to suck the wonder out of it, to make it uninteresting.” In regards to space exploration, is it important that people have a sense of wonder to it? Is it important to maintain public support for government efforts? And is it important in a higher spiritual sense, that we have a sense of wonder about the vastness of the universe outside our own little pale blue dot of it?Charles Rubin: I think both of those are true, actually. It applies not just to government space program efforts, but also now to private space program efforts. The private ones obviously will operate in a market environment. Someday, I think it is hoped that such trips will not just be for immensely wealthy people, but will be for normally wealthy people. And they're going to have to have a reason to want to go into space. I think, as is true in many, many circumstances of tourism, it will be because there's something very cool and wondrous to be seen out there. That is certainly part of any justification — an important part, it seems to me, for both private space efforts and, of course, public space efforts. There are going to be many different reasons why people will support or be against a government-funded space program. But here also, I think that wonder plays an important role in attracting some kinds of people to those efforts who would otherwise not be attracted. The science of it, the technology of it — those are crucial things, but they're not going to appeal to everybody. But exploration and going where no human being has gone before: These are things that are going to have a broader appeal, I think.I wonder, even if we get to the point where it's maybe not common that people take a quick trip into almost space or even at the point where they can have a vacation in orbit, even if you know people who have done that, I think there will still be a sense of wonder. I've done some traveling, probably a lot less traveling than some other people. But I'm pretty sure that when I go to Italy and see the Colosseum, or if I went to Australia and saw Mount Uluru, even though I am not the first person to do that and I know people have done that, I would still probably think those are pretty awesome.I certainly hope that's true. It may be useful if I say something more about my concerns about routinization: I think that there are problems that will be faced as space travel gets more common and is available to more people. That will be a wonderful thing in terms of the success of the technology, but we will potentially find ourselves in a situation where it's going to be like flying in an airplane to Australia or flying in an airplane to Italy: I don't know how many people look out the window under those circumstances. And yet here you are flying at an immense height with extraordinary vistas to be seen around you, and we simply take it for granted.I began to think about some of this in the way I do when I was going occasionally into New York City from New Jersey. I don't think this is a train ride that is known — well, I can know for sure — it's not known for its natural beauty, and I could look around me and see that people were doing almost anything other than looking out the window. But it's kind of an extraordinary ride. You're passing through suburban America, you're passing through decaying industrial areas. There's just a lot to be seen there. But of course, it's just a train ride so who really is going to be looking too carefully at what's going on around them? I'd like to see that in our space efforts we maintain that level of interest at all levels of the journey. And again, I think that's going to be an important part of both commercial and governmental success.Is that possible? Is that an unavoidable downside? Some things are going to become common and there's always going to be a certain amount of people like yourself — I'm probably more like you in this; I always think it's cool the first time I see a New York skyline or taking a train and just seeing how one little town might be different; I enjoy that — and some people don’t, they will get lost in their phones or naps, and that's just the way we are. Different people have different preferences.Yes, and that's fine. In fact, that's wonderful. But I don't think it's impossible to open a door that might otherwise be left shut. In other words, I think these are outlooks that can be cultivated. They're outlooks that can be encouraged. I think I was fortunate growing up: My folks took us on wonderful driving vacations, and when we started out was an era of auto suspensions where car sickness was still a major concern. We were actively discouraged from reading in the car, so we learned to pay attention to the landscape. And my mother was a great one for pointing things out, and she was never afraid to hide her own enthusiasm. And I didn't do such a good job with my kids, who became readers in the car. I kind of wish that were otherwise, but I probably could have done better. Again, I think there are attitudes that can be cultivated, there are expectations that can be created, that will perhaps allow more people rather than fewer to appreciate the wonders of space flight.That reminded me of a book by the Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps called Mass Flourishing. And toward the end of the book, he talks a little bit about schools. And he's worried that we're not creating entrepreneurial — in the broadest sense of the word — risk-taking, adventurous children.Are we creating with our current education system, do you think, the kind of people who can have a real sense of awe, a sense of wonder at what they see out of a window on a spacecraft or a space hotel?That sounds like a last chapter I very much need to read. I agree. I think there are multiple tendencies in contemporary American culture that readily point us in directions that are not healthy. My hope would be something like this: that a serious, active, adventurous, risk-taking space program could serve something of the same function going forward in our time as that extraordinary, less than a decade served in the 1960s when the United States was on its way to the Moon. That really was inspiring. I look back on it and I think it's amazing. It took so short a time from the Kennedy speech to having people on the Moon. And people responded to that, it seems to me.The case for astronautsFrequent listeners will know that I love the TV show For All Mankind. And for those who have not watched it, it's an alt-history show where the space race never ends. The US and the USSR just keep racing, and it has all kinds of interesting side effects. And I remember, I think it was the end of season three, it flash-forwards — spoilers — to the early ‘90s. And what you see is this Martian vista, then you see an astronaut's boot take a step on that Martian vista. But some people don't get a thrill out of that. They think, “Fine. Build your space factories and space hotels and space stations, but anything beyond that, just send robots. Send robots to the Moon, send robots to Mars — do your exploration that way.” Certainly, you could do some exploration more cheaply if it was just robots. Is it worth the risk to be sending people beyond the Moon?I want to acknowledge your point and say, yes, there are people who simply aren't going to find any kind of appeal in this. And that's okay. I just would like to see a situation where those whose heartstrings can be plucked by this sort of thing can express it that way and can understand themselves that way. An for example, NASA perhaps be a little more forthright in stressing the adventurous and the risk-taking part of its program rather than, as it has been in the past, tending to downplay the risk. I'm not talking about making things more risky. I'm talking about admitting the risks that are actually there.We mentioned a current essay, but you had another one which was great, “The Case Against the Case Against Space.” I'm quickly going to read a few sentences from that:“We should want heroes, but heroism requires danger. That many professed shock when the idea was floated that early Mars explorers might have to accept that they would die on Mars is a sign of how far we miss the real value of our space enterprise as falling within the realm of the ‘noble and beautiful.’ It would be better to return in triumph, to age and pass away gracefully surrounded by loved ones, and admired by a respectful public! But to die on Mars — to say on Mars what Titus Oates said in the wastes of Antarctica, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ — would be in its own way a noble end, a death worth commemorating beyond the private griefs that all of us will experience and cause.”That seems to me a countercultural notion right now: that it's worth it. There are worse things than to die in that pursuit.It is a countercultural notion, but I think it's worth trying to… And by the way, thank you for that.I've quoted that passage in various things. I just love it.But we can work towards creating a world where it is at least not as unusual as it might be today. I think there is to some extent a kind of natural appeal of heroism, a natural admiration of risk taking. And we can work to bring that out with respect to the space program. And yes, of course, we should pride ourselves on the fact that we are not expending lives lightly and that we do everything we can to bring our astronauts back. But there also has to be a recognition that it isn't always going to work that way. And just because lives will be lost, that does not in any way diminish the value or the meaning of the enterprise.Billionaires in spaceWe have this “Billionaire Space Race.” Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson: They all seem to have very different goals. Musk and Bezos, particularly, have a far more expansive vision of what they're trying to do than somebody like Richard Branson. But they're certainly describing what they're doing differently. Elon Musk has talked about how we're going to be a multi-planetary civilization, have colonies on Mars. And Bezos has not tended to talk like that. He talks about creating an orbital economy, moving heavy industry into orbit: a much more grounded description. I wonder if Bezos does that because he just wonders how much interest people really have in space exploration. I'm not sure what my question is, but certainly it seems like they've taken different stances. And I'm wondering if there's an underlying concern that even though we love science-fiction films, there's just not that kind of interest in space?In a way, I think that the fact that interest in space is limited is actually something which Elon Musk's vision accommodates better than Jeff Bezos' vision. Jeff Bezos does imagine vast numbers of people moving up into those orbital colonies such that the Earth is significantly depopulated largely for the sake of ecological integrity. That presumes a huge interest in people moving into space. And to my mind, frankly, it’s quite unrealistic.But what is Musk talking about? Musk is talking about something that we know well. I understand from that book I criticized that there are problems in analogizing Earthly exploration to space exploration, but there are still similarities. We're talking about sending a small number of people on our behalf for the sake of exploration, for the sake of adventure, for the sake of the expansion of knowledge. That can be done with a relatively smaller constituency than a vision like Bezos’, which requires just about everybody somehow to buy into it. Even when we start talking about colonization of Mars, as Musk likes to talk about, even that can be a minority taste and yet still lay the groundwork for extraordinary possibilities of a human future.William Shatner recently did a quick jump into space and back with Jeff Bezos, and there was a lot of attention paid to his reaction. William Shatner said after his trip to space: “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. … My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” What do you make of that reaction?I think that his unstudied reaction immediately following the flight — I think what you're quoting is a later reflection on his experience — was more telling. Whether or not there was an element of sadness, he was moved to an extraordinary extent by his experience. And I think that's appropriate. Of course, people are going to be moved in different ways and he is certainly entitled to reflect back on his experience and put a much darker tone on it subsequently than he put on it at the time. There was some of that in what he said at the time, but I think his vision has gotten darker over the course of the last months. People aren't all going to be moved to the same…I love the idea of space exploration and that did not bother me at all. It made me appreciate Earth. It made me think we have to make sure Earth works right now because there's no place for us to go. I can understand that, thinking about Earth and are we taking care of it enough? That's totally fine. I don't think it means that we shouldn't explore space and try to go out there. But to me that's a totally reasonable reaction, and maybe also a reaction I might have if I was in my ‘90s and probably thinking more about having probably far fewer days ahead than behind.Yes. That's a nice point.Sci-fi and the future of spaceAre there books, TV shows, movies, and science fiction that you think present thoughtful visions about space or even about the future of space exploration or the future in general?Let me mention two things. I haven't gotten nearly as deeply into For All Mankind as you have, but I'm enjoying it tremendously. The show that I love so much that I haven't been able to bring myself to watch yet the last few episodes is The Expanse. I think it is actually a very thoughtful and compelling vision of a future. Lord knows, in some ways it's a terrible future. I don't want to do a lot of spoilers, but nonetheless, I think it has the root of the matter in it, that this is what a human future in space looks like. And there are going to be heights and there are going to be depths. But the opportunities for new venues in which to experience those kinds of heights and depths, there's going to be something extraordinary about it.The other thing is, there's this wonderful coffee table book. It's called Apollo Remastered by a photographer named Andy Saunders. And he has taken some familiar and some hitherto-unseen NASA footage and processed it using modern techniques. And so the pictures are beautiful in themselves, but he also has done interviewing of some of the surviving astronauts. He has, I think, a wonderful eye and ear for the adventurism aspect of space exploration. And he gets some astronauts talking and commenting on things which I was a little surprised to hear. It made me think differently about some of those Apollo astronauts than I had up to that time. It's a lovely book visually and also just quite stimulating in terms of its vision of what was actually going on among the astronauts of that period.Since you mentioned The Expanse and it's a show I really like: I've written a little bit about it, and I got into a little bit of a back-and-forth with people because I described it as a “future-optimistic” show. And people are like, “How could you say that? There's still conflict and war, and there's inequality?” Yes, because we're human beings, and whether we have fusion drives, that's going to be there. My idea of a better future isn't about creating a race of perfect near gods. It’s that we keep going on.When I think about how much conversation is about the ecological destruction of the Earth and that we're not going to have a future, to have a show that says, “A lot of things went wrong, but we're still here.” In The Expanse, it’s clear there has been climate change. I think there's a giant sea wall protecting New York. There are problems, and we solve problems. And maybe our solutions cause more problems, but then we'll solve those and we just keep moving forward. Humanity keeps expanding and we keep surviving. And that's pretty good to me. That’s my kind of future-optimism. As much as I love Star Trek, I don't require an optimistic future to be one where there's absolute abundance, no poverty, we all get along all the time.I think that's beautifully observed. I agree 100 percent. I don't think I would like to live on the Mars of The Expanse. I don't think it's my kind of place.A lot of tunnels. You're living in a lot of tunnels.But Bobbie is just an extraordinary person. She's very Martian, but she isn't entirely limited by her Martianness. She's so competent and capable and just admirable in all these ways which a future person, one hopes, could turn out to be admirable. That's very beautiful. And yes, there are terrible traitors on Mars, traitors to humanity on Mars, too. But just as you say, it allows us to continue to lead human lives in these new and extraordinary settings and stretches. If that were to be the future, it stretches our capacities, it stretches our minds, it challenges us in ways which I think are good for us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

➡ Reminder: I will be writing much less frequently and much shorter in November — and November only. So for this month, I have paused payment from paid subscribers.Also, I’m making all new content free without a paywall. In December, however, everything will be back to normal: typically three meaty essays and two enlightening Q&As a week, along with a pro-progress podcast like this one 👇 several times a month (including transcript). And, of course, a weekly recap over the weekends.Melior MundusHere at Faster, Please!, I write a lot about the need for optimistic, inspiring science fiction. As I’ve put it before:It’s important that our culture create aspirational and inspirational visions of the future. Underlying the rapid advance of human progress over the past quarter-millennium has been a powerful optimism about tomorrow combined with what sociologist Elise Boulding has described as a “utopian sense of human empowerment.” We have to believe that the inevitable disruption caused by progress will be worth it — if we make the right decisions.We also need to believe that we can invent, broadly, the future we want. Right now, however, it seems we think that we’ve carelessly created a future that our kids and grandkids won’t want — a future of rising temperatures and rising inequality. And since the early 1970s, Hollywood has both reflected and encouraged that gloomy belief. But sci-fi could again be pro-progress and future-optimistic (what I call “Up Wing”). It could have plenty of dramatic tension while also showing a path toward a better, although still imperfect, world.I'll often ask my podcast or 5 Quick Questions guests/interviewees to point to an example of that kind of science fiction. And perhaps no film, book, or TV show gets held up as the standard for sci-fi more than Star Trek. To learn more about the history of the franchise and to discuss its future-optimism and cultural importance, I'm speaking with Ryan Britt.Ryan is the author of the tremendous new book Phasers on Stun! How the Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World, out earlier this year. Previously, he wrote Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths. Ryan is also an editor at Fatherly and a contributing writer for Inverse; both BDG brands. In addition, he also writes regularly for Esquire, Den of Geek! and Star Trek.com.In This Episode* The Original Series and ‘60s sci-fi (1:19)* The mainstream appeal of Star Trek (5:44)* Star Trek’s future-optimism (12:06)* The essence of Trek (21:24)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The Original Series and ‘60s sci-fiJames Pethokoukis: When originally broadcast, Star Trek did not have great ratings. Obviously it has become an institution since then. Why didn't it do better when it was first on regular television back in the ‘60s?Ryan Britt: It's a little bit of a matter of debate. One of the people that I interviewed for my book, Marc Cushman, did these deep dives into the ratings for his books, which were these very, very in-depth books called These Are The Voyages. And his contention is that if you look at it by today's standards, five or 10 million people is a lot. Now we have all these streaming services that target these niche audiences and stuff like that. It would no longer be considered a failure. But at the time, you only had three networks. You had NBC, CBS, and ABC. And Star Trek was on NBC, and it didn't compete in the way that NBC wanted it to long term.That said, it had a very strong start. And Lucille Ball who ran Desilu Studios that produced Star Trek sent a note of congratulations to Gene Rodenberry when it started, saying they were off to a great start. But the flip side of that is we forget that Star Trek introduced mainstream American television audiences to all this stuff in science fiction that they had no exposure to before. On the one hand, five, 10 million people, 20 million people, might not seem like a lot compared to today's viewership, but back then it was a huge explosion.When talking about the original series, people often will say it was really a piece of its time with a “New Frontier” spirit. You had the Cold War analogies between the Federation and the Klingons; you could even look at Captain Kirk as a John F. Kennedy kind of character. But those are really things of the early ‘60s. And granted, it's the same decade, late ‘60s. But there was a big difference between the America of 1960–62, then getting into the heart of the Vietnam era, civil rights, the late 1960s by the time the show aired. I wonder if you think that had a role, that already by that time it seemed maybe out of step with the America of that era?It's funny because science fiction in general—this is true of all science fiction, whether it's print or film—it always is oddly a little behind. Star Trek was taking this imagery that you would see on the covers of pulp science-fiction magazines from two decades prior. The way in which it kind of looks reminds you of old issues of Astounding or Amazing Stories and things like that. But its sensibilities were coming from these ‘60s writers who were part of what was called the New Wave. People like Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad. And they were people that were pushing back against those more conservative science-fiction print traditions. So you've got this collision.In the book, I talk about how the oldest person that wrote for the original Star Trek was born in like the 1900s because of the time it was made. But then the youngest person was like born in the ‘40s, David Gerrold who was writing for the original series. So I think you have a lot of collision of generational viewpoints in the original series. You have really young writers and really old writers. And Roddenberry is somewhere in between. He's in his 40s when this is all happening, and he had a big television career before that. I think that Star Trek is a lot of different generational styles and sensibilities happening at once. I think that's also true of the later shows. Like the cliche goes, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Maybe that's why it's good: because there are these different competing ideologies. But I do think that it may mean that the original series has a little bit of a muddled message sometimes for a contemporary viewer.The mainstream appeal of Star TrekI started doing kind of a rewatch not so long ago. So, of course, I started with the original pilot, which did not have William Shatner. And that original pilot was criticized by the network as too cerebral. It was a little chilly. It kind of reminded me more of late-‘60s science fiction, something like 2001, which was also kind of chilly, very cerebral. The Star Trek we know was different. They added William Shatner, they had a captain who would hit something. (I think that was one of the notes from the studio: We want there to be fistfights.) If we had stuck with that original feeling from the very first pilot episode, I wonder if that would've made a difference, if the show would have been more popular, less popular…I think there are a lot of things going on in there, and you're right about everything you just said. Roddenberry also wanted fistfights. That's the thing that people forget. Roddenberry sort of cast himself as this person who was a pacifist and didn't want a lot of conflict by the time The Next Generation happened in ‘87. But in the original series, Rodenberry came from writing westerns. He wrote Have Gun—Will Travel. He came from writing those fisticuffs. He wanted his morality tales in an action-adventure show. The way Roddenberry talked about Star Trek to the fans is not the way Roddenberry talked about Star Trek to the writers and the producers. He sold it as an action-adventure show. There is nothing in the series bible that says anything about it being a progressive, politically peace-making show. There is nothing. And many of the writers who I spoke to who are still alive, like Judy Burns who wrote “The Tholian Web.” She was like, “There's nothing in the writer's bible that is the Star Trek that we know today. It was an action-adventure show. It was a western in space.”To your direct question, had “The Cage” with Jeffrey Hunter and the mind experiments with the Telosians and all that kind of philosophy: No, that show would not have worked. It's great that we have Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijin doing this kind of rebooted version now on Strange New Worlds of Captain Pike and those characters. That episode is great as a thought experiment. But it's not very diverse, for one thing. There's no Sulu, there's no Uhura, there's no Scotty. Those characters aren't that fun. Jeffrey Hunter's Captain Pike is depressed. He's talking about quitting in the first episode. And to your point, it does feel a little bit closer to the kind of late-‘60s sci-fi movies. But it's also closer in tone to what was in print science fiction, like a sort of cranky white guy hero who sort of has to fix something. Whereas when they got Kirk… They needed Kirk, they needed Shatner. The show needed that. The show needed the diversity. It needed Uhura and Sulu, it needed Scotty, it needed Bones. Boyce, who's the doctor in “The Cage,” is funny. But he's not Bones. When you watch “The Corbomite Maneuver,” which was the first episode they filmed of the original series with the regular cast after “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the first scene Bones is saying, “What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor?” and he's hilarious. And Kirk's got his shirt off and he's working out, and Spock's saying something is “fascinating.” It's great. You don't have that in “The Cage.” So no, I don't think it would've connected with people, because the characters weren't as, for lack of a better word, romantic and fun as they became.Let me read something my friend, the journalist Virginia Postrel, recently wrote about Star Trek: “Star Trek’s fundamental appeal was not about the future or technology per se. The show portrays a setting in which smart people have new experiences and learn new things, solve important problems, and forge deep friendships. Nobody worries about money or office politics. The show’s values are humane. Everyone’s job is important and the boss deserves respect. … [F]or many of its fans, Star Trek represents an ideal workplace. Star Trek’s vision of a nerd-friendly universe made the future glamorous, but only to the select few for whom that vision resonated.”I believe her point was, and also to your point, that that kind of nerd-friendly universe may not have resonated enough when there were only three channels. But it certainly would resonate if we had today's streaming services. Her general point [is] that it's not about the future or technology; it's about something else, that gets to its enduring popularity.Something that also gets left out a little bit, which is a little bit more fundamental and perhaps sounds kind of boring when you say it, but there had never been a science-fiction program for adults with recurring characters. Ever. Doctor Who debuted in 1963, but it was a family show. Lost in Space debuted in 1965, but it was a family show. The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone: These were anthology shows, and they were also off the air by the time it was 1964. Just the idea that if you were interested in, as you say, this kind of setting—or as Virginia says, a science-fiction setting that allows for all this—there were just no characters to latch onto for a TV audience. I think that that is part of it: It’s just that it was novel. This is something people forget, because now there are a million science-fiction shows and they’re a dime a dozen. But that was novel at the time.Norman Spinrad, who wrote “The Doomsday Machine,” who I interviewed for the book, was like, “This was like for science fiction when Dylan went electric.” It brought these things out to a bunch of people. And science fiction before that is kind of like folk music. I think it was geek friendly or nerd friendly or whatever, but I think what people forget is that relative to the rest of science fiction, Star Trek is ridiculously mainstream. It only was in the ‘70s where Star Trek suddenly became niche relative to Star Wars. And that's only because George Lucas actually said, and he's quoted in the book saying this, Star Trek made that possible. It proved that you could do big, mainstream, science fiction for adults and for everybody if you had the right sort of zip to it—and he wasn't talking about philosophy or science. I think that's the impact, too. It’s just the idea that science fiction became mainstream, is because of Star Trek.Star Trek’s future-optimismI would like to think that the enduring popularity and the various other incarnations and spinoffs have something in common, which is, I guess superficially you could say, optimism. But more really, the idea that the future is not going to be perfect. This is not a show about a utopia, though maybe it seems like utopia compared to where we are right now. It's a world where there are still problems, but we can solve those problems. And maybe how we solve those problems could create more problems, then we'll solve those. But again, I like to think that the popularity is really about not just that, yes, tomorrow will be better, but it'll be better because we can fix it and just keep solving one problem after another until things get better.I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Animated Series with my five-and-a-half-year-old, this 1973 animated series, which is really interesting because I did watch a bunch of it while I was writing the book in 2020 and 2021. But now she's even older and we have a Star Trek night and we watch the animated series together. And my daughter is already hip to how this works: When the conflicts are introduced in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series or a few of the episodes of the original series that we've watched, she always knows. She'll turn to me and be like, “But they're going to become friends with it in the end.” There's a giant cloud that's going to envelop this planet in this animated series episode called “One of Our Planets Is Missing”—sounds exactly like the plot of the motion picture because it is. My wife was overhearing the dialogue. She's like, “Oh my God, this sounds terrible. All these people on this planet are going to die.” And my daughter calls to my wife from the kitchen. She goes, “Spock's going to talk to it and make it nice.” And I think that's the thing: There's always an understanding. Even a five-year-old can pick up on the pattern of Star Trek: This looks like a monster; it's not a monster. This looks like a bad person; they can come to an understanding with it.And there's not a lot of action-adventure shows from the ‘60s or now, really, that are like that in general. I was making a joke that in 2020 you had a debut of The Mandalorian (which I love) season two and Star Trek: Discovery (season three) within a week of each other, two weeks of each other, something like that. Both episodes had characters fighting against what was kind of a giant space worm creature. And in The Mandalorian they just blow it up. They just kill it. They put bombs in it, they blow it up from the inside. And in the Discovery episode, the character Cleveland Booker, played by David Ajala, literally empathizes with it and calms it down. And that's the difference. That's the difference between Star Trek and almost everything else except for maybe Doctor Who.I think it's important that we have optimistic, problem-solving science fiction. I’ll ask some guests, “Can you give me an example of something that you watch that you think meets those criteria?” And then I finally had to say, “other than Star Trek,” because I kept getting Star Trek as the same answer.Doctor Who.Doctor Who would also be an excellent answer. Why isn’t there more? You mentioned Doctor Who and Star Trek, two long-running, successful franchises. Why are there so few examples of that, while there's a lot more apocalyptic, zombies, “we're doomed in the end,” that aren't problem solving and, you could say, optimistic?I don't know. It's a good question. That's an interesting question. I think that sometimes I actually am surprised that even we have Star Trek and Doctor Who! Sometimes I go in the opposite direction where I'm like, we're so lucky to even have these things. I just did a big essay on early Sherlock Holmes stories a couple weeks back for Esquire. And something that I always like pointing out to people that might not read Sherlock Holmes is that most of them aren't murders. Most of the good stories are not murder mysteries, they're kind of something else. And Sherlock Holmes is another kind of interesting example of a sort of really ethical but flawed person who's always trying to see like, “Oh, maybe this person's not the villain. Maybe it's the other way around.” And of course Sherlock Holmes has influences on Star Trek because of Nicholas Meyer who directed The Wrath of Khan and because of Michael Chabon, who is creator of Star Trek: Picard—and many other Sherlock Holmes connections to Star Trek, Spock in particular.But why are there not more? I suppose it's just because it's easier to write conflict… You have to have conflict in fiction, and it is easier to have just James Bond or something, which is something I know a lot about. I know a lot about Bond. Even those books though, he doesn't have a gun as often as you might think, not as much as he does in the movies. When it comes to adventure fiction, violence is embedded into that, whether it's a western or whether it's a detective story or something like that. When you don't do that—like with Star Trek, they make a choice: The phasers have a stun setting. With Doctor Who, they made a choice: He doesn't have a gun. And when the Doctor does have a gun, it's a big deal. And the same thing with Star Trek. Kirk in “A Taste of Armageddon”: “I will not kill today.” They have to make it part of the storytelling to almost subvert the rest of adventure fiction in a way.I'm a fan of The Expanse, and there's a great scene—I forget if it's also in the book, I know it's for sure in the TV series—where it looks like there's going to be a war and fighting is going to break out. And the main character, Holden, says, “Let's try something else.” To me, Star Trek is everybody constantly thinking, “Can we try something else other than blowing something up?”The Expanse is great. Of course, the showrunner of The Expanse is Naren Shankar, who worked on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and was Ronald Moore's friend. And then you've got Ron Moore doing For All Mankind, the Apple TV series. And For All Mankind is another example where in the season two finale—that's a couple years ago now, season two of For All Mankind, I'll spoil it—where Ed has the choice of whether or not he's going to blow up these Russian ships that are going to the Moon. And Sally Ride has got a gun on him, and he decides not to. And then Danielle can abort the handshake in space with the Russians, and she quotes Captain Kirk and then she does the handshake. And that's Ron Moore's Star Trek optimism coming through this alternate-history sci-fi show. I think For All Mankind is a good example of those Star Trek-ish ideals working out in what's basically a prestige drama, which is basically Mad Men with NASA. And that's hard to do, to make that upbeat. That's a dark show, but it has a lot of optimism in it.The essence of TrekOne of my little ideas here is that it's important that at least some slice or sliver of our science fiction be optimistic and problem solving. You can point to Silicon Valley people who say they were inspired by Star Trek. But do you think, more broadly, that it's important to have that kind of science fiction, showing a future worth making and a future worth living in? Or is it just science fiction?I think that it's also like important that the stories are contemplative in a very specific way. I love Star Wars, but there's not a lot of different kinds of Star Wars stories. It's generally a hero's journey, good versus evil, which is fine and not negative. They're kind of unpacking that a bit with the Andor show and trying to be like, if you were a member of the rebellion, would you kind of be a terrorist? And that's an interesting sort of moral experiment, which is subversive. But it's only subversive for Star Wars, right? Because Star Wars has always been very black and white for the most part. And the morality plays don't have a lot of variety. I'm working on a book about Dune right now, and Dune is very moral and ethical in its considerations. It's just kind of like things didn't go well. The purpose of that storytelling is like, here's when it doesn't go well and here are the various intricacies of why, and then how that's connected to politics and ecology. It's not dark for the sake of being dark. I would say that something like Westworld, to me, is kind of dark for the sake of being dark. (I don't hate Westworld or anything like that. I always end up on podcasts being like Westworld!) But I do think that there tends to be a little bit of a one-note-ism is there, and even aspects of the Battlestar [Galactica] reboot would sometimes go that direction of like, wow, aren't people messed up? And then you'd kind of be like, “Yeah, but where's the hope in there?” I think something that kind of strikes that balance of it is the new Foundation show. I think that's another Apple show. I think that strikes a little bit of an interesting balance. I just think that the ideas have to be unpacked in a way, because I think you can go too sugar coated. Star Trek at maybe its worst moments, or maybe its less potent moments, would be a little too on the nose. That's about what I would say.Of the more recent Star Trek, for some reason the new one Strange New Worlds—which is a riff on the original “The Cage,” as you mentioned earlier—people seem to have connected with that. I keep seeing versions of, “Well, that's finally real Trek. Do you know what people mean by that? Is that your impression? I don't if they mean that it's optimistic or what it is, exactly.Part of it. It definitely is a little bit more upbeat, but Strange in the Worlds is also still significantly darker than The Next Generation. Everything is kind of relative. I think that I'm a pretty big supporter of all the new shows—Discovery, Picard, I'm talking to the Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan in about an hour today. I love him. That show is actually very upbeat and funny and talks about the workplace aspect of it that you were talking about. But I think that what people are responding to—and Strange New Worlds objectively has better reviews; it had like 100 percent or 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes for a while; you can't argue with the reviews, they exist; and the reviews were more mixed for some of the other shows—I think it's about the format, frankly. I think that the serialization of Discovery and Picard was emulating the prestige style of other shows: The Expanse, Breaking Bad, Battlestar, Sopranos, whatever. And I don't know if that's the best way to do Star Trek. Deep Space Nine had a lot of serialization, and that was very risky at the time, particularly in the ‘90s. But it's not like you want to randomly watch one episode of that arc in Deep Space Nine of the Dominion War. You suddenly have to watch like two seasons. If you're going to watch one episode of Deep Space Nine, it will be a standalone episode. If you're going to watch one episode of The Next Generation, it will be a standalone episode or a two-parter. The original series, the same. Enterprise, even Voyager. Serialization, I think, tends to not age as well.But even Battlestar, which is brilliant, I couldn’t watch just one episode of the 2004 Battlestar. I have to watch all of it. Strange New Worlds are standalone episodes for the most part. And I think that is what's connecting with people. I just watched “Spock Amok,” which is the fifth episode, again for like the fourth time the other day. And it's great. It's this great body-switch episode with Spock and T’Pring. Ethan Peck is hilarious in it. It’s great.It's excellent.To me, that is the main thing about it. If you want to knock Discovery and Picard for being dark, if you actually watch those and you actually see what those shows are about, it's not really true. Those shows are about optimism, about hope. The conflicts are just a little rowdier. But those shows are not about that. Those shows are about those redemptions, they just take longer. Whereas in Strange New Worlds, it's kind of a given. Some of that optimism was kind of a given in a way that was also true of The Next Generation. So I think that's the difference.I did also ask Ronald D. Moore this question. It's the Peter Thiel question: Star Trek is the communist show; Star Wars is the capitalist show. I want to get your opinion on that. What do you think of that characterization? Is that actually an insight?I don't know. I think it's a little reductive. I think it's a bit reductive. You could also flip it. You could just flip it around and you could easily just make the other argument. I'm not saying I agree with either viewpoint, but you could easily be like, “No, Star Wars is the communist show because the rebels want to dismantle capitalism, and the empire is capitalistic. So that's the communist show. And Star Trek is capitalistic because the Federation has a monopoly, and they just don't have money within their own government, but they screw over these other planets economically” (which we know is true). Star Trek has criticized itself, like in Discovery season three the Orions are like, “You guys still have capitalism. You just don't have it in your own space.” And then in Strange New Worlds season one, Pike goes to this planet where they're like, “Hey, you guys still trade with us.” It sounds like a dorm room argument to me. It doesn't seem that deep to me. I know there are a lot of folks who are like progressive socialists that are like, “Star Trek has got all these great examples of like how communism could work in the future.” And it's not really my deal. I'm like a pop culture critic who thinks about how Star Trek affects art and culture now. People have written books about the economy and Star Trek and stuff like that. It's not really my bag is what I'll say.Sometimes I like to guess if the title of the book was the one the author really wanted, or if the book publisher suggested it. I'm wondering if the title of your book, in your heart, should've been Live Long and Prosper! rather than Phasers on Stun! Or was this your preference?I had a lot of different titles. The subtitle was mine always: “How The Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World.” That was the subtitle. That was completely mine, and my agent was like, “That's a winner. That's the subtitle.” We always knew, because I really liked the idea of saying that it wasn't just the making of Star Trek, but the remaking, that the book was about metamorphosis. We wanted, then, a catchphrase. I had pushed for “Spock Lives,” or “Spock Rocks” for a long time. And then we ended up having Spock on the cover, so I got that. But I was on the fence about  Phasers on Stun! But then I interviewed Walter Koenig, who played Chekov of course, for a long time, not long after the January 6th thing. And Walter was so nice and thoughtful about everything, and conflicts in society and how to think and unpack all of them from all sides of the political spectrum and wasn't reductive and just a smart guy. And I mentioned to him the working title at that time. He goes, “I love that, because it means we don't have to kill each other.” And so after that, I was like, “Well, if it's good enough for Chekov, it's good enough for me.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe