Faster, Please! — The Podcast

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

➡ 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 Mundus“Generations of people throughout the world have been taught to believe that there is an inverse relationship between population growth and the availability of resources, which is to say that as the population grows, resources become more scarce.” That’s how Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley open their new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. It’s also the central premise of much of today’s Down Wing, zero-sum thinking. And it happens to be wrong. Tupy and Pooley:It is free people, not machines or deities, who generate new ideas, and it is free people who test those new ideas against other people’s ideas in the marketplace. The process of knowledge and value creation is at the heart of humanity’s moral and material progress. It is what enables our civilization to bend towards goodness and superabundance.What is superabundance? The authors again: “[A]bundance occurs when the nominal hourly income increases faster than the nominal price of a resource,” meaning resources become cheaper (more abundant!) in real terms. Superabundance occurs “when the abundance of resources grows at a faster rate than population increases.” And that’s exactly what we see in the world today.Cato Institute senior fellow and HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy joins me in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast to discuss superabundance, Hollywood’s Malthusianism, and more.In This Episode* Will we ever run out of Earth? (1:33)* Can our planet sustain billions of people living like Americans? (5:13)* The burden of proof is on the doomsayers (12:12)* The more people, the better (18:04)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Will we ever run out of Earth?James Pethokoukis: There's only so much Earth, so eventually, aren't we going to run out of Earth and its bounty?Marian Tupy: It's certainly true that the Earth has a finite number of atoms, but the amount of value that we can get from those atoms is basically infinite. Look at something as simple as sand that has been on Earth for billions of years. At some point thousands of years ago, people realize that they could turn sand into glass jars and later into windows. And now we are using sand in order to create fiber optic cables, which are carrying information around the world at very high speeds and a lot of volume in order to power our civilization's communication networks. So from something as simple as a grain of sand, you can get ever more value.If you are somebody who thinks economic growth is a good thing, who wants the global economy to keep growing—and, gee, it'd be great if it grew even faster—at some point it's going to hit a limit. Aren't we already seeing that with lithium shortages? I hear that lithium shortages are going to slow the green transition. So aren't people who are pro-growth, pro-progress, or pro-abundance—even pro-superabundance—isn't that just kind of a temporary state and eventually, I don't know, 50 years, 100, that's not a tenable position over the really long, long run?No, because knowledge continues to expand. As long as we have more people on Earth, and hopefully one day in cooperation with AI or advanced computing, we'll be able to create evermore knowledge. And it is that knowledge which allows us to get around problems of scarcity. Lithium is a perfect example. Lithium-ion batteries are a massive advance in terms of storage of electricity. But who is to say whether batteries in the future will be powered by lithium? Maybe we'll come up with a different compound, which will allow us to store energy at a much cheaper price. In fact, people are already working on basically creating batteries out of, not lithium-ion, but sodium-ion, which apparently is going to last even longer and will be massively cheaper. So it's not only a question of efficiency gains—instead of using three ounces of tin or aluminum for a can of Coke, you are now using only half an ounce—and it's not just about technological breakthroughs like, for example, GMO foods so that you can increase the yield of plants for an acre of land; it's also about substitution. This is very important. It's about substitution. You are using something in order to get to a certain goal, but you may realize 10 years, 100 years from now that you don't actually need it, that you need something completely different. And humanity has been through this very often. Two-hundred years ago, the great discovery was of course coal and steam. And people immediately started wondering, what is going to happen by the year 1900 or 1950 when we are all going to run out of coal? And then oil and gas came on board and displaced coal to a great extent. So substitution will play its role, and lithium is not going to be a problem.Can our planet sustain billions of people living like Americans?There was certainly a time where people were—and some people still are—worried very much about overpopulation. This really became a thing in the early 1970s, where we worried that we had too many people. We were worried about natural resource constraints. We were going to be running out of oil and just about everything else. How much is your thesis is based on the idea that global population will continue to grow to maybe 10 or 11 billion and then it stops? Would you still have this thesis if we were going to have a population of 30 billion people, all of whom would like to live like Americans do today, if not better? Is the idea of a constrained population key to this forecast?You started by pointing to the 1970s, and whilst it is true that many academics have departed from the basic Malthusian premise that more people will lead to an exhaustion of resources, what we found writing this book was very disturbing, which is that Malthusian ideas are much more widespread than we originally thought amongst the common public, amongst the ordinary people. In fact, as far as we can tell, a disproportionate number of mass shooters in America and also around the world, especially in developed countries, have been people driven by Malthusian ideas. This goes back to Anders Breivik in Norway, then the guy called Tarrant in New Zealand, all the way to the mass shooters in the United States, the guy who killed 22 people in El Paso in Walmart a couple of years ago—all of these people have been driven by the notion that there are far too many people in the world using far too many resources. The Malthusian notions are still very much present. You can also get them from multi-national organizations like the United Nations. You have these websites like the Overshoot Day and things like that still. So people still buy into it, and that's deeply worrying because obviously we think that population growth is…Overshoot, meaning that we're overshooting the capacity of our resources and that for everyone to live like Americans, we would need 10 Earths—and obviously we don't have 10 Earths.The current calculations say that we are already using 1.7 planets in order to maintain our standards of living, which is ridiculous because we still only have one planet. How can we already be using 1.7 planets? It doesn't make any sense.Wouldn’t they say this isn't sustainable? People who are very worried about running out of everything, when they talk about growth, it's never just growth, it’s “sustainable growth.” What they mean is sustainable environmentally.And when it comes to that, then of course we have to ask, how would this unsustainability present itself in the real world? People are living longer. People are living richer lives. The very fact that longevity had been expanding until COVID suggests that we are also living healthier lives. We are better fed. And not just that: As countries become richer, they have much more money to spend on environmental protection. The extraordinary lengths that Western societies go through in order to protect their oceans and their land and their biomass and biodiversity—nothing like this has been done by humans before. Where is this apocalypse going to come from? Another way of looking at it is the question of existential threat. Well, existential threat to whom? Existential threat to humanity? But how are we going to measure it? The only way we can measure it is by looking at how many people a year are dying due to extreme weather. And that particular statistic has been reduced by 99.8 percent over the last 100 years. So even though the language of the extreme environmentalist movement is getting more and more apocalyptic, the number of people who are dying due to extreme weather is continuing to collapse.Let me ask that question in a simpler way: Do we have the ability, do we have the resources, for everyone on this planet to have at least the standard of living as Americans and Western Europeans do today? Can we do that? That's the response I often get on social media: They’ll say that we cannot afford to have eight billion people living the way 300 million Americans do. Is that possible?If the basic premise of the book is correct, then yes, not just for eight billion, but potentially substantially more for the following reason: Ideas are not constrained by the laws of physics. Yes, the planets, atoms are constrained by the laws of physics, but not the ideas produced by the human brain. So long as you have more people living in freedom, communicating together, exchanging ideas—in the words of Matt Ridley, “ideas having sex”—then you can always come up with a solution to shortages, which would be, in that case, temporary, driving up prices, therefore incentivizing people to look for solutions. The essence of the book is, there are no physical limits to abundance; and therefore, it should be possible for the world to have the living standards of Americans.Is this a faith-based premise, based on a fairly short period in human existence? That you're assuming that we can still do it, that humanity is ingenious enough that we can continue to be more efficient and come up with new ways of doing things infinitely?Is it faith-based? Thomas Sowell has that great quote that the caveman had exactly the same amount of resources that we have in the world today. And the difference between their standard of living and our standard of living is the knowledge that we bring to bear onto the resources that we have. In fact, you might argue that the only reason why any resources are valuable is because of the ability of human beings to interact with them and produce value out of them. If you think about the immense difference between our standards of living and those of people in the Stone Age—again, the resources haven't gone anywhere, they're still with us; except for a few tons of metal that we have shot into space, everything else is still here: the same amount of copper, the same amount of iron—there is no reason to think that people 200 years from now who are much richer than us couldn't utilize those resources in a similarly beneficial fashion.The burden of proof is on the doomsayersLet me ask you this: Who should the burden of proof be on? People who are worried about the sustainability of growth, who think there's no way this Earth can tolerate eight or 10 billion people living like Western Europeans: Should the burden of proof be on them, or should the burden of proof be on you to say that, yes, we've done it in the past and we can continue to do it in the future?I think the burden should be on them in the following sense: This is not the first time that this particular concept has been proposed. The famous wager between Simon and Ehrlich was essentially…Explain that wager just very briefly for people. What is that wager?Paul Ehrlich is the famous biologist from Stanford University. He wrote the 1968 Population Bomb book, which became an international bestseller. He was on Johnny Carson's show like 20 times, scared and scarred generations of Americans into believing that the world was going to end because of lack of natural resources. In fact, it was based on his work that you've got Soylent Green, the famous 1973 movie with Charlton Heston. And that movie basically culminates in 2022—it's this year that the movie is supposed to happen. And of course, we never got anything like that. On the East Coast, Julian Simon at the University of Maryland basically challenged him to a bet. He said, “Look, Ehrlich, you pick any commodities you want and a time period of more than a year. We are going to put $1000 on it, and if the prices go up whilst the population expands, I'm going to pay you. If the prices go down, then you pay me.” And in fact, Ehrlich lost that bet and had to write Simon a check for $576. These believers in the apocalypse have been at this for so long that I feel that it's time for them to start convincing us that the apocalypse is coming, rather than us trying to remind them of all the previous predictions of apocalypse which didn't come true. I'm willing to go and do a bet like that.The other thing that you ask is, is this possible? Is it feasible for us to continue like that? I believe that it is feasible so long as we have at least part of the world that is still free economically and politically. I don't think that we can expect cutting-edge research from China, which is increasingly restrained politically and economically where people are not free to speak, interact with ideas. But so long as we are free in Western countries, be it the United States or some other country if freedom of speech comes to an end here, then we can still produce research, we can still produce progress. But of course, my belief, part of the book, is that the more people who are free, the better. It's not just about population, it's population times freedom. Freedom is incredibly important. China has been the most populous country for a very long time, but they were dirt poor until they started liberalizing. So the freedom component is very important.Why is this belief so persistent? I still hear people who still think that we are headed toward a population of 30 billion, who think that's a big issue, who are very surprised to learn that there are countries where if the population isn't already shrinking, it's very close. Do we naturally want to believe these kinds of stories? Was Julian Simon ever on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson?No, of course not. He never got any professional award in his entire life. And you are right to say that there was always an opposition to these Malthusian thoughts. Shortly after Malthus died, there was a big debate in Britain over who was right. Then they revisited the whole concept of shortage of natural resources in the late 19th century. So it goes through ups and downs.But there's something in that story. Have we identified what that is?There’s something in that story, and the big question is what it is. I think that this particular problem could have many fathers, so to speak. One of them is that people have been traditionally not numerate. And we have a problem with the notion of exponential growth and compounding. Paul Romer put his finger on it, and that is that ideas do not add up; they multiply. And so he's got that famous example of the periodic table. Once you start interacting with compounds consisting of 10 elements on the periodic table, which has 100 elements in it, you're talking about more possible combinations, more possible calculations, more possible recipes for future progress, than there are number of seconds since the beginning of the Big Bang, 14.5 billion years ago. There's just so much knowledge which can still be discovered. We have only scratched the surface of knowledge. I think that's part of the reason why people are so pessimistic: They do not understand the potential for creation of new knowledge. The other reason, probably, is that the world really is finite. That is absolutely true. It's also irrelevant, because it's what you do with those resources that matters. As I’ve mentioned with the example of sand and fibers, you can use resources in evermore valuable ways.The more people, the betterI know this isn't key to your thesis, but we do live in a universe. So if you say, “Maybe you're right today, but in 1000 years you'll be wrong.” Well, a lot can happen in 1000 years. If I'm betting on 1000 years, I would also guess that if we somehow hit some constraint here on Earth, we have a whole universe of stuff that we could draw upon.Well, absolutely. Can you imagine, if wealth continues to expand at the current rate, what sort of species we would encounter in 1000 years and their technological abilities?A lot of asteroids out there!What worries me is actually that there won't be enough people to explore all those possible avenues for creation of new knowledge. You mentioned population growth: Population is below replacement level in 170 countries out of 190. We are going to peak in 2060 and then start declining. Instead of worrying about 30 billion people, we are going to have to worry about a population that is going to be basically as big in 2100 as it is today. And that really constrains the knowledge horizon and how fast we get there. And that brings with it all sorts of other problems. When people say—and I was actually speaking to somebody yesterday about this—that perhaps we have enough wealth, I cannot help but think, imagine all the possible problems that we could encounter in the future, all the other existential threats: be it asteroids, or a new pathogen, or something like that. I want our society to be super rich so that if we need to shut down the economy for another year, we can afford to do so rather than do it with that. Or if we do encounter an asteroid that's hurling towards Earth, we have a super powerful laser powered by mega fusion power stations that can blast it out of the sky. We never know what the future is going to hold, but I would much rather have a wealthier society deal with it than a poorer and more technologically primitive society dealing with it.Despite the fact that these predictions that were made a half century ago have not panned out, that these bets have been lost, if there’s any example of the continued power of this idea, it’s really the movie Avengers and the Infinity War series. The key villain, Thanos—and this is a multi-billion-dollar franchise—and his entire plot is to kill half of all life everywhere in the universe because we're running out of space. Apparently plenty of people signed off on the idea and said, “Yes, the audience will accept that.” And the audience did accept that.In the book we talk about that movie, and I think that one in five Americans saw it. But it was just one of the movies made based on Malthusian principles. There was Kingsman and there was also Inferno, and they were all based on Malthusian ideas.I believe that one of the James Bond films was based on the peak oil theory, too. I would doubt that there was anyone at a Hollywood studio who said “This is an absurd idea.”I don't know whether you would call it genetic or cultural, but this notion of limits must be deeply embedded in our psyche. And the key to breaking with that thinking has to be the embrace of knowledge, understanding that knowledge can solve all of our problems. Just about everything that you see around you in the world today that you bemoan is due to lack of knowledge. People are dying of cancer because of lack of knowledge. Babies are dying in Africa from malaria because of lack of knowledge, although that's being fixed already by vaccines. The more knowledge, the better. Currently it's only the human mind that is capable of producing new knowledge, so we still need people. Maybe at some point in the future we are going to have a super smart AI that is going to produce its own new knowledge. But right now that's not a realistic option. I think that there is something to be said for population growth. Now, what we are certainly not suggesting is that people should be forced to have more babies. The book’s goal…Are there people who suggested that's what you're saying?I hope not. That’s certainly not something. The goal of the book is much less ambitious. The goal of the book is to say to all those parents around the world who are worried about bringing a new child into the world because it'll be a drag on resources, because it'll be a cancer on the planet: You don't have to worry about that. Your child has the potential of contributing to the scope and stock of human knowledge. We are basically just tackling one aspect of this anti-nativist, anti-natalist, and anti-humanist worldview, which is the issue with resources. If we can convince people that it's still okay to have children, the question famously posed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, then we will have done something good. 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

We’ve all heard the stories and statistics about the supposed death of American manufacturing. But America's industrial sector never truly went away. Many, many companies are thriving, and today's guest argues we're experiencing an outright renaissance. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I’m joined by Gaurav Batra, who previously co-led McKinsey & Company’s Advanced Electronics Practice in the Americas. Along with Asutosh Padhi and Nick Santhanam, he's the author of the new book, The Titanium Economy: How Industrial Technology Can Create a Better, Faster, Stronger America. This from the book:The Titanium Economy is the secret weapon of American industrial revival—the key to ensuring the country’s economic vitality as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses and we face steep competition from global rivals. The next few years will be critical, as the future growth of the Titanium Economy sector in the United States is far from assured. Investors, policy makers, and the public at large must appreciate the importance of providing more robust investment in these companies, as well as how their growth brings so many positive ripple effects for individuals and communities, providing more high-quality jobs and boosting the economic prosperity of communities and whole regions.So what is the Titanium Economy? Listen in to find out!In This Episode:* The US industrial renaissance (1:14)* The businesses of the Titanium Economy (7:48)* American industry and technology (12:29)* Workers in the US manufacturing sector (16:20)* Finding America’s next-generation industrial workers (21:26)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The US industrial renaissanceJames Pethokoukis: I think there's a caricature or perhaps a misperception about the US economy—I think you see it in the media—that the US economy is basically Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and big box stores. And that's basically your American economy, and it's certainly an economy that doesn't really make stuff in the physical world—with atoms—anymore. And the book, I think, is a corrective to that view. Why is that view wrong and, as you state, that the US is in the middle of an industrial renaissance?Gaurav Batra: Jim, you very accurately represented the perception of what's happened in the US economy over the last couple of decades. I think the story, whenever anybody tells it, is mostly about technology companies. It's mostly about financial services, mostly about Wall Street. As we started digging in, not just with the book but our work in the industrial sector, we realized that the reality is actually very disconnected with this perception. The reason we say that is, if you look at just pure numbers, still 20 percent of the US economy is completely dependent on US manufacturing. That number has not gone down. It may not have increased, but that number has sustained pretty well. If you look at employment, this sector still employs the bulk of the US economy's workers today. In terms of pure numbers, in terms of relevance, the sector never went away. It definitely slowed down because other sectors started growing, but manufacturing as a sector in the US still remained pretty staunch. That is at the sector level.As you unveil that a little bit and go under the hood, you realize that whenever we talk about Wall Street, we talk about the Facebooks, the Alphabets, the Apples of the world delivering incredible stock market growth. Everybody talks about how much of that you own in your portfolio. But the moment you start unraveling the industrial landscape, you actually see several—and the number is actually north of 20, 30—companies who have done actually fairly well over a much longer time period in terms of even delivering value to their shareholders. And these companies have done it not necessarily leveraging outsourcing, but they've done it by just strong, sensible business practices: how they run their companies internally, how they work with their customers, how they potentially create a niche for themselves in particular markets. For us, at least as we started (and I spent about a decade in this particular industry), as I looked at that perception, which was exactly what my idea was coming into the sector, versus what I took away from it after being a practitioner in the segment for about 10, 12 years: the perception and the reality don't match. I think the perception, as you rightly said, is all about Wall Street, all about technology, all about financial services. But the reality tells us that manufacturing has never gone away. Given what's happened over the last two years with the pandemic and the geopolitics of the globe around us, it is only telling us a flashing red [light] that this is actually going to get even more critical for all of us here in the US in the next couple of years.These are industrial companies. While they may not be classified as technology companies, they use technology. Consultants like talking about 5G and AI and cloud computing. But they're more than buzzwords. Those technologies are diffusing into the economy, and not just at places like Google or Amazon or Apple. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think what we're seeing in this industrial sector is these technologies are part of how they do what they do.Absolutely right. We think it's an essential ingredient to success going forward. To give you one example, there's a company called Bulk Handling Systems. It's based in Eugene, Oregon. They basically are recycling cardboard, cans, and plastic. Essentially stuff which has food in them. I think if you looked at them a decade earlier, they would tell you about all the manual processes, which is fairly unhygienic, about how somebody would have to pull that piece of food out of a cardboard can or a plastic can, and then put it in the recycling. Today, if you look at that company, it's using artificial intelligence, it's using latest-version technologies, it's using robots to find where these sediments are, getting them off the cardboard can and the plastics, and then essentially putting them through recycling. That's a very tangible example of how technology and the progress we've made there is really impacting the industrial landscape—and for the good. I think while this one might be on a production line—there are several others about how people are using similar techniques to ensure quality and efficiency on the production line—technology actually is also making these companies go to the next level of performance on pure, I would say, business processes.To give you another example, a place where I've seen technology help a lot of such companies is pricing. A lot of these companies create a lot of complicated engineering equipment. Equipment could be a boiler or a heat exchanger or a mixer for a food processing plant. It's not a standard thing you can buy off of Amazon. There's a lot of specifications going into it: temperature controls, material composition, process tolerances. People used to do all that work manually, in terms of negotiating with the customers, letting them design those kind of products. Today, they can go to a website. There's an electronic configurator, you can click and choose what kind of parameters it wants and it gives you a right outcome. And then similarly, it quickly tells you how much it's going to cost. A process which would have taken multiple weeks, in some cases months as well, is now getting compressed to a matter of days. I think technology will get pervasive. And the good part is, I think there's a very good fusion between what our industrial landscape does and what technology can provide to them to really make them go to the next level of performance, both in terms of meeting customer needs and satisfaction, and then, candidly, being much more robust [financially].The businesses of the Titanium EconomyIn those two examples, you've given two very different kinds of businesses. And in the book, you really give a sense of the span of the kinds of companies we're talking about. I wonder if you could give me a sense of the span of sectors that we're talking about.I think that's very relevant to discuss because I think a lot of times industrial is discussed as a monolith. It's very much discussed as a singular segment. But it's probably the worst articulation or the most inaccurate articulation of the segment we probably can come up with. Everybody has their own way of looking at it, the way we looked at it there are close to 90-plus what we call “micro-verticals.” And they essentially, as you rightly said, cover the whole spectrum.We wake up in the morning, we have a cup of tea or cup of coffee. The beans, which are being sent to us, have come from a food processing plant, which is either utilizing equipment or products which are being manufactured by companies, many of them here in the US. We pick up the phone in the morning to check our text messages, check our emails. The chips behind those phones—this has been obviously in the news of late quite a bit—come from semiconductor manufacturers. And the whole semiconductor industry, which is $400, 500 billion in size today, relies on innovations in precision manufacturing, which have been gaining over the last multiple decades. We get in our cars to go to work, automotive industries are now playing a big hand in it. We come to the office and we start writing on a piece of paper. The paper industry is there. Lunch is delivered to the office. It's packaged in specific packaging that's coming from companies like Sealed Air, where they're working on top-of-the-line packaging to keep the quality and the hygiene of the food high. And similarly, they're looking at packaging pallets of machinery and equipment, which is getting transported from one part of the country to the other part of the country.Anything I literally can touch is influenced by manufacturing in a meaningful way. So the spectrum is wide, and I think it's very important for us as members of society, as investors, as executives, to understand how complicated and how heterogeneous this segment is. Because once we start realizing that, not only do we see the importance of it in our daily lives, but then we also as executives, as colleagues, as workers, as investors in the segment, we are able to then understand the true value of these companies. A great example which always comes to my mind is a company called Graco. It’s based out of Minneapolis. What they specialize in is high propulsion of fluids. So they get spray painting fluids in a can. They figured out how to get peanut butter in a jar. If you look at their segment, I can call them industrials, but it’s nowhere related to tapping the automotive space or tapping the aerospace space, but they're looking at a particular niche in the market, and then having that change in mindset, having that change in how they view or how we view them then helps us appreciate that they're a market leader and they're a market leader in a need, which is not going to go away. We will be spray painting cars or spray painting something else. We will be eating peanut butter for a while.I think that's a great example because I don't think people think about flow control and fluid management very often. It's not a strict consumer name that people understand, nor is it manufacturing where you think of some sort of big factory, necessarily. But that is modern manufacturing that is essential to the modern American economy.Absolutely. I think there are countless examples like this, where companies are serving a very critical need. They're just not consumer brands, so we don't know their names. We can look them up if we wanted to. I think that's where they start suffering a little bit, in terms of both our mindset and our perception of these, and to the first question you asked: I think that's what then perpetuates at least our feeling that the whole economy is about the Facebook and Alphabet and Apples of the world, when actually there's a lot more innovation and value coming from the manufacturing sector as well.American industry and technologyTalking about technology and how these companies are using it. Again, I think there's a stereotype that this technology is employed by companies just to replace workers with some machine. I don't think that's probably the whole story.I think that's definitely not the full story, at least as well as my experience is concerned. Because I think there's definitely displacement. I think if anybody says that there is no displacement, then I think they're wrong. There is displacement in terms of what people are doing today. When technology comes in and makes it more efficient, then obviously as a responsible financial operator of a company, you would think about, “Hey, there is capacity opening up, so what should I do with it?” I think in the long term, there are definitely much more benefits, in my opinion. One is that the companies become much more healthier-going concerns, that they're able to invest in their own growth. And they can grow through investing in their own company’s expanding markets, they can go acquire somebody else. So there is, in the end, a greater good coming out of the fact that the company has not become healthier concerns.Then number two is, I think it does create a new job category. How many people would've been thinking about hiring data analysts or digital product managers in industrial companies 10 years earlier? Probably not many. But today, if you go on any job board, there are so many of these employment opportunities existing out there, which will create a new set of workers, a new set of employment opportunities for the economy. So my sense is, at least given what I've seen from my vantage point, there will be short-term displacement, which I think, again, with the companies getting to be more healthier concerns, we'll probably minimize the short-term displacement aspect of it. But in the longer term, there is a lot of value to be driven out of this. It will improve our productivity. It will make everything better. And then as that happens, what we have seen also, and we catalog in the book through what we call the Great Amplification Cycle, as companies become healthier concerns, the communities and the workers which work there become more prosperous. And with the workers becoming more prosperous, the local economies benefit. And we genuinely believe, just given how manufacturing is—it's not localized, it has to be dispersed, it has to be all over the country—that's one very effective level we have to bring down the inequality we are seeing today in our country. So going to the Midwest, going to some of the “rust belt” and re-invigorating manufacturing here, will really have great-second order effects to the communities there.That's a good point. So where are these companies? Where are they located?They are everywhere. Funny enough, when we started compiling the research for the book, our impression was they were in the “middle coast.” Not the east coast, not the west coast, mostly in the middle coast. But interestingly enough, they're actually on the east coast and the west coast as well. Tesla is a very good example of a manufacturing company running in Fremont, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. But these companies are everywhere. I think HEICO, if you look at it, based out of Florida, their businesses are in 80 cities across the country. Simpsonville we've cataloged in the book as a great example on the east coast where it's benefited from the tire industry and Sealed Air being in that particular region. Obviously the Midwest has a bunch of these around Milwaukee, and a lot of clusters are coming up around the Texas area. So they literally are everywhere, and that's why I think they are actually a great vehicle for ensuring the economic prosperity of the country, because just the reach is so vast.Workers in the US manufacturing sectorDo we have a sense of sort of the employment numbers? How many companies are we talking about, and do we have a sense of the employment?If you look at the industrial structure itself, I think it employs, at least from my last count, close to 18 to 20 percent of our overall labor base. I think if you look at it purely from a perspective of the number of companies, there are nearly 4,000 companies in the US which are industrial or manufacturing something or the other. Now, the cool part about all this is, in my opinion, most of them—I think three out of four of those 4,000 companies—are actually private companies. So you'll not find them on the NASDAQ or the Dow Jones. They're not traded publicly. They're held by private and mostly are family-owned companies which gives them a sense of resoluteness, which is very unique.And then number two is, close to 80 percent of these folks are actually fairly small in size. So south of $5 billion of revenue. These are, in the end, in numbers, tremendous. We hear about all of the big ones, but more than 75 to 90 percent, depending on what metric you look at, are companies which are not being publicly traded, are much smaller companies, and they are all over the country. That gives them the reach and the numbers. As I mentioned, they are close to about 18, 20 percent of the employment base. I think the coolest part about these guys, as we think about their impact on employment, is the two factors about this industry, which are pretty different and unique. Number one: You don't necessarily need a college degree to be a participant in this industry. People with vocational training, welding, fabrication training, can go join this industry that has really healthy careers. That's one. The labor market they cater to is much broader than other sectors, like if you take service or technology for that matter. And then number two: Compared to several other sectors, the pay in this sector, given that it's a fairly stable sector, is, depending on what analysis, anywhere between 40 to 100 percent higher than the average. More people get the chance to get employed. Over time, they all learn more than what their potential alternatives might be, and their reach is pretty high. All these factors have contributed to a huge engine for employment. And then, in turn, economic growth.How big a challenge is finding all those workers for these companies? That seems to be a big one.That's a huge one. And I think as we looked at least for the book and looking down [at] the things we need to change, the things which executives need to change about how they talk about their companies, how they run their companies. But I think the biggest change we need is in the labor supply area. And I think this is where the government and the public agencies have to come in and play a more active role. We're seeing some of that happen now with the CHIPS Act recently where obviously the government is putting a lot more emphasis on the local manufacturing industry. But I think this is the biggest challenge. Even if you compare the US with some of the other countries like Germany or China for that matter, that's where I think there is a big scope of improvement for us to essentially enable some of these public agencies, through funding, through programs with community colleges, through programs with vocational institutes, to essentially get more and more of that supply up. I think if you look at COVID times certainly when demand for a lot of these products like PPE or some of the home equipment went up because everybody started staying at home, the biggest challenge actually was to get workers to get to the factory, to be able to run these factories on more than one shift, to be able to cater to the increased demand. So far what we've seen, the government is headed in the right direction. I'm assuming more will come, which I think will be really fantastic.In the meantime, what we've seen is just companies doing things by themselves. I think one [thing] I really enjoy and I feel is encouraging is if you look at a company called IDEAL Industries, they have what they call an IDEAL Olympics. That's the place where they basically bring in talent, which is like welding talent, which is like machinist talent, and really attract people to that job category and job family and try to increase supply locally for them, for labor. So you’re absolutely right, it’s a huge problem. I think a lot more needs to be done urgently, because this is not something which gets solved overnight. So any move we make today will give benefits in a few years’ time. But just given the importance of the sector and the fact that this is among the biggest bottlenecks today, I think requires immediate attention on fixing this problem.Finding America’s next-generation industrial workersHow much of that talent problem is just a cultural problem where kids think, “Boy, I'd love to work for Google,” or, “I'd like to be a social media manager. I don't want to be a welder,” even though that might be a more satisfying job over the long term than being a social media manager. And that's where the jobs are; those aren't just 1950s jobs. Those aren't just middle-20th-century jobs. Those are 21st-century jobs still.You're right. I think that mindset from our side, what we teach our kids and how we inform them about what their options and career trajectories might be, I think is critical. And I think that comes back to our homes and comes back to our societies. I remember, we were interviewing a CEO for the book, and the quote that stuck with me was, “I have a harder time getting people in my factories because they much rather would be baristas at a Starbucks than actually come work in my factory when they would literally earn at least two times that amount within a few months already.” I think that really points to the fact that there is an element of training people, but I think the first step starts at home and first step starts in our minds: how we can get to our kids and our families the value and the purpose a manufacturing job can provide them. I think this is where we should get ahead of it as industry executives to talk about how prosperous lives can be in this particular segment, and then also change the image of the segment. Even before I started working in the segment intensely, my picture of a factory was, you are greased up, you are dirty, it's high temperatures, it's not exciting.Loud. Very loud and hot.Very loud. In some specific areas that might be true, but if you go through, I would venture 90 percent of the factories, they are spick and span. There is automation everywhere. There is safety. Working conditions are much different than what our perceptions are. So I think there has to be an element of that teaching, which the executive needs to do, about what kind of careers would manufacturing be able to afford folks. And then there's teaching at home also, I think, which we need to at least give to our kids, that there are multiple options: social media and retail and whatever, but we should also then be making sure we are talking about manufacturing as a real alternative given what it can afford.We talked a little bit about training. Is there anything else you’d like to see the federal government do?I think one thing which has always been an interesting topic for me is, I think if you bring focus and we bring transparency and accountability to what we do, we typically make good progress. So I would love to see—I don't know how best you put it… We have the surgeon general for the US. Why is there no chief manufacturing officer for the US? Somebody whose job is to ensure that the sector is being done in as healthy a state as possible, somebody whose job is to make sure we're not surprised, for example, with what we saw at COVID. Suddenly we had shortages of critical things at home. Obviously dollars will help, funding will help, policy will help. But I think to make sure that we don't play catch up all the time, one thing I would love to see, and this is my personal opinion, is something like a CMO for the United States. It's his or her job to make sure that they are thinking about the sector, what the sector needs not just today and five years down the line, 10 years down the line, and to make sure we don't kind of fall back. We always are proactively ahead of the curve on that. So that's one idea at least as we were doing our research that kind of stuck with 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

When Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down, resulting in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. In response, the Japanese government shut down all of its nuclear reactors. But subsequent economic research reveals that the unintended consequences of abandoning nuclear energy have been worse than the accident itself.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Matthew Neidell, an economist in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. In 2021, Matt coauthored a paper on those unintended consequences called “The unintended effects from halting nuclear power production: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi accident.” From that paper: This paper provides novel evidence of the unintended health effects stemming from the halt in nuclear power production after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. After the accident, nuclear power stations ceased operation and nuclear power was replaced by fossil fuels, causing an increase in electricity prices. We find that this increase led to a reduction in energy consumption, which caused an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures, given the protective role that climate control plays against the elements. Our results contribute to the debate surrounding the use of nuclear as a source of energy by documenting a yet unexplored health benefit from using nuclear power, and more broadly to regulatory policy approaches implemented during periods of scientific uncertainty about potential adverse effects.In This Episode:* The Fukushima meltdown (1:30)* The consequences of Japan’s shift away from nuclear (7:30)* Japan’s nuclear reversal (17:15)* Public perceptions of nuclear risks (20:43)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The Fukushima meltdownJames Pethokoukis: The title of the [working] paper is "Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident." Let's start with a quick explanation. What is the precautionary principle?Matthew Neidell: One thing I should clarify first: The title of the paper ended up changing. We do talk about the precautionary principle, but it ended up not being the title in the published version. We got a lot of pushback on the use of “precautionary principle” in the title. That said, I'm happy to talk about it, because I think everything in here is relevant to the precautionary principle.You could teach a whole intro to econ class from this paper. Two things that pop out to me are the precautionary principle and also the idea of trade-offs, because this paper is very much about trade-offs. Starting with that, in what way do you think those principles are illustrated by the Fukushima accident?I think what's really important here is that—this is almost anytime we think about nuclear but especially when big accidents happen, like Fukushima—we tend to focus on the one thing that happened and we don't think about the alternatives. That's the important thing. We think about nuclear as “nuclear carries risk.” And it does carry risk. There are dangers associated with nuclear. Just about anyone should know that who is following this. But it's “How do the dangers compare to something else, to the alternatives that we can use?” One of the problems is that we tend to think of nuclear in isolation. Like people are just saying, “Nuclear is bad, therefore we shouldn't do it.” And that's the kind of precautionary principle aspect of things. It says, “Unless we are fully informed about the risks associated with something, there's no uncertainty associated with the risks with something, we shouldn't do it.” And that's hampering because there are so many opportunities that are out there that carry risk. And if we just say, “Let's not engage in these opportunities because there's a chance of risk,” we end up cutting back on so many things that we might otherwise do.There's a scale of nuclear accident severity. It's a seven-point scale, and so far there have only been two level-seven—the worst—accidents: One was Chernobyl, and the other was Fukushima. In our experience in the nuclear age, Fukushima was one of the absolute two worst accidents that we've had. If you're looking for an example, this would seem to be a fantastic test case about just how dangerous it is, and also just how dangerous the counterfactual is.Yeah, I think that's right. They are the two most dangerous, the third one being Three Mile Island.That's actually down the list. I think that’s a five. We'll start with the actual accident: What do we know about the fatalities and the damage from the accident itself?The biggest thing that people focus on are the radiation deaths. We have the meltdown, there's radiation that's getting out in the environment that's not contained, and how many people are being exposed to that and dying from cancer as a result? That is, I think, the biggest fear to most people. So far we only have estimates of that. We don't know that precisely because people are dying from cancer, unfortunately, all the time. So how we trace those back to this particular accident is hard to know precisely. But we have ways of estimating that, and the estimates out there—and these are not just estimates of how many radiation deaths we've seen so far, but also how many we expect to see over the next 10 or 20 years because of this accident. And the kind of leading number out there that we reference in the paper is 130. That's the number of estimated radiation deaths because of the Fukushima accident.You're right, that's what people would mostly focus on. What was the impact of just evacuating because of the meltdown?With the evacuation, interestingly, that's where more deaths were. Some of the exact numbers are kind of fuzzy what exactly they are, but estimates put it around probably 1000, 1200 deaths or so because of the evacuation process. What's interesting about that is, like you said, that's not the first line of effects that we're expecting to see. Certainly, when it came to the evacuation, there was mayhem when this is happening, but maybe a little bit too much mayhem that led to extra accidents from the evacuation that we shouldn't have seen.Is that because you're moving sick people from hospitals or there are auto accidents? Why do so many people die during evacuations?That's a good question, because I think it was a little bit mysterious why the numbers were so high. I think it's the kind of things that you could imagine. We're shuffling people away who maybe weren't the most mobile people to begin with, and were moving them away and that's wreaking havoc as a result. Or you have this mass evacuation and there are accidents along the way. All of that could be contributing to it.The consequences of Japan’s shift away from nuclearThose are the deaths that we can calculate from radiation, from the evacuation. But then the Japanese government responded. It responded with a change in energy policy and that had consequences. What did the Japanese government do? And then what did you find about the consequences of their actions?What the government did—I'd say it was in response to a lot of protests that were happening at the time, at least that was one important contributing factor—was they halted the use of nuclear power as a source of energy in the country of Japan. Until Fukushima happened, about 35 to 40 percent of their energy was coming from nuclear power. And then after Fukushima, it went to zero percent. They weren't using nuclear power for any of their energy. And a couple of other countries that weren't directly involved took similar paths. Germany started phasing out nuclear power, is one big example as well.Talk about unintended consequences from Germany.Yes. And that leads to another can of worms that opens up with GermanyYour paper is not even about geopolitics. We could go into that, too. In Japan, no nuclear, which I assume was the cheap energy source for Japan at the time—and the cleanest.It was. The important thing is that it was a cheap, reliable, and clean source of energy. We don't focus so much on the clean aspect of it in this paper, but I think that's important too. What we really focus on was that it was a relatively inexpensive source of energy. There are all kinds of questions about providing nuclear power. It's very expensive to build these plants, but once they're up and running, they provide energy at pretty low costs. They had a really reliable source of low-cost energy, and all of a sudden they said, “We're going to get rid of 40 percent of our country's energy supply.”They’ve still got the energy demands that they need to meet. People still need to heat their homes. They need to cool their homes in the summer. Not to mention all of the other basic functions in your home—keeping the lights on and the fridge running. So they had to figure out how to meet those energy demands, and what they did in meeting those energy demands was they started importing fossil fuels. Mainly from mainland China is where they started importing those fuels.I assume that's coal, mostly.Coal, gas — those were the two main things that were coming in. And when they were coming in, they were now providing the energy to fill that gap in demand. But they were now more expensive than using nuclear. People's energy bills were going up. Depending on the area of Japan, we're talking about some places were seeing energy bills going up 30 to 40 percent. If you think about during times of the year when you're using energy the most, the middle of winter when you're heating your home to try to keep a nice comfortable environment at home. And now your bill has gone up by 30 to 40 percent—a lot of people ended up cutting back on their energy use.And this is another economics 101 principle: As the price of a good goes up, people are going to consume less of it. So we saw people cutting back on their energy use, and they're cutting back on their energy use during the coldest time of the year. What's important about that is that's when energy use is really important for your health. One of the things that a climate-controlled environment is doing is it's protecting you from the elements. It's protecting you from freezing temperatures that, most people can relate to, don’t feel good on a regular basis. But also if you have people who might be experiencing heart disease or other kinds of more frail states to begin with, if they're now experiencing colder temperatures for a prolonged period of time, this could be pretty harmful to their health.And what you did is you looked at a section of large cities to try to figure out those health consequences?That's what we did. After we found the areas where we saw the decrease in energy usage, we also asked, “Did we see increases in mortality in those areas as well?” And that's precisely what we found. We found that when it was cold out, in the winter—temperatures hovering around 30, 40 degrees, think zero degrees Celsius, right around freezing—when temperatures were falling into that range and energy prices were higher, we saw increases in mortality compared to times where we had similar temperatures but before the increases in energy prices.You looked at about the 20 or so largest cities over the early 2010s, from 2011 to 2014, and you calculate about 1300 additional deaths.Because of the higher energy prices, we estimate there are an extra 1300 deaths in the cities where we were able to estimate the effects here.(1) I assume there would be more if you looked at the entire country; (2) to what extent do you believe this has been an issue beyond 2014?Both of those are reasons that we think the number is even higher than the 1300. Our study only focused on about 30 percent of the Japanese population, just because that's where the data was available to do the analysis. But if we project our estimates onto other areas, we have every reason to think that there are effects there as well. We think those numbers can be even larger than the 1300. And then also our analysis ended in 2014. There's always a lag on when you can get data and it takes some time to do the analysis. But those effects very likely persisted beyond 2014 as well. So we think the number of deaths is certainly greater than the 1300. It’s hard to put exactly what the number is on it, but we'd say easily it should be several thousand more.I don't know if you examined this, but do you know if that potential consequence was part of the shutdown debate? Or was the debate just about “This is too dangerous of a technology, we need to shut it down”?Unfortunately, I think the debate is mostly around just the risks. This is getting back to what we were talking about earlier with the precautionary principle and just focusing on one aspect and losing sight of the whole picture. It was really just saying “This is the risk that we face from using nuclear, so we shouldn't do it,” instead of thinking “These are also the benefits that nuclear brings.” And we haven't even touched on some of the other benefits that nuclear brings. We've just talked about the price benefits right now, that it brings lower energy costs. And we talked a little bit about the potential air quality and greenhouse gas impacts as well. But that's mostly lost at least in the protests that are against it. They're really focusing on the risks and not thinking about the benefits from it.Matt, I don't know how much time you spend on Twitter. I spend too much. Sometimes I get the impression that there's a certain segment on Twitter who thinks economists are too involved in public policy. But this seems like an absolutely perfect example of where you actually need somebody talking about economics, about trade-offs, about other potential consequences and counterfactuals.Yeah, I think that's right. Obviously as an economist I'm going to promote what I do as being useful. But it gets back to, I think it was Truman who said, “Give me a one-handed economist,” because all the economists say, “On one hand this, but on the other hand that.” And that's really thinking about the trade-offs here. But it's hard to imagine any situation where there isn't a trade-off, where any decision we're making, there's not also an alternative decision that we can make that has impacts as well. I know that is maybe a bit self-serving and that's what economists do. That's how we approach every problem. We think about not any one thing in isolation, but try to think about the whole problem and everything that's happening in the problem, the costs and the benefits.Japan’s nuclear reversalJust to stick with Japan for another moment, they have now reversed course. Japan is now re-embracing nuclear. To what extent have you followed that policy reversal? Part of it seems to be about climate change. I don't know how much also has to do with the kind of findings that you have in the paper.I don't know the details behind what's driving them to make that decision. But yes, they're planning on bringing back—what is it, seven or nine plants that they're going bring back online? I think a lot of that has to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think that's a big thing because right now we see gas prices going up everywhere. Whether you're directly relying on Russian gas or not, it's still world markets that are determining prices there. And we see energy prices are going up, and we're especially fearing this winter. The Russian invasion started at the tail end of the winter last year so we had some time to prepare. The hope was things wouldn't go on as long as they are. But they are going on as long as they are, and now we have to think about this winter ahead where we're going have to think about higher energy prices for a lot of people, and how are we going to deal with those higher energy prices?One way to deal with those higher energy prices is to increase the supply of energy, and that will hopefully bring down the price of energy. I think that's a big part of bringing the nuclear plants back. I think the same thing is happening in Germany as well. They were slowly decommissioning all of their nuclear plants. They hadn't fully phased them out. I think it was actually supposed to happen this year, 2022. And I think maybe now they're putting the breaks on that and saying “We need to keep some of those plants alive,” especially because Germany in particular is very dependent on Russian natural gas.There was a somewhat similar study done looking at excess deaths in Germany from switching from nuclear to more coal-fired plants, looking at air pollution, dirtier air causes deaths. That is not something you looked at, though I imagine it would be a factor.That's not something we looked at directly, but it's absolutely another factor. And this is one that we just looked at the price differential between nuclear versus coal or gas. Another super important benefit from nuclear is that when it's actually producing the energy for people to use, it's not emitting any pollutants locally. So it doesn't have an effect on air quality. When the alternative is coal or gas, that's leading to emissions that contributes to particulate matter, which is this really small fine pollutant that gets deep in our lungs, gets into our circulatory system and causes significant number of deaths. I believe particulate matter is the leading environmental cause of mortality around the globe.Public perceptions of nuclear risksDo you have a sense that people overestimate the fatalities from nuclear accidents? I don't know if you watched the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO. It would be very easy for someone kind of watching that and maybe half on their phone to think that hundreds of thousands of people died. And I recently watched a documentary, I think it was on Netflix, about Three Mile Island. They also tried to give the sense that many, many people died, even though the evidence seems pretty anecdotal, what they did give. They didn't bring a lot of experts and economists talking about deaths. In political decision-making, it's easy for politicians to focus on highly visible costs and highly visible benefits. But it seems like with nuclear, they're also looking at costs that perhaps don't even exist, that there's just the sense that it's a lot more dangerous than what it is.I think that's right. Part of it is about salience. When we think about a nuclear meltdown, it's a shot heard around the world. Everyone knows about Fukushima and everybody knows about Chernobyl. Even if we have the opportunity to forget about Chernobyl—not that we should forget about Chernobyl, we should still remember and learn from Chernobyl—we still have reminders about Chernobyl and the miniseries coming out and telling us how bad it was. If we had a Chernobyl-like incident every five years, we'd be having a different conversation. Then we could say, “Maybe nuclear should be off the table. Maybe it's not worth it.”But we have very different calculations. We've had one Chernobyl, the worst incident we've had. And then the second-worst incident we've had is Fukushima, where we have 1200 or so deaths. It's orders of magnitude better, and that's only the second-biggest accident that we've had. And if that's what things are like going forward, that's much safer, clearly much safer than Chernobyl. I think the interesting thing embedded in the question you're asking me is about the salience, that we hear about the deaths from these accidents. But the deaths from coal and the deaths from gas, you don't hear about them. They're just in the background. Every day there are people dying from particulate matter, but we're not saying, “It's because of the burning of coal we now have this person dying from particulate matter.” It's just that we know there are some people that are dying and we can later statistically attribute it to the burning of fossil fuels. But it's not reaching salience the same way that a nuclear accident is reaching salience.An analogy that comes to mind is thinking about flying versus driving. Flying, statistically speaking, is so much safer than driving. The amount of airplane-related deaths in a given year is very small, but the amount of deaths from car accidents is, again, orders of magnitude higher. Car accidents are happening every day, and the only way you really hear about car accidents, other than if it's a really famous person who's involved, is your local news. They're not making national news. But when a plane crash happens, it's national news—it's international news. But when was the last big plane crash that happened? I don't know. I couldn't tell you. It has to have been at least several years away. I know COVID put a lot of pause on a lot of travel, but it has to be years away from when that last accident happened. Yet I think a lot of people are more scared of flying than they are of driving, even though the risks of death from driving are much higher than the risks of death from flying.Where did the precautionary principle come from? Are there philosophers or economists that have been pushing this idea since the 1970s? Or is this a much old idea that has found new salience?I don't know enough of the history of it going back in time. It definitely gained prominence in the last 50 years. With a lot of the environmental movement that was growing out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the precautionary principle took more kind of formal definitions and became, in some cases, an official part of policy. That said, the definition of it has changed over time, the precise way that the precautionary principal is defined. Before then, I'm sure it's been used at least unofficially. This is where the precautionary principle gains traction. You can almost think of it as “better safe than sorry.” This is how it gets pushed: “Let's be safe first rather than learn we made a mistake and be sorry later.” It's probably a good way to think about your daily life as an individual, thinking about “better safe than sorry” when you make decisions. But it's not clear that suddenly becomes a good tool for making decisions for millions of people. It now starts to take a different flavor to it, because as an individual, when you're making this better-safe-than-sorry decision, you're thinking about one thing, one step at a time. In front of you, you have a cup of water, and you say, “I don't know what's in this cup of water. I don't know how long it's been sitting there. Maybe it has some bacteria because it's been sitting there for too long and I could get sick.” So then you say, “Better safe than sorry. I'm not going to drink this cup of water and later I'm going to do something else that's going to quench my thirst.” That's fine, that's perfectly reasonable. I make decisions like that for myself and for my family. But when you're sitting there making that decision when you have lots of choices in front of you, it becomes different, because then it gets back to like what we talked about before. You have to think about the trade-offs associated with any decision that you make, that if you're not choosing this, you're now choosing something else. And we’ve got to think about the benefits and risks with all the alternatives that we face. And the precautionary principle just gets us away from thinking about those alternatives.If you were to rank the papers I've mentioned in my writings over the past five years, this paper probably ranks pretty high. It embodies these principles. It provides, I think, a very easy way for people to understand some important principles and concerns a pretty important topic: energy. How much publicity have you gotten from mainstream media about your paper? What kind of response have you gotten, either from environmentalists or economists? I think it is a pretty important piece of research.Thanks for the kind words. I'd say we've gotten some media exposure from this, but not a tremendous amount. I'm doing this podcast and I did another podcast recently and it's gotten written up in a couple of places, but I'd say it hasn't really hit mainstream media. Some of that, to be fair, is I don't do much self-promotion of my work. You said you spend too much time on Twitter. I spend probably too little time on Twitter. More promotion might have helped with that, so some of that is a result of our choices too.It seems like, at least as applied to energy because of climate change and more immediately because of the Russian invasion, people are thinking a lot about past decisions and about trade-offs. Do you think views about nuclear energy are changing, as far as the riskiness and more importantly the riskiness compared to other decisions like becoming dependent on a potential enemy for your energy?I do think it's changing a little bit. And it's interesting how other factors make you change your viewpoint on this. The risk from nuclear hasn't really changed at all, but it's the risk from the other thing has changed. We have to be thinking about the alternative options. We talked about Japan and Germany now changing their tune on nuclear, we also see in the Inflation Reduction Act that was signed recently that now nuclear is being promoted in that as well, encouraging the development of nuclear power. We see Diablo Canyon, the nuclear plant in California, which they were going to decommission. It now looks like they're reversing course on that. I think there is a change.The question always becomes: How long does this last? If there's another nuclear accident, that could quickly change things. There's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to nuclear and that uncertainty is different than the uncertainty when it comes to other energy sources. If another accident happens, it could be that all of a sudden we change course on nuclear. I hope that doesn't happen, because I feel like we learn from the mistakes. We know with Chernobyl there were just a lot of missteps that happened that led to that accident. And I just heard something recently that they actually had a safety inspection the night before the actual meltdown happened, which is kind of amazing that that could happen. A lot of the information there is behind lock and key with the Russian government, so we don't know a lot of the details. But we've learned over time how to make it safer and safer. Our ability to detect problems is just greater and greater. Hopefully what's happening is that we're learning how low the risk is from nuclear. And what's important is for everyone to think of it in context to the alternative. That is where we're at a hard point with—we probably don't want to go too far down this path of information and misinformation—what do people know about the risks and how big they are? I don't know that number offhand, what people think about nuclear. But a lot of people think that the risks are worse than they are, and that doesn't help public discourse if people are misinformed about the dangers. 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

Welcome to part two of my conversation with Michael Mandel, vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. In the last episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, we considered the capital investments and job-creating power of America's major tech companies. In this episode, we discuss the Biden administration's CHIPS and Science Act, industrial policy, and whether we should expect an uptick in US productivity growth.In This Episode:* Innovation and industrial policy (1:14)* Looking at productivity numbers (4:14)* How technology affects jobs (7:19)* The future of productivity (12:38)* Investing in bioscience and materials science (15:00)* Policy for societal resilience (19:29)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Innovation and industrial policyWhat do you make of this recent CHIPS and Science Act and perhaps a move in the United States toward what some people call industrial policy—a phrase that can mean a lot of things. I think in this case it means subsidizing sectors that government thinks are important, especially in competition with some other countries.I have to say, quite honestly, that I took my eye off the semiconductor industry for a couple of years because I assumed we were in good shape. And then when I looked over, I said, “Wait a second, something happened here. All of a sudden, we're not in good shape anymore.” I support investment in this sector. I don't consider this to be classic industrial policy at this point. I just consider this to be doing what we've done in the past. We did this with memory chips: There was government intervention with SEMATECH. You sort of say, “Here's a sector, we need to fix it. Let's just go ahead and spend some money here.” We haven't gotten to the point of being strategic yet. This was not really a strategic investment. We're just saying, “Let's throw money at this problem.” We know that at the margin, throwing money at this problem is going to get us further along than we need to be.Do I think that more of this is needed? The country you didn’t mention, of course, was China. I do think China's innovation policy is a really interesting question because we haven't had an experience with authoritarian countries that were successfully innovative. For a lot of reasons, because it seems that capitalism works better to produce good innovation. If it turns out that authoritarian innovation works, many countries around the world will want to imitate that model because it's much more comfortable for governments to run innovation from the top. The only reason why they allow innovation to bubble up from the bottom is because doing it the other way doesn't work.What I would expect to see in the US is a combination of the two, a lot that is bubble up from the bottom. We will be faced with technological and social and environmental challenges that we can't imagine. And we have to have invested the money in the new technologies before we get there. We don't know what the problems are going to be. We don't know what the technologies are going to be. We discovered this in the pandemic, where it turned out that mRNA technology, which was sitting on the shelf for 20 years, was a solution to a problem that we didn't even know it was a solution to. But if we hadn't been investing in it so it wasn’t there, it wouldn't have been available as quickly as it was.Looking at productivity numbersStatistically, we had this productivity boom during the pandemic, at least in 2020, 2021. And people read about a lot of technologies happening: maybe AI spreading, mRNA, CRISPR, rockets. The first half of this year, statistically, was not so good with productivity. These numbers tend to jump around a lot. What's the reality going forward?As you know, productivity numbers, especially total factor productivity numbers, are useless over any period less than 10 years. We mentioned earlier the shift of hours from the household sector to the market sector as part of e-commerce. Remember: Hours in the household sector are not measured as part of the productivity basis. If you actually include them, it significantly adds to the productivity growth in this period. Because what's happened is, if we take the total amount of hours being put into consumer distribution, which is both the market hours and the non-market hours, market hours has gone up, which is what shows up in the official productivity numbers. If you look at retailing, you don't actually see very much productivity gain because, in fact, the hours have gone up a lot. But they're not counting the fallen hours in the household sector. What has happened is when you count the fall of hours in the household sector, productivity growth—I haven't done these calculations recently, but it goes up a lot: quarter percentage point a year, half a percentage point a year. It’s actually a significant increase.In the sector or economy-wide?Economy-wide. Because it's a lot of hours. The degree to which telehealth, for example, removes the necessity of people to drive to the doctor's office, if we are not including those hours in our calculation of productivity growth, we're missing the big effect. And you can go through the economy like that: places where there were movements outside of the hours in the market, in the household sector, just not being counted. That even leaves out increases in output in the info sector that's not being measured. I need to go back to something else that you said, which was the productivity boom that we saw in the past: My belief is that a lot of that was mismeasured, too. But over-measured.When? What period?I'm talking about the early 2000s. There was the apparent boom from 2000-2007, increase in productivity.How technology affects jobsWe had the ‘90s boom, and then we had the pop of the internet stock bubble. But, statistically, we still saw a lot of productivity growth after that.My belief, looking at the numbers, is that a lot of that is mismeasurement of a shift in purchasing from US manufacturing firms to, say, overseas manufacturing firms, which were being picked up as a productivity gain rather than a price drop. Now we're getting to really abstruse stuff, but it doesn't really matter.That doesn't make me feel good, because I like seeing years of high productivity growth and we haven’t seen as many as I would like since 1973.I understand, but that actually explains why it is that people are so pissed.Because in the ‘90s we had high productivity growth driving high wage growth.That’s right. And then you did not have high wage growth after that … Retailing was in some sense a bellwether industry. Originally McKinsey was writing reports about retailing being a high-productivity industry. And then they realized it was a low-productivity industry. And in fact, real wages stayed low for many years and did not start increasing until Amazon and the other e-commerce companies came in and started taking away the really low-wage jobs which were moving out of retail, into e-commerce and fulfillment as much higher-wage jobs. What I look for is wage growth. If I'm not seeing real wage growth, I assume that I'm not seeing productivity gains, because I'm seeing real wage growth in the areas that I think real productivity gains are happening—whether or not they're being measured or not.Do I think it's going to spread to the rest of the economy? I do. We know what it looks like. The question is, are we ready for this? Are we ready for telehealth? Let’s just stick with telehealth for a second. You could eliminate big chunks of healthcare workers and costs on the consumer side by shifting as much as you could to telehealth. That becomes a byproduct of the money that's invested in broadband and 5G. And then the question is, are you measuring this correctly? And are you doing what you need to do to make this work? And the case of telehealth, of course, is a licensing problem: being able to get healthcare connections in a state that's different than yours isn't always the easiest thing.Some people who listen to this will say, “That economist is being flippant about job loss. This is another job-killing technology.”I think what you want to think about is that we have not seen any evidence of job killing at all. Let’s go to the autonomous vehicle and the truck drivers. Your autonomous truck is going to have to be kept in really good repair. It’s going to have to be kept highly tuned, because it's out there by itself. If you want to do this, you want to run it all night. You’re either going to have somebody sleeping in the cab or you actually have to have something that is kept in as good repair as the average airplane is. Which is really a lot. And so you're talking about having a very large repair force, and you're shifting truck drivers from a dangerous job to a less dangerous job that is better paid.You also might need more road maintenance people. If you imagine a future where you’ll have cars driving 80 miles an hour, six inches apart from each other, you better not have too many potholes.That's exactly right.Some people don't want to switch jobs, though.I think that's important for us to respect. But I also think people like their lifestyles and they don't want to necessarily switch from a job that is partly physical to a job that's all nonphysical. What the e-commerce example tells us is that we can actually produce a lot of jobs that are of varying types, that are technologically enabled. What the telehealth tells us is that we have a lot of telehealth maintenance people that we didn't have before that are very practical. I think that if we stay on the track that we are, I'm not scared of [inflation]. I find it really weird when people say, “We produced too many jobs this month in the job report, because we’re scared of inflation.” You shouldn't be scared of inflation. You should be scared of low productivity. Jobs are good. Productivity is good.The future of productivityI like both. When we look back on this decade from 2030 or maybe 2035, will we say, “That was a high-productivity gain where we sort of stepped up,” or we still be having this conversation of “What do we need to do to boost productivity growth?”I'm going to take a step back here. I think we're going to discover that a lot more people are being kept out of the labor force by long COVID than we think right now, and that we're going to be running into labor shortages. And as we run into labor shortages, there is going to be incentive for companies to invest in technology in a way that they didn't do before. We are going to start seeing real growth and productivity as investments in technology spread from the digital sector and in a few other sectors into the rest of the economy. And we'll circle back around to healthcare. What we want from healthcare…Look at those capital investment numbers.If you look at capital investment over the last 10 years, it's been running at about half the rate as it was in the previous 10 years. Not just in the US, but in Europe—not in China, though. That's really what the big distinction is. China did not have the capital investment slowdown that the developed world had. We need investment in technology. We need a willingness to change. We need investment, not just in information technology, but in the biosciences. And that we need a regulatory structure that is flexible enough to adjust to this.What’s your best guess? I've brought this up several times in this podcast: Erik Brynjolfsson and Robert Gordon, the economists, have a public bet about productivity growth.In the end, I've got to go with Erik. Erik has been excessively sanguine up to this point. I think the numbers have, up to this point, leaned in favor of overestimating productivity growth. But I do think that coming out of this pandemic the combination of information technology and biosciences and whatever more investment we do in materials sciences, is going to be extremely important.Investing in bioscience and materials scienceI understand how IT might affect productivity growth. How would the biosciences? Because we would be healthier and work longer?That is one thing. Another thing has to do with agriculture. And related to that, energy.I know [CRISPR pioneer] Jennifer Doudna has an agricultural startup.The agricultural stuff is really important at this point, because if we're moving into a period of changing climate and we're moving into a period where food and water supplies are really important, then anything we can do to increase the productivity of the agriculture sector and also its ability to adjust quickly is just really important. The fact is that we collectively as a global economy have survived the worst pandemic in 100 years, basically without touching the growth rate of the economy. I mean, it touched it, whatever it did, but mainly we kept going. And the reason why we kept going is that we had invested so much in biosciences, especially in the US. We had the technology on the shelf that we needed fully operational. We could say, “Well, it doesn't do exactly what we wanted to do.” That's not important. It was there, it was ready to the degree that people were willing to roll it out.I think what we're going to find is that we're going to have a lot of other challenges that come up for which having a strong biosciences capacity is absolutely essential. Information technology is great, but it doesn't cover the full range of innovations. The place where we're missing is materials sciences. Other countries have spent more on materials sciences than we have. If you go back to your question about industrial policy, I would say that the main thing that we have to do is actually with semiconductors because semiconductors is basically about materials sciences, is more investment in materials sciences.The old nanotechnology initiative, despite that people had thought this was going to create tiny machines that built things, it was basically materials sciences.It was basically materials science. Once again, that's something that we spent some money on, then we stopped spending money on it. It’s still lurking out there as a possibility we may have. There may be stuff on the shelf right now that we can reach out for when we need it. The glass on smartphones was originally a Corning glass that they had made.They didn’t know what they could do with it.It was not good. They had designed it to be shatter-proof auto windows. And it was just bad for that. But it was in their drawer. And the thing about Corning, of course, is that they had such continuity in their research capabilities they actually remembered it. I'm on the plus side of this. I think that I'm of the school of, the future happens slowly then all at once.It's also how we go bankrupt.Let me tell you a little bit about my theory about innovation, both positive and negative black swans. We have very little ability to predict technology. We have very little ability to predict what the problems we're going to face are. What we do have is the ability that when we have something bad happen, can we ameliorate the negative consequences? And when we come up with a positive, good surprise, can we take advantage of that? We had a big negative happen with the pandemic and we managed to deal with it. The question is, can we take advantage of new technologies to push things forward, or are they going to languish on the shelf? And that's really the answer to your question: chop off the bottoms of the down rungs, boost the top rungs and the overall growth is higher.Policy for societal resilienceWhat you've also described there is kind of a societal resilience, the ability to do that. Since I work at a think tank, you work at a think tank, what is the five-point policy plan there?Let's actually just go back to manufacturing, because that's the one that I've thought about the most. In the broader sense, in terms of regulating technology, don't destroy the goose that is laying the golden egg. You can regulate it and you should regulate it. If you see the things that are wrong, if you have definitive things that you think are wrong and you can say, “Don't do that. We can punish you.” And then you can sort of judge for yourself whether or not people have followed that or not. If companies are doing well, encourage them to expand. Encourage them to expand because that's the best way to make sure that the higher productivity is in more places of the economy rather than fewer. In terms of manufacturing, which is so crucial, make sure that the technology is available at a local level for anybody to use so that they have a chance to experiment with it. The problem is we don't have enough experimentation going on.How does government do that?On the state level, you can imagine setting up centers that anybody could come into and use the latest—not a consumer model 3D printer, but the latest production model one, or have access to the latest-model robot, not an older one—and be able to say, “What could you do with this that is different?” Because you want to be able to throw smart people at the technology. One of the great things about information technology, the personal computer, is that it was available to everybody.What you've described almost reminds me of a World's Fair, where technology can be presented to people and they can interact with it.We haven't had a World's Fair in a long time, have we?We've covered this topic in the newsletter. What you're describing is maybe kind of World's Fair, but for small business.You can imagine that, with spinoffs for it. I'm not talking about industrial policy in the classic sense. There are a lot of technologies that are out there that don't have enough people working with them, that don't have enough financing available at the entrepreneurial level that we want to be able to make sure that they have available to them because then we'll have the creativity that we need to move to the next stage. But having said that, I'm feeling more positive going forward. In the next 10 years, I'm not going to put a number on productivity growth because I'm really getting more and more doubtful of our ability to measure it…If you did, remember: a number and a date, but not both. That's the classic stock market strategist.As you know, Jim, I’ve been at this a long time. What I usually forecast is big ups and downs, with the ups being bigger than the downs. How could that be wrong? 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