Faster, Please! — The Podcast

The conventional narrative about the economic history of World War II says that new learning from wartime mobilization jumpstarted a postwar golden age of fast economic growth. But, economist Alexander Field writes in his 2011 book, A Great Leap Forward, "It was not principally the war that laid the foundation for postwar prosperity. It was technological progress across a broad frontier of the American economy during the 1930s." Field develops that argument in his new book, The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War, released last fall. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm joined by Alex to discuss his argument.Alex is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.In This Episode* Depression-era technological progress* Economic detective work (8:04)* What about the scientific advances of WWII? (13:23)* The US economy if WWII never happened (17:39)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationDepression-era technological progressJames Pethokoukis: You write in A Great Leap Forward, a book that I consult frequently and mention frequently in my writings: “The years 1929-1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history. … It was not principally the war that laid the foundation for postwar prosperity. It was technological progress across a broad frontier of the American economy during the 1930s.” Your new book builds upon that argument, but could you, just for a moment, give a quick summary of A Great Leap Forward, and then how that moves into your new book?Alexander Field: The basic argument of A Great Leap Forward was that behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment for at least a decade, potential output was growing by leaps and bounds during the Great Depression. It wasn't really recognized until Simon Kuznets had to try to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what the potential of the economy could be. But the contributors to that were, I think, several. Number one was the last third of the conversion of the internal transmission of power within American factories from the shafts and belts, which was a signature of the 19th-century factory, to fractional-horsepower electric motors and electric wiring. And the second part was just an enormous amount, surprisingly, of research and development spending. Just astounding, if you think of the Depression as being so disastrous macroeconomically, but in terms of the number of people employed growing by leaps and bounds, number of labs established. And then finally, although it's widely accepted that the New Deal spending was too small in a Keynesian sense to immediately bring the economy out of the Depression, nevertheless, that spending on streets and highways and bridges and hydropower and so on had very strong positive supply-side effects. I think it's the combination of those three factors that I see as responsible for making potential output so much larger in 1941 than people thought it was.For the layman, your finding in that book, your thesis, is extraordinarily counterintuitive. You would never expect that underneath that sky-high unemployment number and the failing banks and the breadlines, there was this sort of innovative ferment happening and foundations laid for future progress. Similarly, to the extent that people would have an economic opinion about World War II, I would guess: 1) that it brought us out of the Great Depression, and 2) that it was a period of key advances, key technologies and the fact maybe we learned how to do things more efficiently during the war, whether it's build boats or what have you. Those two things are what played a huge role in postwar prosperity—I think that might be sort of the everyman way they would conceive of it. That is not exactly what you found.I think you've done a very good job characterizing what I see as the two key themes in the conventional wisdom about the Second World War. Basically, the argument that fiscal and monetary stimulus rapidly closed the output gap, the unemployment rate went from under 10 percent in ‘41 to unimaginably low, below 2 percent, in ‘43 and ’44. That's accepted and I'm not challenging that. But the second part of the conventional wisdom is what the economists call learning by doing: the emphasis on the decline in unit costs with accumulated output as a result of producing military durables. And the argument is exactly as you stated it. The argument is that learning spilled over into the postwar period and kind of underlined the supply side foundations for the golden age, which is ‘48 to ‘73. Now, my argument is different.I see the Second World War from a productivity history perspective as a detour. My argument is that the progress, the growth of potential output up through 1941, that's essentially most of the reason why the US stands astride the world economy in ’48, not what happened between ‘41 and ’48. It might have been different if the US had persisted in producing a hundred thousand piston-driven aircraft a year. But we didn't. We didn't produce piston-driven aircraft. Most of the products that we got very good at making, we stopped making them fairly soon after Victory over Japan Day. And I view most of that specific human capital as not really having a great deal of relevance after the war.As you mentioned, the things we got good at making were not just the instruments of war, but the instruments of war at a particular period. They were not going to be applicable to future conflicts, but they're also not applicable to a civilian economy that, once the war was over, began to expand very quickly. You mentioned the airplanes. I would also assume the kind of ship building that was done in the war was also not particularly applicable to the post-war era.That's right. That's exactly right. I see basically, the success of US industry under government leadership in producing the military ordinance that supplied our armies, as well as those of Britain and the Soviet Union, our allies, and so on — I see that basically as the application of technologies that had been honed in the ‘20s and particularly in the 1930s, producing automobiles and refrigerators, and applying that management experience to mass producing military durables, rather than the view that it was experience producing military durables that laid the foundations for the postwar period in terms of the supply side.Economic detective workI think people would think that we didn't need to look anymore at the Great Depression or World War II, that this is, they would say, settled science. We know exactly what happened and why it happened. Apparently the role of the World War II, what happened there, is not settled science. So what were people missing previously? What did you find that presents a different perspective?I think, as you say, it began with the findings about the Great Depression. I think what we're doing in the business of research, particularly academic research, is we're researching things: We're trying to find something new to say. But finding something new to say is only part of it; it also has to be something that actually might be true. And so it really it came out of really deep immersion in a variety of sources, both statistical and documentary: reading the minutes of the War Production Board, reading the minutes of the planning committee. And as this happened, a lot of preconceptions that I had about the war began to fall away. For example, the central empirical finding, surprising finding, in this book, or the argument, is that the productivity of American manufacturing—and it is within manufacturing that we would expect to see the effects of learning by doing—actually dropped dramatically between 1941 and 1945.And one of the things that I kind of picked up from this immersion in the sources was, rather than a view of American industry during the war as 24/7, 365 days a year, I get a picture of really profound production intermittency. In other words, essentially the need to shut down production lines, because it's a shortage economy. You've moved from a surplus economy to a shortage economy; sub-assemblies and raw materials and ultimately labor are being rationed. And if you can't get the heat exchanger you need, then the whole line is going to sit there. It's a very different view. And then you see this being said. In [War Production Board chairman Donald] Nelson's biography he talks about destroyer escorts: “Well, they were sitting there for six months because they couldn't get the part that they needed to complete it.” And those are kind of throwaway lines. They're there, but they’re not part of the kind of standard narrative; they're kind of overlooked as anomalies. And I don't want to get too Thomas Kuhn-ian about that, but if you start kind of pulling those anomalies together and assembling them and so on, then you get a different picture. And that's what I've tried to articulate in the book.I love your role as a kind of economic detective. It's not just about going to the BLS website and pulling up the data and then off you go. There's some real detective work as a historian, as much as an economist, going on here. It's really interesting thinking about the narrative because I think you're right that I picture December 7th, 1941, we head off to war and then it's all hands on deck, the production lines are never quiet, the steel mills are never cool, and it's all that way until August 1945. But perhaps now having gone through this pandemic, we're a little more aware of what happens when you have a shortage economy, which is what you found.Yeah, it's absolutely the case. I mean, ‘42 was absolutely a chaotic, terrible year. I would say there was no consensus in Washington that the United States was going to win the war, and it wasn't just the problems of suddenly having to produce a radically different set of products and making all this transition. The Japanese and the Germans weren't making it any easier for us, and I talk about that in the book as well. I think also vastly overlooked: I had absolutely no idea of the severity of what I call the rubber famine in the United States. When the Japanese overran Singapore in February ’42 and then rapidly shut off all of the exports, they cut off over 95 percent of the one strategic material in which the United States had effectively no domestic sourcing. And they were panicked, absolutely panicked about this, the Rubber Survey Committee. So that was another negative supply shock. And then the Germans were enormously successful in torpedoing what I call the tanker pipeline that was bringing petroleum and petroleum products from east Texas and Louisiana to the eastern seaboard. That's how it was moved and so forth. And between January and June of ‘42, they torpedoed 400 ships in the Atlantic and the Caribbean and just completely shut that down. And there were also serious consequences about that.What about the scientific advances of WWII?Was the war a time of great science productivity? Or is that also a detour toward science that was not as applicable to the postwar period, and we were not able to build on the gains and science of the ‘20s and ‘30s and so forth?The evidence is pretty clear, and I would cite James Conant, former president of Harvard and also a member of the Rubber Survey Committee, basically saying, “During the war, basic scientific research was shut down.” This was an all-hands-on-deck, we're going to essentially exploit our existing larder of scientific knowledge to fight the war. Now, sure, obviously there were developments in terms of technology and science during the war. I can talk about some of them. We could talk about jet engines. It's clear that jet-engine technology did advance during the war. But look, aircraft and aircraft-engine technology was advancing very rapidly in the 1930s. And you have to ask the counterfactual: What would've happened without that? As far as the United States, we never flew any jet engines in the Second World War.Nuclear power: We spent $2 billion on the Manhattan project and so on. And I think the first nuclear power plant was in England in ‘56, I think. And we obviously have relied to some degree on nuclear power. I think the jury is kind of still out on the extent to which that was a big plus. And it's operated only with enormous subsidies in terms of government accepting the liability limits and so on. So we could talk about other factors. There were some significant institutional consequences of the Second World War, but from a technological perspective, I do see it as a detour. And as far as basic science, I think this is one of those areas in which there is not a lot of dispute. It was shut down as was R&D development in terms of consumer durables.What sort of response have you gotten from other economists, other economic historians?There have been sort of people nibbling at the edges. They're not happy with one little thing, one or the other. But I think the reality is that World War II is not something that economic historians have given that much attention to. The time series, econometricians will typically drop the observations from World War II: “Ah, it was a controlled economy. Everything was messed up. We can't run our [models].” And so on. The basic thesis I have not gotten a lot of pushback on.When I saw that your book had come out, the first thing that popped in my head, since I write a lot about productivity growth, was a passage in Robert Gordon's book in which he very specifically writes about labor productivity in World War II and how the improved production techniques and so forth were not forgotten after the war. What you're describing is a very different view of productivity.What Bob Gordon did in chapter 16. . .Obviously you're familiar with it.I read all of the manuscript in chapters, so yes, I am quite familiar with the book. And what he did in chapter 16 was, I think, absolutely crystallized and state very clearly the second key theme, in terms of the conventional wisdom, about the war. He went beyond that. He then kind of advertised it as novel. But in the book, if you read the book carefully, I have considerable documentation because whenever you're trying to say something novel, you have to persuade people that we didn't already know this and so on. And what I think Bob is doing, basically, there is just absorbing and very clearly stating what is the received wisdom by many historians and economic historians. And I just think it's wrong.The US economy if WWII never happenedI think one of the more intriguing economic counterfactuals is what the American economy looks like in the ‘40s and in the postwar era if there was no postwar era—if all else equal, there was no need for a war. If we had not had this diversion, what does the economy of the United States in the second half of the 20th century look like?It is a counterfactual. One thing I would say is that the war did interrupt a very strong trajectory of productivity growth, both labor productivity and total factor productivity, as the output gap closed between ‘39 and ‘41. And what you're seeing there in terms of my interpretation is, number one, just a continuation of that trend during the Depression of very strong productivity growth, secular trend, combined with a boost also from closing the output gap because of the pro-cyclicality of TFP. Now, if you just were to statistically extrapolate that through the ‘41 to ‘48 period, things look pretty good. It's a questionable kind of exercise in terms of how accurate that would be.If you look the world in 1948, people, historians, everybody else is looking at that and they're seeing the United States is standing like an economic colossus astride the world. The Soviet Union has lost 20 million people. Germany: Dresden, Hamburg, they've been fire bombed. England has had to basically liquidate its overseas economic empire to pay for the war. Japan has had two atomic bombs and virtually all of the other major cities have been fire bombed with incendiaries and so on. And I think it's natural, particularly because the US was victorious and so on, and particularly because it was so successful in production—but of course, productivity is not the same as production; it's production per unit input—because it was so successful in that to say that was attributable to the war years. And again, I come back to my thesis, which is: No, I see essentially in ‘48, the US had a major productivity lead over Western Europe and Japan, and the next 30 years, what the French call “les trente glorieuses” and so forth, essentially saw living standards converging among the developed world as that productivity gap is closed. But my argument is that that productivity gap is already quite evident in 1941. It's not a function of the war. It's there in spite of the war.So even without the destruction to our competitors in World War II and our lack of destruction, the US in 1950 would still be standing astride the world as an economic colossus on the technological frontier, even without the war.Right. It's interesting to think about American industry prewar, say in the ‘30s, and postwar. Let's talk about the American automobile industry, because that was central in terms of the prosecution of the war, in terms of the conversion of those factories and the contractors operating, the automobile industry firms operating these big defense plants and so on. Economic historians basically agree that the 1930s was probably the most dynamic period in terms of innovation in American automobiles, in terms of the development of industry. Do you really want to look at the 1950s and say that those were the glory years of American US manufacturing? I mean, the tail fins and so on, and the cars lasted three years, and we essentially owned the marketplace. We weren't threatened by foreign imports yet. But I don't see a major upward progression in that direction. I do want to say, though, in terms of the legacy of the war, that there were clearly some important things that were different because of the war and maybe it wouldn't have been if we hadn't had it. Number one, we had a compression of wages. So there was essentially 30 years of reduced inequality in income and wealth in the United States. Number two, little things like, for example, the incredibly peculiar system whereby Americans provide healthcare tied to your employer. It's just an artifact of what Henry Kaiser did when, because of caps on wages, he wasn't able to raise wages, so we'll have benefits, we'll have hospitals and so on. The introduction of tax withholding, because of the high tax rates, gave the federal government greater fiscal capacity. Blacks did very well. Many American blacks essentially had the opportunity to move from unskilled to semi-skilled positions. So yes, there were some consequences. I don't want to suggest that everything was exactly the same or worse. I wanted to get that on the record. But in terms of the general trajectory of the growth of productivity and potential output, I would argue that the war was a detour.Then to what extent was the immediate postwar boom — the ‘50s, ‘60s, heading into the early ‘70s — how much of that was based on tech progress and innovation that emerged in those decades, and how much was really building substantially on the foundations from the ‘20s and ‘30s?There's a couple of things. First of all, the ‘50s and ‘60s did benefit from relatively high levels of aggregate demand, partly because of military Keynesianism and the Cold War. So that problem was not so great. As far as the technology overlap, I think if there was learning during the war, and in chapter nine of my book I talk about this—and it's somewhat speculative there—I don't think it was within manufacturing. It's not the traditional emphasis on learning by doing. It was on logistics. It was on essentially the efforts, particularly in the military, in terms of the enormous knowledge, the use of linear programming, the gradual diffusion of those techniques to the private sector, the development of containerization, multimodal transit and so on. So if I were to kind of say in the post-war period, “what's the productivity legacy?” I think maybe we've been barking up the wrong tree and maybe more emphasis needs to be placed there.I read various comments from economists at the end of World War II and maybe right at the beginning of the postwar period, and there seemed to be a lot of pessimism about what would happen. Are we going to go back into a Great Depression? What's going to happen when all of these soldiers come back? Am I overstating that, that the postwar boom seemed to have been kind of a surprise to those economists?If you're thinking about actual output, a couple of things matter. Number one, potential matters, but also the output gap matters. And the big concern among economists at the end of the Second World War was aggregate demand. In other words, they say, “Once all of this military spending stops, essentially, it's going to be back to the 1930s” and so forth. And that didn't happen. I think the conventional wisdom is probably right. It is that the balance sheets of American households were just in great shape, they couldn't buy certain stuff, they were being well fully employed. They had a large lot of deferred demand for cars and washing machines. I think you're absolutely right. There was a lot of pessimism, but it was mostly focused on aggregate demand. I mean, in one sense, who cares about potential if you're way below potential? And that was, I think, what was driving that pessimism.My last question is about your previous book. I just want to mention again the name of your current book, which is The Economic Consequences of US Mobilization for the Second World War. A book I was delighted to see land on my desk. And as I said earlier, your previous book, A Great Leap Forward, one which is well thumbed-through by me. I have one final question about that book. The cover image is the famous Futurama ride from the World's Fair of 1939, New York City. Why did you choose that image?I think because it captured the kind of technological optimism and just sort of unalloyed and uncritical confidence in the ability of science and technology to push the economy forward, which had been absorbed by the population in spite of the double-digit unemployment. And of course, that is consistent with my thesis of what was actually happening in spite of the unemployment. I think that's the reason why I put that there. 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 it comes to Up Wing thinking, there's no better litmus test than nuclear power. Setting aside the regulatory barriers we've imposed on ourselves, the United States can tap a source of clean, reliable energy that overcomes the carbon emissions and geopolitical challenges of fossil fuels. Here to make the case for nuclear in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, is Robert Zubrin.Robert is a nuclear engineer and the author of the new book, The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future.In This Episode* Is the case for nukes contingent on climate change? (1:14)* How the Atomic Age ended (6:39)* A 75-percent nuclear America (15:03)* Is a nuclear renaissance coming? (23:00)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationIs the case for nukes contingent on climate change?James Pethokoukis: Were it not for climate concerns, would there still be a case for nukes, or would you be writing The Case for Carbon instead?Robert Zubrin: No, there still would be a case for nukes. The primary case for nukes is to expand humanity’s energy resources. Regardless of climate change, we have an imperative to make energy more cheap and available. The primary problem in the world today is poverty. We have poverty in America, but in America, the average per capita income is $50,000 a year. Globally, the average is $10,000 a year. And half of the world is below average. So the existence of poverty in the world is quite prevalent. And that stifles people's lives. It kills people — people die of diseases that could easily be cured. They don't get educations. They suffer from malnutrition. They suffer from lack of opportunity. This is the thing that needs to be answered. We need to increase the availability of energy to put the whole world on an American standard of living. Once again, we still even have poverty here. We'd have to increase world energy five times. And fossil fuels cannot support that. So regardless of the issue of climate change or carbon enrichment of the atmosphere, we need more energy.And secondly, we need the energy to come from freedom, not from possession. It needs to come from the power of creation. A major problem with fossil fuels is it puts a lot of global power in the hands of people who just simply have it by force of possession, not through creativity. It gives wealth to those who take it rather than those who make it. For example the OPEC oil cartel could, as it did in 2008, constrict the world's energy supply below what it needs and send the price of oil up to $150 a barrel and cause a massive worldwide economic dislocation as a result. That's even a potential threat right now. Whereas nuclear power fundamentally comes from mind. That is, it’s the result of technological creativity: turning something that is not a resource into a resource — an incredibly abundant resource. So it moves power where it needs to be, into the hands of the creative, which is to say in the hands of the free.Let me continue on the theme from that first question: Why isn't it The Case for Solar? I know that solar prices seem to have come way down in recent years. Why not that as the thrust of your book?The problem is this, that solar energy, and in this I would also add wind as well, are intermittent energy sources. They are not reliable sources of power with which to power an industrial civilization. They are useful boutique energy sources. Wind power has had a major role in the development of human civilization by powering ships. Worldwide commerce was enabled by putting wind to work as a classic example of off-grid power. Solar energy is predominant in space, once again, way off-grid. But if we're talking about the production of energy at scale in a reliable way to power industrial society, they simply do not cut it.Does solar still not cut it, even if we figure out new ways and better ways of storing that energy? That sounds like it's doable. We just need better batteries or ways of storing that solar energy for when it's cloudy out.There are a couple of problems there. First of all, the amount of solar energy to power Manhattan would cover most of Long Island — and try buying Long Island to put the solar energy capacity there. And then you have the problem with storage. First of all, the problem with storage on a planned basis, that is just storing for a night, is bad enough. And it basically increases the cost of a solar installation by like a factor of five just to do that. But what if it's cloudy for three days going? What if there's this thing called winter that happens? Which it does. Solar energy can be inadequate for months on end. Having the capacity to deal with that is simply not possible. So, in fact, solar energy power systems have to be 100 percent backed up by reliable sources of power, which to say either fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydroelectric.How the Atomic Age endedWhy did the Atomic Age end? Do we understand the culprits? Do we understand who the murderer was?I think I do. First of all, nuclear power in the ‘60s was so much cheaper than fossil fuel power that in the early ‘70s, we were getting orders in the United States for two new nuclear power plants per month. That's how fast it was coming online. And in fact, it caused alarm in the oil interests, who very early on tried to stop [Admiral Hyman] Rickover from introducing the nuclear submarine. Exxon and Atlantic Richfield both gave very large grants to the Sierra Club to go after nuclear power. And in fact, part of their fear was justified because after the oil price went up in ‘73, ’74, nuclear power actually cleaned the lunch of oil-fired electricity in the United States. In 1972, 3 percent of American electricity was nuclear, 20 percent was oil. Now it's 3 percent oil, 20 percent nuclear. Oil, of course, maintained its premier position as transportation fuel. There, it couldn't be dislodged. It has unique advantages in that realm.But what happened was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was an ideological offensive launched by Malthusians. You may remember two very important books from that period. One was called The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. And another was called The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. That's ‘68 to ‘72. And then there were many less popular works. But they all said, “Look, we're running out of everything. We have to stop economic growth and population growth.” This was a very powerful ideological offensive, except for you may remember Julian Simon, who was an economist who said the Club of Rome was absolute nonsense. We weren't going to run out of everything, or anything, by the year 2000. But he was regarded by mainstream media as some Neanderthal from the Chamber Commerce. And if you look at the Sierra Club's statement, when they finally came out definitively against nuclear power, which was in 1974, what they said was, “We need to oppose nuclear power because it could encourage unnecessary economic growth.”And then they went on to say, “We can do this. We can stop them by stopping the establishment of any way for them to dispose of the waste.” And so they targeted nuclear waste disposal as a key weakness of nuclear power. And at that time, there were proposals in the works to just dispose of it by subsea disposal, which is easy to do. And when they got that block, and Jimmy Carter blocked that, they then opted instead for a much more elaborate program of storing the waste under a mountain in Nevada. They then campaigned against that. It baffles the mind how someone who claims to care about health and the environment can say it's better to store nuclear waste in nuclear power plants in the suburbs of major cities than under a mountain in Nevada. And yet they did. When they say there's no solution to nuclear waste disposal, there certainly is a technical solution. And the Nuclear Navy stores nuclear waste in salt domes in New Mexico. They just don't have to put up with any of this stuff. But they managed to stop the commercial nuclear waste from safely disposing of its waste and then say, “Hey, there's no way to dispose of the waste.” And they have collaborators in the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If the FAA was run like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we would have no airplanes. If you have a totally hostile regulatory structure, you can destroy any industry.Can you think of particular regulations, perhaps, that you think played a key role? Or is it just broader than that?If I was asked to name one thing that is the big problem and which needs to be corrected if we're going to have a nuclear renaissance, it's the regulatory structure, what was put in place by the Carter administration — which by the way, was in infested massively with members of the US Committee for the Club of Rome. They established this regulatory structure. In the book, The Case for Nukes, I show the flow chart of what you have to do to get a nuclear power plant license in the United States. And it looks like a map of the New York subway system with a million stops and intersections this way and that way. And guess what? Each of those subway stops themselves involves another subway map inside of it. And some of these are really ridiculous. One of the subway stops, just one, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which among many other things demands to know, and have proof to its satisfaction, that the utility should build a nuclear power plant as opposed to a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired plant, or no plant at all. Imagine if you had some land and you wanted to build a log cabin on it. And so you go to the municipal authorities and say, “I want to build a log cabin on this.” And they ask you not just for your plans to show that it's going to be a safe building, but to prove that it shouldn't be a chalet, or a cape cod, or a brick house, or a gas station, or a pet cemetery, or a zoo, or anything else.And then imagine that you actually do show that to the satisfaction of the authorities involved. But then there's now an opportunity for people who hate you to intervene in court to contest that approval. And now you have to go to court and prove to a judge and a jury that this in fact was the correct decision by the mayor. And if that court approves you, they can then appeal. That's what this is like. [Recently], we had a nuclear power plant go online in Georgia. It took 14 years to build it. Our first nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, took three years to build. That is, the amount of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant has increased by a factor of five. And this is not because they've become more complicated. It's because the legal process become vastly more complicated.And if you look at the data, as the time it has taken to build a nuclear power plant has increased, the cost has increased as the time squared. And once again, I show this in the book. It actually follows this curve. It's not even just linear, where you have to pay people for longer periods of time, you're paying all these workers to hang around doing nothing, instead of putting things together. You're paying more expensive kinds of people. Lawyers cost a lot more than plumbers, and you're paying for more and more lawyers as this thing drags on and becomes a bigger and bigger and more complex deal. So this is what has stopped nuclear power in the United States. The time to construct nuclear plants should have gone down with experience, not been quintupled.Currently, and this is a number that's sort of holding steady, we get about 20 percent of our power generation from nuclear. What is the counterfactual? What is the right number? If the ideological war had not happened, and all those nuclear plants, those two nuclear plants a year, that kept happening. What does our energy mix look like today, do you think?In France today, it is 75 percent nuclear and 10 percent hydroelectric. So it’s only 15 percent fossil fuels. Here you have France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. He put together kind of a labor-industry alliance for growth that included both de Gaulle-ists and even the communists, who had a trade union. This is jobs, this is what we want. And they did it. And it's 75 percent nuclear. Meantime, here's Germany, with this massive green party, as well as green ideology infecting the social democrats and even the Christian democrats and the rest, shutting down their nuclear power plants. Germany's carbon emissions per unit power is five times that of France. Five times. There is the green Germany. And it's even worse than that, because a lot of Germany's power comes from biomass. And you have this romanticism of “We're getting our power from the forest.” Yeah, you're getting your power by killing trees and the animals that live in the trees. So how's that being a friend of nature? The way to be a friend of nature is to get your power from things that aren't involved with the natural biosphere. The person who saved the whales was Rockefeller, by switching us from whale oil to petroleum, because petroleum has much less involvement with the biosphere than the whales do. And you'll have even less involvement with the biosphere if you switch from fossil fuels to nuclear.A 75-percent nuclear AmericaHow do we get that 20 percent up to 75 percent?There needs to be, fundamentally, a societal decision. Now, one thing that very oddly works in our favor here, is that the Malthusians have oversold the case on global warming. Global warming is real. World temperatures have gone up one degree centigrade since 1870. And that's true; I don't dispute that for a minute. I dispute the fact that that is a great cause for alarm. But it's true. They have nevertheless managed to alarm people greatly, because they're trying to use global warming as a rationale for rigging up energy prices. Which is basically an extremely regressive tax. (Carbon taxes are just about the most aggressive sales tax you can have, because they don't even tax on the basis of price. They tax on the basis of mass, and a cheap cut of meat involves the same amount of carbon emissions as an expensive one. And a cheap dress involves the same amount of carbon as an expensive dress, even though one might be priced 10 times above the other.) They've oversold this. They actually got a lot of people [saying], “Oh my God, this is an existential problem. We have to stop carbon emissions.” If their primary concern actually is carbon emissions, a lot of them are saying, “Well, then why not nuclear?”So you actually have, at this point, a significant faction in the Democratic Party, and they have an organization called the Third Way, Cory Booker is a member of this faction, who say we should have nuclear power because there's an existential problem of climate change. They actually believe this. So this is the solution. The hardcore, they hate nuclear power because it would solve a problem they need to have. But these other people actually want to solve the problem. So there's some leverage there. The Biden administration, though, has responded to this faction in only limited ways. They have allocated some money to develop more advanced types of nuclear reactors. That's good.The nuclear reactors we have now are essentially the same thing that Rickover invented in the 1950s to power the Nautilus and the Shippingport plant. I don't think that that's a fundamental design flaw. Pressurized-water reactors, which is the Rickover reactor, is like 90 percent of all reactors, if you include the mild variations of it that are out there. It's a very good design. It is inherently safe. It cannot have a runaway nuclear reaction because the water that is the coolant is also necessary to sustain the nuclear reactor. And in the book, I explain the physics of that. So it's impossible. And there's been over a thousand pressurized-water reactors on land or sea over the past 60 years, and not a single person has ever been hurt from a radiological release from one of them. But that said, it's possible to have more advanced designs that would be cheaper, that would be more efficient.I hear a lot about these small modular reactors.Yeah, that's a good one. The small modular reactors are pressurized-water reactors, but it's a different kind of design where they design them to be built small so they can be built in modules in factories and literally just assembled on site. So it's not really a construction problem, it's more like a “bring a bunch of things to a place and hook them together” kind of project. That offers the chance to make them cheaper, faster to build and also to address markets not just of big cities, but maybe of towns of 100,000, 200,000, this kind of thing all over the world. That's one. There's also greener reactors, which have the capability of getting, you know, 90 percent of the energy out of nuclear fuel instead of 1 percent, which is all a pressurized-water reactor does. Thorium reactors, which [have] cheaper fuel, other things like this. I'm all for these things.But we can't have that conversation if fundamentally there's this huge division about whether we should do it at all.Correct. And in fact, if this regulatory structure remains in place, we won't have them because it's going to be even harder to get a new kind of reactor licensed than to get another reactor of a kind that people are very familiar with. There needs to be a fundamental overhaul of the entire regulatory structure. Whether you conduct your business should, number one, be between you and the authorities. Interveners from hostile interests should not be allowed to take part in that process at all. And the regulatory structure itself has to be greatly streamlined and made to operate within the law. By law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to approve plants within two years of the application. They regularly take five years, and then there's a whole bunch of agencies that take more time. Once again, this argument that nuclear power is too expensive is a fiction. Any industry can be made too expensive if there are regulators making it too expensive.Is a nuclear renaissance coming?There seem to be some things coming together which would make one optimistic about the future of nuclear. Are you an optimist or not so much?I'm fundamentally an optimist. Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” We're getting there. We're exhausting the alternatives. We fell for this bunk about, you don't really need energy, or you can get it from windmills. And that this somehow would be a much better way to do it, or anything of this sort. So this is clearly the best answer. Let me give you an idea of how much energy we're actually talking about here. The nuclear reactors, we get the fuel from uranium ore, which is several percent uranium. But if you aren't interested in just getting it from ore and you're just looking around for the uranium, granite — ordinary granite that you see, buildings are built out of it, mountains are built out of — is two parts per million uranium and eight parts per million thorium. And if you converted that to energy, a block of granite would have a hundred times the energy of an equal mass of oil. So you go through New Hampshire somewhere and you see these huge granite mountains, you're looking at mountains of energy. You're talking about more energy in one of those mountains than all the oil of Saudi Arabia. That's how much energy.And then if we talk about going the next step, which is to fusion, then one gallon of water has as much energy in fusion as 350 gallons of gasoline. We're talking about completely un-limiting the human future and the waste from it. In other words, the ironic thing about making an issue of nuclear waste is that it's the only energy source in which you actually can dispose of the waste. In other words, the waste from coal-fired power plants would be impossible to sequester it because it's literally millions of times greater in volume for a given amount of energy than nuclear power. We could easily sequester the waste. And of course, with more efficient reactors, we could actually use a lot of that waste. So there's that. It's simply the right answer, and it's being blocked by people who want there to be a limit to resources.It's a preference of sorts. It's an ideological preference.It's a problem for people who want to assert that human activities, numbers, and liberties must be fundamentally constrained because there isn't enough to go around.Let me build off that by asking you a final question, which is you dedicate the book to “the Prometheans.” Who are the Prometheans?The Prometheans are the problem solvers. There's a lot of history in this book. I talk about how we got to nuclear power, and there's a human story here that goes from Einstein and Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Rickover, and what they had to overcome to make this happen. Now, by the way, we do have a new generation of entrepreneurial people. There's a whole bunch of entrepreneurial startups in both the fission and fusion area right now who are attempting to continue this revolution by introducing even superior types of nuclear reactors. And these people have guts. I mean, it takes a lot of guts to go into the nuclear business right now. You're going to have a fight on your hands. But I think it's the right answer and I think reason carries a stick. And so I think, ultimately, the rational will prevail. 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

As space enthusiasts and entrepreneurs look to expand human civilization to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, few stop to examine the geopolitical risks of space colonization or the opportunity costs of not fixing problems on Earth. While most Faster, Please! guests advocate further expansion into space, Daniel Deudney offers a different perspective. Deudney is a professor of political science, international relations, and political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He’s the author of several books, including Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, released in March of 2020.This interview was first released in June 2021 for my AEI podcast, Political Economy, and now I’m sharing it with subscribers to Faster, Please! (Unfortunately, our chat preceded my viewing and reading of The Expanse, which does a great job suggesting Deudney’s concerns.)In This Episode* Space expansionism and its dangers (1:24)* Space infrastructure (13:57)* Hedging existential risk (18:13)* Principles for space policy (30:40)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Space expansionism and its dangersJames Pethokoukis: My listeners love when I read during these podcasts. I’m going to start by reading two quotes. The first quote is from Elon Musk:“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”Quote two is from the Blue Origin website:“Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space.”Now, I think you would probably call both those visions “space expansionist”. But that is not your vision, right? So what don’t you like about those visions?Daniel Deudney: Well, Musk and Bezos articulate a vision of space expansionism that was first articulated early in the 20th century and has been subsequently developed. Bezos was actually a student of Gerard O’Neill, who was one of the main visionaries of space colonization in the United States during the 1970s. So they’re articulating a central set of ideas that is held by a large number of people, both in the United States and globally. And my book, Dark Skies, is really a systematic evaluation of the actual impact of space activities to date and a critical assessment of the likely impacts of many of these yet unrealized projects.So to start with the historical record, this is not a simple task because space is just a place. And so there’s a heterogeneity of activities that have gone on there. So it’s like summing up apples, light bulbs, and grenades. But the standard narrative of space activities to date, I argue, is woefully inaccurate. It leaves out one of our major space programs — and, depending on how you count, perhaps our major space program and arguably our most consequential space program — which is the use of ballistic missiles to deliver thermonuclear weapons at global distances in very short periods of time.The standard definition of space weapons is that they are weapons used against objects in orbit or placed in orbit. That’s completely insufficient because it leaves out the use of the frictionless environment of space as a corridor for rapid bombardment at distance. And so I say that we have this major space program that we don’t acknowledge as a space program. It’s what would be called an “unknown known.” Everyone knows that these exist, but they get misplaced or miscategorized. And if we put ballistic missiles back into the ledger sheet for an assessment of space activities to date, I have to conclude that the impact has been to increase the probability of nuclear war, which would obviously be a civilizational, perhaps existential, catastrophe for humanity. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis. The fact that these weapons move so rapidly — are so difficult to intercept — has created this unprecedented situation of vulnerability.And this really points to a more general fallacy of this very optimistic thinking about space, which is to simply neglect the violence potential and the tendencies for this violence potential to be harnessed. It’s like they think that space is good, and if something is not good, then it can’t be involved in space. The reality is that this major space program (that we don’t acknowledge as such) has been a major negative in terms of the survival of our civilization. And so the first step for the space expansionist, I think, is really to be a bit more realistic and accurate about what they’ve actually done and the inherently enormous violence potential involved in this domain.Is that your primary critique then? I mean, those are two very attractive visions. And is your main critique that they are just utterly ignoring how it could all go wrong? That they’re only viewing this as creating a space economy, creating space hotels, creating lunar or Mars colonies, or deflecting asteroids — but they’re ignoring how all these technologies could be used for ill?Yeah, that’s a general summation. The first key point is the ballistic missiles and space weapons. And then, looking at the larger future set of agendas that they advocate, colonization sits really at the center of it — millions, billions, or trillions of people living in space to make humanity a multi-planetary species. And their seemingly ace-in-the-hole argument is that the Earth is fragile — it’s vulnerable, it’s subject to all sorts of disasters. And therefore, we need to get all of our eggs out of this one frail basket.Seems like a good argument.At its surface, it does. And as they say, the reason the dinosaurs went extinct is because they didn’t have a space program.So let’s look at what would be entailed in humanity becoming a multi-planetary species: colonization of Mars, colonization of asteroids, and so forth. This would almost certainly produce an interstate anarchy. The assumption that the advocates make, and I think it’s well-founded, is that any colony which is big enough to provide existential risk insurance will be big enough to become politically independent. And once it becomes politically independent, we have to expect the same types of dynamics that have been characteristic of Earth history and interstate anarchy.Then we read the terrain, and we see immediately that it’s got this inherently enormous violence potential. And that’s because these objects — asteroids, even space debris — are moving so rapidly. The reason these asteroids are so destructive when they strike the Earth is not because of their mass, but because of their mass combined with their velocity. And so this is an environment that is inherently far more violent than any environment that we have dealt with on the Earth.So I asked the question: What is going to be the likelihood that we’ll have — as we have on Earth — wars and violent rivalries in what I call the Solar Archipelago? One factor, of course, would be the issues of mutual vulnerability, which I argue would be extremely high. The ratio of destructive capacity, like on Earth with nuclear weapons, is going to greatly exceed the territorial, habited locations. So saturation of violence capacity will mark solar-orbital space. Even though, of course, there will be a recovery of distance — it won’t all be quick because Mars is tens of millions of miles away, at least.Then you asked the question about rivalries over frontier resources. The historical record on Earth is that frontiers are very violent places. Rivalries for making claims will be very likely. So we have a war-prone argument there.Another factor: To what degree are the units like one another? On Earth, we think that units that are like one another — particularly if they are democracies — are less war-prone towards one another, and I think that colonies in space are likely to become very different than places on Earth. The advocates all say this. It seems intuitively obvious. And the most important difference that will invariably emerge will be a very fundamental one: biological species radiation. This is to say that the human species will start branching. This will occur inevitably, slowly, through processes of Darwinian evolution. But many of the advocates insist that we will do this more quickly with genetic engineering.And so it’s not only that we’re going to have multiple bodies in the solar system inhabited, they will be inhabited over time, almost inevitably, by intelligent species — at least as intelligent as us, with at least our levels of technology. But they will be radically different in their biological character than humans on the Earth.Look at all of the violence which has been sparked and justified by minor cosmetic skin-color differences on Earth, and think about what would happen if we have really different species. Let your imagination go here. The biological potentials for variation are enormous. It might well be that insectoid body forms will prove more appealing in space environments.And so we will have eventually a solar system that will be inhabited by aliens, but they will be descendants of Earthlings. And that to me is a very unappealing future. And I think that it’s almost an inevitable one once we cross over that crucial threshold to have a colony that is politically independent.Would that be your worst-case scenario? Look, I’d like a space economy. I would like there to be some space hotels. Maybe we do some manufacturing, see what happens.Space infrastructureSo I’m assuming that was your worst-case scenario. Do you have a positive space story? One that concerns you far less, at least?Tourism, within the larger scheme of things, is really kind of a trivial pursuit.In terms of space resources, we’re talking here primarily about the extraction of valuable metals from asteroids. That’s a civil technology that would require the ability to alter the orbits of masses of asteroidal material and asteroids in the solar system. Presumably, you’re going to insert these bodies into Earth orbit. So you’ll have to have highly precise capabilities to alter their orbits. And of course, we would also want to develop technologies to alter their orbits so that we can avoid them colliding with the Earth (although that’s not really a short-term problem).And so I look at this as a civil technology and I say, “How distinctive is this from the military technology?” And the answer is, it’s almost none. It’s a question of the trajectory. Once you have the technologies to alter the trajectories of asteroid-size bodies in the solar system, you’re going to have to tap into a violence capacity that will be millions of times greater than all nuclear weapons combined. So I say that allowing private enterprise to develop asteroidal mining, as seems to be the preferred American scenario, is kind of like allowing private enterprise to develop and have hydrogen bombs. It’s just not a good idea because of the enormous destructive potential.Many of the scenarios for near-Earth envision giant infrastructures in orbit. A favorite is collecting solar energy from orbit — we have this problem of immense importance with regard to the carbon loading of the atmosphere, and there’s lots of energy that can be collected in space and beamed down to the Earth.But thinking about that as an economic proposition, or even an ecological proposition, is insufficient. We have to also think about it as a political and military proposition. My view is that it’s not going to be possible to develop infrastructures in near-Earth space until we have overcome interstate rivalry. Think about the Chunnel between France and Britain. It’s unthinkable in a situation of interstate rivalry.So it could be that the creation of this apparatus — I call this Orbita — would require the pacification of interstate relations. That’s potentially good news. But the potentially bad news is that whoever controls Orbita would be able to control the Earth because these enormous quantities of energy could be readily weaponized to shoot down anything coming up from the Earth. So it’s like we have a village and we’re going to build a big castle next to it. We’re going to have to expect that the village will get dominated by the castle.Hedging existential riskRegarding inter-solar system conflicts, why would you be more worried about war with evolved insectoid humans than about an asteroid hitting the Earth? How do you begin to figure out which is riskier?I’m worried about the asteroid-hitting-the-Earth scenario. I’m not sure how to figure out which of those scenarios is more likely. But I know the one has happened before, and they keep telling us that it’s only a matter of time before it’ll happen again.That’s right, it is just a matter of time. It might be a long time before a significantly large one strikes. But you make a very good point, and you’ve asked me if I have a positive vision of space. I lay out what I call an Earth-oriented space program, which does include the development of techniques to deflect asteroids. But it should only be done by a consortium of states and should not be coupled with the development of economic exploitation.And look, if we do have asteroidal mining, then I think it’s very unlikely that actors of magnitude on the Earth would support colonization. If this is the great bonanza of mineral resources, the last thing we would want to do is to create a rival — Mars, in particular — that would be in a much more proximate location to exploit these. So I think that as the prospect of Martian colonization starts to become a real possibility, these types of concerns are going to be increasingly evident to people. This is what I refer to as the second great debate about solar-orbital space: What should we do? And I think that as it becomes real, these objections will become increasingly compelling to large numbers of actors on the Earth.What you’re ideally recommending is, I suppose, you would have us wait to go into space almost completely until we have a much different geopolitical situation here on Earth. And it seems like we’re going in just the opposite direction — it seems like we’re actually having intensive competition. So I would assume you would find that worrying.Yeah. I think that the directions that we’re headed in are largely disaster-prone. And of course, one of the directions that we’re going in that never gets talked about is continuing to modernize, replace, and improve the nuclear weapon delivery system. That is, as I said earlier, this major space program that we don’t acknowledge as such. And the United States has, during the Trump era, declared the objective of dominating space. And this is something that has long been talked about by various military visionaries. But this was an important threshold that we have crossed.The SpaceX Corporation, as I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast knows, has lowered significantly the cost of accessing near-Earth orbit — by a kind of order of magnitude, perhaps. And they have these plans to build even larger rockets that they make claims about even further reducing the cost of accessing near-Earth orbit. And this is widely hailed as a great advance.I look at this, and I say, “Well, it’s going to lower the cost of doing stuff in space.” And the question then is: Which of this stuff is going to get done? And of course, immediately the military is interested. The idea that we can dominate space is going to depend upon having the capacity to put significant mass into orbital space.So I think that we have been misperceiving the overall character of this environment. We’ve been misrepresenting the actual effects to date. And when we get rid of this “Oh it’s going to all be so wonderful” mentality and critically examine what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen, we have a very different picture.And I want to emphasize that I am not a Luddite. I am not opposed to technology generally, but humanity over the course of the 20th century has started to develop technologies that are extremely potent, double-edged swords. And the question that we have to confront is whether we have the ability to steer the use of these technologies so that we get the benefits without getting the downsides. And our record so far is not very promising.But we haven’t used nuclear weapons. In fact, the United States reached agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear weapons. And you could say we’ve even over-corrected because our fear of radiation has led us to abandon nuclear power. So hasn’t the record shown that we have been able to handle these weapons and that, if anything, we’ve been overly cautious when it comes to dealing with new technologies that could have a great benefit?Well, that would be a long conversation. And with regard to nuclear weapons, we have a fundamental epistemological problem here: What is the probability of nuclear war?During the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Kennedy said he thought it was between one-in-three and one-in-two. And knowing what we now know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was clearly more likely than that. So do we look at the Cuban Missile Crisis and say, “Hey, no problem here”? Or do we look at it and say, “We were really lucky”? There’s a fundamental disagreement about nuclear weapons that we really can’t resolve by appealing to the empirical evidence. And that fact alone should be very sobering to us.But I think that if you looked at this without any sort of theoretical presumptions and said, “Is it really a good idea to have thousands of high-yield thermonuclear weapons prepared for nearly instant use?” That strikes me as a bad idea. And, you know, some people say, “Well, that’s what saves us.” But look at this as a case study: The only way we can deal with nuclear weapons is by building large numbers of them and have them posed for immediate use? That strikes me as a very limited adjustment.So do you think that ultimately we’re going to have to get lucky again? There seems to be a lot more interest in space. And that interest is obviously among countries who have major disagreements and who view space as both an economic opportunity and as a military necessity. So it seems like the scenario going forward is a multipolar space race with an uncertain conclusion.That’s right. That’s clearly where we’re headed now.One of the important things to remember about space is the basic geography. We think that we’ve left the planet when we have gone beyond the atmosphere, but I argue that this is a geographic error — the area around the terrestrial Earth that is dominated by the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields is really part of the planet. I call that the “astrosphere.” We have the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and also the astrosphere.We tend to think of the astrosphere as being incredibly large. And of course space generally, even solar space, is mind-bogglingly large. But the astrosphere, and particularly the lower parts of it where almost all activities have occurred, is in practical terms actually smaller than the atmosphere. And that’s because, while the volume has gone up, the velocities that are necessary to operate there have gone up by even greater amounts. And so effective distance within the astrosphere is much lower than it is within the atmosphere. So people have fundamentally misperceived this environment — it actually is small.And then you go back into the earlier predictions about space: No one thought about space debris. No one said, “Oh yeah, this is going to become quickly polluted in ways that will be very problematic.” It’s part of this tendency to use bad analogies. People say, “Oh well, the ocean. The Europeans went out onto the ocean, centuries of expansion occurred and great wealth and prosperity and so forth resulted.” But this is a very misleading analogy.To start with, the ships that have existed since oceanic transportation developed are not shuttling around the ocean at high velocities. Half the satellites that have been put into orbit are still there — dead, hurtling around at very high velocities, over time breaking up and colliding with things. So if you want an ocean analogy, it’s more like the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, or maybe even the Aral Sea. For a frontier that has barely been opened, we already have this level of degradation that greatly exceeds what we have with the ocean. So there’s been this basic misperception of this domain.Principles for space policyTo wrap up, what would you advise? You view this as the beginning stage of something that could prove very dangerous. Better to figure out now what we need to do and talk with other countries so we can figure this out sooner rather than later. So then what would you advise the United States to do as far as space policy?Well, I lay out an Earth-oriented space program. And the first step would be to continue undoing the ballistic-missile-ization of the nuclear delivery system. One of the implications of that argument is that we have another space program that we don’t recognize as a space program: what we call nuclear arms control. It has never been primarily about nuclear weapons, per se. It’s been about delivery vehicles, most of which have been ballistic missiles. And as you say, at the drawdown at the end of the Cold War, we made important steps in this direction. What we call nuclear arms control is to a first approximation space weapons arms control. It’s our most successful space program in the sense of its benefit to avoid catastrophic and existential disasters. So the first step would be to continue that, to complete that revolution.Then we should use space for Earth habitability studies. We should do space science on a larger scale in virtually every dimension. If we want to have humans in space, that’s built on our other important historical accomplishment, the International Space Station. Instead of a free-for-all for lunar resources, let’s build an international science cooperative base on the moon with the Russians and the Chinese involved as well.And insofar as asteroids striking the Earth are a potential problem, we need to do better surveys. And if we want to have demonstrations, this should only be done on a cooperative basis. We do not want this technology to get weaponized. That’s something very important.As for the colonization scenario, we should relinquish that. We should draw a red line. No colonies. We do not want to pursue them. And the reason is that we have got the story backward. The dinosaurs, they tell us, were wiped out because they didn’t have a space program. I say the dinosaurs lasted 200 million years because they didn’t have a space program. And you say, “Ah, the Earth — all of our eggs are in one fragile basket.” I say, if we have multiple space colonies, we’ll have dispersed eggs, which will be subject to rock smashing, which will be easy and likely.So we’ve got to get the narrative right. We have to stop thinking about this in this sort of a wonder-struck manner. There’s this famous quote that the advocates are always using from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the great Russian visionary: “Humanity is in its cradle, and humanity cannot stay in its cradle forever.” The implication being, we have to leave the cradle of the Earth and expand into the cosmos. I look at that little quote and I say, “Well, we also recognized that the ideas that infants have in their cradle, that children have, are not good guides for adult behavior.” It’s essentially an infantile vision, and we need a much more sober vision. This is a public episode. 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Thanks to SpaceX, it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to launch stuff into orbit. But just imagine if instead of using rockets, we could send cargo and people to space on an incredibly tall elevator. This may sound like a total sci-fi idea, but it has some grounding in real-world physics. In theory, we could build a space elevator by putting a counterweight in geostationary orbit and attaching a cable between the satellite and Earth. An elevator could then climb the cable, delivering payloads to space at a fraction of the cost of propulsive rockets. As you can imagine, it isn't quite that easy, which is why I'm joined today by Stephen Cohen.Stephen teaches physics at Vanier College in Montreal and has been working on space elevator concepts for almost 20 years. Recently, he wrote “Space Elevators Are Less Sci-Fi Than You Think” for Scientific American. Stephen also has a new book, Getting Physics: Nature's Laws as a Guide to Life, which was released earlier this year.In This Episode* Space elevators 101 (1:42)* The engineering challenges (7:14)* The economics of space elevators (11:07)* Space elevators in sci-fi (19:21)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Space elevators 101James Pethokoukis: In the intro, I tried to do my best at explaining what a space elevator is. But the simple version is we have something big and heavy in orbit, a cable extends down from that thing, attaches somewhere on the Earth, and we run an elevator up and down it. That's a space elevator. Am I right?Stephen Cohen: Sure.Now that we have a picture in our heads, why is it something more than just an interesting engineering thought experiment? What attracts you to it, other than sort of a technical problem that would be interesting to solve on paper?Well, it's space infrastructure, which is something we don't currently have and never have had. Right now, and for all time we've accessed space, going to space is like a one-off each time. Sometimes you have some reusable parts, but basically what a space elevator is, is a bridge instead of just a bunch of boats.And the advantage of a bridge over boats is what?Access. Right now, each time you want to plan a mission, to simply put something into orbit requires a lot of planning. The weather has to be right. And then you want to plan another mission, you sort of have to begin again. With a space elevator, you can just days in advance say, “Okay, we're going to send something up to a desired orbit.” And just hours later after that one would be sent, you could send something else. And you basically have a housing — that's what the climber is, effectively — that you put the payload inside and up it goes. That's the transformative part. But we haven't talked about really the cost savings, the energy savings, and that's just basic physics.The way you get around in general is by applying forces. And that's something you do without thinking. When you walk, you push on the ground. When you fly through the air, you're basically pushing on air molecules and they push back. But in space, you have none of that. And so what rockets do is they literally are the medium. The fuel you bring is the medium you're pushing against — rather, you're throwing it out the back. It's a hugely wasteful, inefficient way to get around. It's preposterous when you think about it. But it's the only way we can get things to the speeds we need to get them to. Just as a mode of getting things into this is extremely practical. You can't compare the efficiencies. It’s orders of magnitude of difference.It really strikes people. When they hear the general concept, they really think it's something big and it sounds like it's amazing. It's something that is science fictional, but maybe we could turn into science fact. There's something else about it, I think, that just grabs people's attention.Yeah, for sure, because it's a physical connection to space. It's like, if you could just touch the cord at the Earth port, then you're in contact with something that's reaching out all the way into space, which is wild. But I think there's an element missing. People don't realize tethers in space are not a new thing. We've had missions since the ‘70s that are effectively two bodies orbiting earth connected by a long tether, sometimes kilometers long. Now, that's not in the ballpark of 100,000 kilometers long, which is a common number thrown out there for what the eventual space elevator might be. But a lot of the same technologies are involved. The biggest difference is of course, instead of two bodies connected by a tether, like a big spacecraft to a small spacecraft, say, this is a big structure connected all the way to Earth. The amount of tension is tremendous. That's the big difference. That's what effectively becomes the big engineering challenge about it all.To be clear, the cable would be connected to something large in orbit, and that could be something we build, but I've also heard maybe it could be a small asteroid? Am I confusing two different things there?It doesn't have to be something we build, but likely it won't be an asteroid. The way at least the first space elevator will likely be constructed would be you send the cable up in a spacecraft and you drop it, you sort of spool down the cable over time. And it would be a lengthy unspooling. The dynamics of that are super interesting. But the point is, at the end of it you can now connect that cable to the ground. It's good to have something functional at the other end, not just some mass. Of course, the mass you're going to have at the far end, the particular value of that mass, that depends on how long the cable will be. So to achieve an equilibrium, you can't just choose any random mass. It would have to be planned.The engineering challengesLet's get to some of the challenges. And as you answer those questions, we may also find out why you think this is something that can be done. You mentioned that cable. That seems to be the chief engineering issue, as you mentioned: finding an ultra-strong lightweight material to make up that cable. Is that something that needs to be invented? Are we talking an innovation? Do we need radical new science, or can you see how that cable could be manufactured in a decade if we got serious about funding that kind of research?The key property is called specific strength. It's not just strength, but it's the strength-to-density ratio. And that property in the material existed since the mid-‘90s. But it's very costly to produce. Time consuming as well. Now, on both fronts, there have been big improvements since then.Are these carbon nanotubes? I always hear about carbon nanotubes. Is that what you're talking about?The two candidates that are talked about these days are carbon nanotubes and just graphene. These options, there are some issues with repeatability. So the process, you think you're doing it the same twice, but you don't get exactly the same properties each time. It still needs to mature, but the basic science is there. It's become a materials engineering kind of problem.Is it an engineering problem that we just sort of have to work the problem, and it'd be great if we had funding, but it doesn't require a radical breakthrough? We think we know how to get there. It's just sort of resources and effort and time.Yeah. Yeah. There are probably solutions to every problem that stand in its way. I would say as the material problem is getting solved and as time is going on, a new problem is entering that is on the same level as the material problem. And that's our very, very crowded space environment. That is only becoming a bigger issue. That problem is only going to get worse with time. And the equator is a fairly busy area. It's very likely that the space elevator will be situated slightly off-equator, and the mechanics of that are sound. That's not a big issue.On land or in the ocean?Probably in the ocean, is the proposals I've seen. Those are sort of the details, I would say. And it will come down to economics, won't it? We're still at the stages of design, but there's really no company that is clearly in charge and no administration, institution is pulling all the strings. What we have right now is a big project with a bunch of academics scattered around the world that are, I would say, dabbling in it. A lot of work has taken place. I would say low-intensity work. That is, you get 10 very useful studies done in the course of a year. That's peanuts for something on this scale. There needs to be probably a champion or several on the business side, I guess. But also governments need to get involved for this to really take off.The economics of space elevatorsIt must be annoying that you can't find a super billionaire — they seem to be very interested in rockets. You need to find one who's interested in a space elevator. That would seem to be an important piece to the puzzle when you look at how things are going in space and rocketry.Yeah, on the economic side of things, if you want return on investment, you probably need to work on steps to get there. So partial space elevator, that's something which is basically a larger space tether. Space tether on the order of thousands of kilometers. So it's an easier challenge, but the payoff isn't nearly as high. There need to be small aspects that are worked on that have return on investment that get you there. There are several that could be listed. If I could speak about the big investor of which you just mentioned, there's another project that really reminds me of the space elevator: something called Breakthrough Starshot that you haven't heard of it. It's an attempt to send something interstellar. To send to another star system a very small payload, on the order of grams, that we could then once we get there take a picture of, say, an exoplanet and send it back. And we’d get something way cooler than what our best satellites can do. That project also has a few major engineering challenges, but I wouldn't say science challenges. We're now at the point where there's a road to it. It's also probably decades away. It has spinoff technologies. They're really very similar. And the interesting thing is, there seem to be investors putting more money into that one than space elevators. That's my impression. Not boat loads of money.Isn't that a Mark Zuckerberg thing? Hasn't he put money in that?I don't think he's the only one.Yeah.I'm not fully aware of all the happening surrounding Breakthrough Starshot, but it's worth mentioning that the space elevator is completely transformative for life in our solar system, really. We talk about colonizing the Moon and Mars, and that would be really neat. But it's sort of a pipe dream if you can't support it. Sending a single person or several to Mars, that's a big, big undertaking. But now for them to live there in a supported way? The amount of mass you have to get there is tremendous. And you can't do this in a sustainable way without infrastructure. The point I'm making is, a space elevator [is] really transformative for the solar system. And I don't want to speak down on Breakthrough Starshot. I don't want to speak ill of that project. Totally cool. I'm on board. But that one, I would say, is transformative in the sense that you can actually send something to another star. We've never done that before. But it wouldn't change life as we know it, unless our picture happens to show something living on an exoplanet.Someone else's space elevator, perhaps!.It's really the economics and efficiency of getting something off the ground, into orbit. Has that economic potential calculus been changed, or would it be changed, by reusable rockets? I mean, when you first got interested it was probably either pre-SpaceX or maybe SpaceX’s early days, and those costs have come down and are expected to continue come down. At some point, does that make a space elevator irrelevant?Before we get to the cheaper chemical rockets, there are other changes that have taken place. For example, nuclear rocketry. There's also the idea of solar sails and things like that. But of course, none of those can address the primary reason why a space elevator is useful, and that's to get out of the Earth's gravity well. That's where you need chemical rockets or, well, nothing else. Nothing else will do it, because you need a tremendous amount of power in order to reach those speeds, unless you can just climb along a cable. Of course, those chemical rockets get cheaper. It doesn't mean they necessarily become routine, in the sense that weather will always be an issue, safety always a concern. They're not green, and if you intend to get really serious about space in the way people are talking about it, we are talking about such wasteful practices there. It's just unconscionable in a way. That's not the economic side, I realize. But an economic study needs to probably be repeated regularly to see whether this is the best way forward, purely based on economics. Access, environmental considerations: Those are other elements that also need consideration. But the economic story, I'd say, is evolving. Chemical rockets will always have a certain ceiling that you just can't beat, and we're maybe getting close to it.If I got into a space elevator capsule on Earth, how long would it actually take to get up to a space station?In all likelihood, there will be a station at geosynchronous that's 36,000 kilometers high — so about three Earths away — and it will probably take a week to get there if you could go in the area of the high-speed trains we've become accustomed to on Earth. That would be beautiful views for a week. What's cool is as you go up, the weight you feel goes down gradually until you reach this geo place. And then you are indeed weightless, just floating there like they do in the ISS. However, you'll have passed the ISS a long, long time ago, because that's only 300 kilometers off the surface of Earth. You couldn't put a station there on the space elevator. Physically that just wouldn't work. Geostationary is the ideal place for a space station because it imposes no new tension on the cable. In any case, it would take a week, is the short answer to that question.But that week would be a far more relaxing experience than taking a rocket.And let's be clear, this would be way cheaper once you've got it. Operating one of these, you wouldn't pay millions of dollars a person. Not even close. I can't know exactly what the number would be, but it could be 100 times less for one person once this thing's really up and running. Plus you don't have to spend a week going to geo and a week coming back. If we're trying to recreate the experience of going up to 300 kilometers, it could be an hour up and down and you've achieved a nice view of Earth.Space elevators in sci-fiIt's an interesting concept, but one which is probably used more in scientific literature than in movies and TV shows. I think the first time I ever saw one on a screen was in the recent TV series based on Foundation by Isaac Asimov where they had a space elevator. Now, of course, the space elevator — spoilers — the space elevator in that show, there's a terrorist attack and it falls down and just kills…Is there a portrayal of this technology in science fiction that you're aware of or that you think is interesting?There's some artistic license, perhaps, going on there. What would happen if it's severed, if that's the conversation we're having, the portion beyond the severance likely is gone never to be seen again. And then the portion below, its future really depends on where the severance happens, exactly what that looks like. There was a study done when I was doing my master's — in like 2005, 2006, I think — [by] someone named Paul Williams, if I remember right. He did animations on exactly this question. It flies down to Earth, the lower portion below severance. And it would, like, paint a line on the equator —whatever didn't burn up in the atmosphere on the way down. But we're talking about a cable that's like one meter wide and very thin. So don't imagine a building collapsing that's wrapping around the equator. It's a rubber band, if you want to imagine something.The piece you wrote in Scientific American, have you gotten any feedback on that from other scientists, astrophysicists, engineers? What kind of response have you gotten, if any?Oh, I've gotten letters from high school students. “Can you tell me this? Can you tell me that?”It was a completely honest piece. I am not what I would even call a space elevator advocate. But the moment I start talking about it, I get excited. To be clear, a quick perusal of some of the online message boards reveals a lot of, well, trolling where some people who may be informed, some people who aren't, just write a thousand reasons why this will never happen, X, Y, Z. But most of the feedback I've gotten in the circles I would ask through are just: “That was delightful to read.”I think it approached it with the appropriate level of seriousness for something that's interesting, it's not tomorrow, but it's possible. And let's give it some thought. That seems like a very reasonable approach to the issue.I'm a college teacher at this point. I've worked in the space industry. But my goal is to capture people's imagination when I'm in the classroom. That's at least a big part of it. The space elevator ticks a lot of boxes in that department. Exactly where it'll go in terms of economics and all that, I don't really know. And in my day-to-day life, space elevator is something I dabble in when I have free time and when I feel like it. It is something I write about in a small part of the book that I published recently, but it's mostly a general physics book, for example. It's not the focus of my life.Let's say we elected an American president who said, “This is something we can do. We're going devote resources. This is a new Apollo.” With enough effort, could you say within a decade we could have a space elevator, if we had that kind of enthusiasm and allocation of resources?I think in a decade we could have a design that is pretty mature, and I think a decade after that it could be built. But again, that would take the kind of backing that is associated with serious projects. And you’d talk about many countries coming together. To go on a little tangent, there was a film that had a space elevator recently released in China. I cannot recall what it was, but a lot of the recent conversations I've had because of that Scientific American article were from that. Journalists in China wanted to know more about space elevators. Their question for me was along the lines of what you just asked me, is this realistic? And I said it’s probably true that the engineering challenge becomes a bit smaller than the challenge of getting all the groups to do this thing together. The scale of the teamwork, cooperation for a project on this scale, this is a lot bigger than the International Space Station. Not just in terms of its physical size, in terms of things like space law that come into play, all kinds of areas, some of which we haven't even considered yet.That may sound like a bug, but maybe that's actually a feature. Get everybody together working on something. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

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

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

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

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

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