Faster, Please! — The Podcast

What is progress and how do we get more of it? It's a core question here at Faster, Please! and something Jason Crawford thinks a lot about. Jason is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Jason explains how progress is about more than just economic growth, discusses where it comes from, and distinguishes progress from utopianism. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: You are part of a growing intellectual movement that aims to understand two big things: why human progress happens and how to speed it up. First of all, why is this of interest to you?Jason Crawford: Most of my career for almost 20 years was in the tech industry. I have a background in computer science. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup co-founder. And about five-plus years ago, I got really interested in progress. It began as an intellectual hobby, and I just came from the perspective that, like, the progress in material living standards over the last couple of hundred years—I mean more than an order of magnitude improvement in industrialized countries—is basically the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity, or at least way up there. You know, in the top three. And if you care about human wellbeing and you look at this fact of history, I think you have to be a little awestruck about it. And I think you have to ask three basic questions: First, how did this happen? Second, why did it take so long to really get going? And three, how can we continue it into the future?What do we mean by progress? Are you talking about spending power or are you talking about human lifespan? Leisure time? People could define it differently. When we use the word progress during this conversation, what are you talking about?Yeah, there's at least two basic and important meanings to progress. So one is progress in our capabilities, our ability to understand and control the world: science, technology, industry, infrastructure, wealth accumulation, and so forth. But then there's …I love that wealth accumulation part. Oh man, I love hearing about that.Surplus wealth is very important, and infrastructure is a form of wealth, right? But then there's an even deeper—I think the ultimate meaning of progress, the true progress of human progress is progress in human wellbeing: the ability to live longer, happier, healthier lives, lives of more freedom and choice and opportunity with more things open to us, more ability for self-actualization. Ultimately, it's that human progress that matters, and it’s why we care about this.I think a lot about choice and opportunity, the human freedom aspect. Sometimes when I talk about it, people will kind of condense it down to “stuff.” Like, “You just want more stuff. How much more stuff do we need?” But I think there is that deeper meaning, and I don't think most people who are interested in progress and these questions are interested in it just because they just think we want more stuff.First off, stuff is underrated. People like to dismiss it as if material comforts don't matter. They matter a lot. And I think people just take the current level of affluence for granted and they don't think about how life could be way better. You know, people in 1800 if you could ask them, they would probably say they were fairly satisfied with their lives as well. They had no idea what was possible. But you're right that it's not just about stuff. I mentioned choice and opportunity. Think about the ability that the average person has (at least the average person in a reasonably wealthy country) to live where they want, to have the kind of job that they want instead of having to be a farmer or just having to accept the trade that their father had, the ability to marry whom they want when they want, to have children or not and how many children to have and when to have them, the ability to go on vacation.There are a lot of these things that we take for granted now that people did not always have. So it's not just about a full belly and a roof over your head and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Those are great things. And, again, they're underrated. But it's also about romance and knowledge and exploration and excitement and adventure and self-actualization, and self-expression—all of those very human values, which are psychological values. Those are also supported and enabled by material progress.Do we still not know how progress happens, for the most part? We know institutions are important. Deirdre McCloskey talks about the Bourgeois Deal, in which innovators said, “Let me creatively destroy the old and bad ways of doing things, the scythes, ox carts, oil lamps, propeller planes, film cameras, and factory lacking high-tech robots, and I will make you all rich.” Do we need to know more than that?Those questions that I posed earlier, I'm obviously not the first person to ask any of them or even to deeply study them. So two things: First off, I think that while the knowledge is out there and is maybe well known to academic experts who study this stuff, I don't think it's ever been given really great popular treatment. And definitely not one that goes into … remember the very first question that I posed was literally, how did it happen? So when I started, I went into this study and I'm now writing a book because there was a book that I wanted to read five years ago and I couldn't find it. It didn't exist. I don't think it does exist. I wanted to learn in one volume, in one summary, what were the major discoveries and inventions that created the modern world, and that gave us this standard of living?And I wanted to really understand what were we doing wrong that made agricultural productivity so low? What were we doing wrong that made disease so rampant, right? What were we doing wrong such that most people were stuck going not very far outside their village their entire lives? And I mean, doing wrong: I say that a little tongue in cheek. Obviously we were doing something wrong. We just didn't know how to do it better, but what did we have to learn? So I don't think that that has ever been put together in a very accessible summary for the general public in a single volume.You said a lot of this information is out there, but it's more academic so we need to popularize it. Though, for sure, we're not just talking about old papers that we're going to refer to. There's plenty of new research on the Industrial Revolution; on how you create today a modern, fast-growing economy; how you increase productivity growth. It's a well-researched topic on which the research is definitely ongoing.Yeah, absolutely. So that's the other part of it, which is that even within academia, even at the frontiers of knowledge among the experts, there are open questions and there's still, frankly, a fair bit of disagreement. If you want a good summary of the academic literature and where the state of the discussion is at this point, there's a new book that just came out, How the World Became Rich, by Koyama and Rubin. It does a good job of summarizing [of] the academic literature. I do think there's a fairly good consensus, or at least among most folks in the field, that institutions and culture somehow are at the root of a lot of both how the original Great Enrichment began and also why some nations have caught up and others haven't.I think there are still a good amount of open questions at a sort of fine-grained detail level: If it's institutions and culture, which institutions exactly? And which aspects of culture really make the difference? You can look at Britain and you can say they were able to create the Industrial Revolution, in part, because they had a great deal of economic freedom among other things. But then you can also look at various Asian countries that have caught up in a large part in terms of economic growth with some economic freedom, but certainly not the level that Britain had. And even Britain was sort of weirdly missing things. Like, for more than a century after the South Sea bubble in 1720 it was extremely difficult to create a corporation, let alone a limited liability corporation, right? So you could make a partnership like Boulton and Watt, but to do a corporation I believe required an act of Parliament for over a hundred years. Now, making it easy to create corporations is sort of a key institution and ultimately a key part of economic freedom. Britain was able to start the Industrial Revolution without that. So if you want to really understand what's going on here, you have to get to a pretty fine-grained level. And I think that is still an open area of research.I think that's an interesting point. You bring up corporations. It's not just technology; it's not just the steam engine or the combustion engine or Moore's law and the microchip. It's not just these bits of technology that somehow happen and thank goodness they did. And maybe in the future will get more. It's broad; it's really kind of a holistic, whole-society thing where you have culture, you have institutions, you certainly have innovators and entrepreneurship. So it's figuring out all these things. Why I find it so fascinating is that it provides a lens to examine all parts of human activity. In my newsletter on Substack, I write about movies and TV shows and books: the cultural aspect. I'll also talk to technologists and I'll talk to economists because all those pieces added together are what create progress.You can look at economic freedom as one thing that happened in Britain that helped create the Industrial Revolution. But I also think it is not at all a coincidence that Britain was the land of Locke and Bacon and Newton. There was something much deeper than just laws and politics going on, something at the level of philosophy and culture, I think, that enabled them to break out the way they did.Part of this is the belief that you can solve problems. Your solution may create some other problem, but we can solve that one, too. It's about a belief that we can make tomorrow better. But it's not about creating utopia, because some of those solutions are going to create new problems.I do like the term “solutionism,” and in fact, I adopted that term in an opinion piece I wrote for MIT Technology Review a little while ago, where I was talking about optimism versus pessimism—I tend not to use the term “optimist” because there are different types of optimism, and you can have complacent optimism, where you just assume that there aren't going to be any big problems or that everything will go fine, no matter what we do. And that is a big mistake. But you can also have more prescriptive optimism that says, “Look, we may or may not be facing large challenges. Maybe the world is even not heading in a good direction, but we have some agency. We have some ability to work and to fight if necessary and to create a better world. And so let's go about it.” Blind optimism is just complacency, but blind pessimism is just defeatism. And neither of those are good. In that editorial, I use the term “solutionism” to try to get at this mentality that both acknowledges the reality of problems, but then also acknowledges the possibility of solutions. I think that's the mindset we need.I'm not a big believer in utopia, as long as those utopias are populated by flawed humans. But I don't think this is the best of all possible worlds. It can be better without being utopian.I think the mistake in utopian visions is the notion that utopia is a sort of static end state and then we stop and we don't progress beyond. And I have a much more dynamic view of what even utopia is or could be and of the future. My view is one of continuous progress where we keep getting better. And then we get better after that. And then we get better after that. And, and by the way, David Deutsch points out in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, that every step of progress along the way will create new problems. And that is not an indictment of progress. It's simply the nature of progress, the same way that advancements in science open up new questions that we don't know how to answer. Advances in material progress or in technology will open up new problems that we don't yet know how to solve but can solve with the next iteration of progress.There was a nice BBC profile of this progress movement that you were featured in. And it said that among progress thinkers, "There is an entrepreneurial bias towards action. The prospective benefits of a new technology dominate considerations of what a bad actor might do with it. The fear of missing out overwhelms the fear of losing everything." Do you think that's a blind spot? Are we too dismissive of how things might go wrong?I think that could easily become a blind spot for the progress community. And that's part of why I don't like the term “optimist” or why I think it can be misleading. That's why I talk about complacent optimism as being not the mentality we want. We want to acknowledge and engage with many of these very real risks and concerns. If we don't, the future will go badly and that's not what we want, and there are good examples of this. Early in the development of genetic engineering, some people started to realize, "Hey, if we're not careful with this, we could be creating dangerous new diseases." And they actually put a moratorium on certain types of experiments. They called for this and got together about eight months later at a conference, the famous Asilomar Conference—1975, I think it was—to discuss safety procedures.And they came up with a set of danger levels or risk levels for different types of experiments. And they came up with a set of safety procedures, matching those levels: “If you're at bio risk level three, you should be doing safety procedures X, Y, and Z.” So at the simplest, maybe you don't even need a mask or gloves or whatever. And then at the absolute highest level, you're in an extremely controlled room. You've got a full suit on and the room has negative pressure so that if the door accidentally opens the air blows in, not out, etc. You've got all of these things, right? And so that was a pretty effective method—proactively, by the way. Very importantly, this was not in response to an outbreak.It wasn't like they created the disease first and killed a bunch of people and then said, “Whoops. Let's figure out how to not do that again.” They actually anticipated the potential risk, but they did so not on kind of like vague fears that were motivated by just some sort of anti-science or anti-technology sentiment. They did so by just very hard-headedly, rationally, logically looking at what could happen and, how do we prevent this? And how do we make progress and also have safety? So I think, ultimately, safety has to be a part of progress. In fact, historically, getting safer is one of the overall aspects of progress. If you set aside potential tail risk but just look at day-to-day safety, we are much safer today than we were in the past. That is an accomplishment. And really a world of progress ought to be a world in which we are getting continually safer, right? If we're not, we're missing some important aspect of it.Of course, then there's the other side who assume any more technological progress will just make the world worse. I wrote this piece about a movie and its sequel I love. I love Blade Runner. I love the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. But it occurred to me that there's a lot of amazing technological advances in that movie. You have human-level AI, fully sentient robots. We have space colonies. You have flying cars, yet it's a terrible world. It's a world where it seems like most people don't live particularly well. The climate is horrible. But there wasn't really a mechanism in the film to say why things are bad other than, well, it works for the film, because it creates drama. Do you feel like you're making the contrarian argument in this society or you're making the argument which maybe most people believe, but maybe they forgot that they believe it?I think it has become contrarian to think that continued scientific and technological and industrial progress will actually lead to human wellbeing. I think that was not contrarian, say, a little over 100 years ago. Certainly before World War I, that was pretty much assumed, and you could just sort of take it for granted. And then ever since then, the wars and the Depression, and everything—that was a major shock to the Western world. Everything seemed to be going really well. In fact, people were even optimistic that technology would lead to an end to war. They thought maybe technology and industry and this economic growth and everything and free trade was all leading to a new era of world peace. And then it absolutely did not. And so that was a very rude awakening, that it turns out moral progress and technological progress don't actually necessarily go hand-in-hand. We can have stagnation or even regress on moral issues at the same time as technology is racing ahead. And I think that was a shock to the Western psyche, and maybe in some sense we have not fully recovered.At the heart of progress, is it essentially a capitalist, democratic philosophy? Or is it not necessarily either of those things? I write that I'm not going to create a better world that I want to live in that is not fundamentally democratic-capitalist. Now it doesn't have to be capitalist exactly like the United States. Maybe it's going to be capitalist like Scandinavia, but I think something that would be recognizable as capitalist and be recognizable as a democracy. In my image of the future, that's at its very heart. Is that part of progress studies or is that a different issue? Is that what you think?Look, I love the notion of a capitalist future, personally, but that doesn't mean that everybody shares that view. So historically certainly …Are there pro-progress socialists?Yeah. Well, so historically, I mean the early Marxists and in the early Soviet era, so we're very …Yeah, utopian. It's inherently utopian. I love retweeting images from the Soviet space program. You know, Soviet lunar bases. So that was part of it. But I wonder if it is still the same?It wasn't just space. I mean, they wanted to industrialize the farms. They wanted to have huge power plants. There was this ethos that technology was going to bring us into the future. Unfortunately, it was a collectivist future. And it didn't turn out so well. But, today, there are still a few folks who believe in progress and want some sort of full socialism or communism. There's this notion of fully-automated luxury communism.But mostly I would say the proponents of progress are more general proponents of, broadly speaking, the liberal order or liberal democracy or whatever you want to call it. Within that, there's definitely a broad range of political ideologies. On the one hand, you've got libertarians who say, "Look, the way to make progress is to get the government out of the way." On the other hand, you have a spectrum from that to the progressives who say "The way to make progress is to have massive government investment in progress." But what I like about the progress movement is that the very notion of progress gives us a shared goal and a value and some common ground to actually have these discussions about. And we can now actually debate all of our preferred policies on the basis of what's actually going to cause progress. And let's bring history and data and evidence and logic to the discussion. And I think that would be a healthy discussion to have.What's the biggest reason that you think you are not utterly wasting your time here? Some people would say, “Listen, we have a half century where progress seems to have slowed down.” There are a lot of theories that all the easy gains have been made. Yes, things will get better, but it's going to be very, very slow. People who are talking about leaps and acceleration forward, that is the world of science fiction. Why do you think that things could not just be better in the future, but that pace of improvement could be such that people notice it? What I'm imagining is a pace of material progress, of health, where it is noticeable. Where people would say, "Yeah, I think something's happening here." Do you think that's possible? And why are you confident, if so, that that is possible?The pace of progress is already such that people see lots of progress in their lifetime, if they are able to notice it. What are we doing right now? Recording a podcast. That's not a thing that existed 20 years ago. Wikipedia didn't exist or barely existed. The entire explosion of the internet has happened within living memory, right? Not to mention, we didn't have mRNA vaccines. Soon hopefully we'll have supersonic airplanes again and rockets to the Moon and Mars. And I think there's plenty of progress to find if you look for it.One reason why I started the newsletter was I really felt for the first time really since the ‘90s like something was happening. Even with the pandemic, I felt something was happening. It seemed like AI wasn't just about better search algorithms or something. But AI was going to be used in healthcare to create better drugs. You have what's going on with SpaceX. And then the vaccines, which seemed to come really, really fast. And I sort of felt like some things seemed to be coming together, where the progress seems to be palpable. Whatever was ever happening with the GDP numbers or productivity numbers, there seemed to be things happening in the larger world that said to me that something's taking off here. And I want it to continue again. If we're in an age of progress, I think that feeling is palpable and noticeable to people.Yeah, I hope so. But facts don't interpret themselves, and people can look at the same facts and come to very different conclusions. So ultimately, I think we need not only the continued progress to show people that continued progress is possible, but we also need the voices who are pointing this out and explaining it. Because the fact is that even in the greatest possible era, there will be some curmudgeon who says that, "This is the end. And none of the stuff is very good anyway." And even in eras where not very much progress was happening at all, like the age of Francis Bacon, Bacon and some of his contemporaries could look around at just a few scattered examples of inventions and discovery—like the new continents that were being discovered, and gunpowder, and the compass, and the printing press—and they could extrapolate from that to essentially the Industrial Revolution, which is an amazing act of vision. So in any era, no matter how well or badly things are going, there will be some people who see it or don't see it. And so, ultimately, that's why we need more popular treatment of this stuff. We need to tell the story of progress and make it accessible to the general public. That's what I'm working on.If we're talking in 10 years and things really don't seem to have gotten a lot better, what do you think probably went wrong?You said 10 years. At a very deep level, I think this is a generational project. I think changing people's attitudes at this fundamental of a level is the sort of thing that really you speak to the young. And you get through to people when they're still open to changing their minds and are still thinking deeply about the world. And hopefully in the next generation you know you can have a shift.You’ve said that every high school in America should have a curriculum of progress. What are the stories that would be in that curriculum? What would people be learning? Would it be a class or would it just be kind of in everything—it would be in science class, it would be in history class?I think it could be certainly be integrated into some of those classes. I think it falls most squarely in history. I think it certainly could be a class on its own or incorporated into the general curriculum. Now, I actually created a high school-level progress course, a course in the history of technology, essentially. It was commissioned by a private high school and is still being taught by them, I believe.That's outstanding.There's a virtual option, so even if you're not enrolled, you can take it online. And we cover a number of major topics. The major topics are agriculture, materials and manufacturing, energy, transportation, information, medicine, and safety. And then we do a little bit about looking forward to the future. But we cover what were the major developments in each of those.So in agriculture, we'll go into things like mechanization of agriculture and the invention of the reaper and the combine harvester. We'll take a look at soil fertility and how fertilizer was understood and developed. We'll look at things like food preservation and refrigeration and freezing and so forth. And so we just kind of dive into some of the major developments that took us from, in agriculture, a world where half the workforce had to be farmers and yet we still had periodic famines and also people had not very varied diets and not very fresh food. And then today we have this world where a small percent of the workforce can provide everybody with a robust, reliable food supply of fresh, varied food. That complete transformation of the food world. And we look at what created that. And then we do the same thing in transportation and energy and manufacturing and so forth. And when you're done with all those modules, all of that adds up to a really dramatic picture of how the entire world was transformed and life was transformed in every dimension.Jason, thanks for coming on the podcast.Yes, it's been great. 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

Ali Hajimiri is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is also co-director of the Space Solar Power Project, which is developing technology capable of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth. Hajimiri and colleagues are designing solar arrays composed of hundreds of small photovoltaic tiles that would be linked together to form larger modules, and then those modules — flying together in formation like a school of fish — would form a hexagonal power station in space. These flexible arrays would be rolled up when launched and unfurl at their orbital destination.In this inaugural episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Ali tells me about how space-based solar works, what problem it solves, and how long we’ll have to wait before we see orbiting power stations in the sky. For more, check out my recent 5QQ chat with Ali. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Pethokoukis: Space-based solar — putting solar panels in space and beaming the energy to Earth — seems like a beautiful, elegant solution. Why is it a good idea? What problem is it solving?Hajimiri: So the primary problem that it solves is being able to get around the days and nights, the cycles of the weather, the cloudy days, and all those things — and having dispatchable power where you need it, when you need it, and as much as you need.An advantage over ground-based solar?Correct. And the other benefit of it is that essentially you can have these systems in space for a long time, and you can route it the way you want. You can actually distribute the power; you can break it up into smaller pieces. You can say, “I want to send 20 percent to New York, 30 percent to LA, and 40 percent to, I don't know, Seattle.”Wouldn’t these panels sometimes be in the darkness, on the night side of the Earth? So how would they work?It depends on which orbit you put it in. If you put them in geosynchronous orbit (or something near geosynchronous) you are basically in the sun for most of the time, except for 20 minutes on the equinoxes. Most of the time you're not eclipsed, because you're so far away that the shadow of Earth is so small. And because of the inclination of the Earth, because it's at an angle, you would get eclipsed for 20 minutes on each one of those.And as it’s transferring power down, it doesn't have to be directly over the collection station, right? It can be at an angle?It doesn't. That's the beauty of it. Because it's a very large array, it redirects the energy. You can electronically steer it. It does not even need mechanical steering. So you can actually create a focal point of energy where you need, where your recovery of energy occurs. And you can move that very rapidly — on the scales of nanoseconds, extremely fast — from one place to another.Does it require new technology to distribute that power? Or is that basically using current technology?On the ground, we have what we call “rectennas,” which is basically rectifying antennas. These are another array of antennas that are very plain, very flat. I mean, if this were not radio, I would've had demonstrations of these things to show you how they look. But these are like thin sheets of material, like printed circuit boards that go in your computers and things of that sort, that sit on the ground. They collect the energy, they convert it to DC power, and then that's converted to AC. And then at that point, you can plug it in to connect to your network — essentially to your distribution line, the same power distribution line that you use. You can even envision putting this next to photovoltaic solar [panels] that are out there, or any other kind of power plant. It could be any kind of power plant, and you just connect to it and add and augment the power that you generate with these.So you can basically bolt this onto the existing power system?Yes. I mean, once you are on the ground station, once you go get past the rectenna and the conversion to AC, then that's basically compatible with all the other AC network.Solar power is becoming cheaper, and the land area we would need to cover with solar panels to power the whole Earth is smaller than you'd think. But traditional solar relies on storage at night when the sun isn't shining. But what you're suggesting wouldn't be reliant on batteries. Is that right?What we do allows you to send the power where you need at the time you need — and you can even break it up into different proportions. But the other thing that it does is that, since you have it 24/7, pretty much you don't need the storage, which is a big challenge.The other thing is that there are places that don't have the power infrastructure. A good analogy to this is cell phones versus landlines. Thirty years ago, there were places in Africa that didn't have landlines. In Sub-Saharan Africa today, there are these same places that still don’t have landlines, but there they have leapfrogged to cell phones.So this way, you can actually get to places that don't have power. You can think about the Arctic Circle — you can think about a lot of places, remote islands and things of that sort — that may not have power infrastructure. And this way you can enable it when you need to have the power over there.This is not a new idea. It's an idea from about 80 years ago that you're attempting to turn into reality. I wonder if you could spend a minute or two talking about what you're doing.It is an idea that I think the earliest rendition, that I know of, is in a short story by Asimov, as many ideas are. But you know, what’s different is that the technology didn't exist for doing these kinds of things in space. I mean, it sounds like a good idea, but it's also a very challenging idea in many different ways. One is that, when you put things in space, things are expensive — you pay dollars per gram. That's extremely expensive for things that you put in orbit. So one of the key parts of making this happen is to make it lightweight.The other thing is that these array elements, making it with large arrays, were not very practical up until the point where we are in integrated circuits — the same chips that go into our computers and phones. The same technology is now what we are using to make these incredibly large arrays that are very lightweight, because these are very small and lightweight.And then now, on top of it, we are making them flexible, because the way to deploy something that's of that magnitude is to roll it, then deploy it, and then unroll it. You can think about this like a sheet. These are like sails that you open up in space. Now, the technology to enable that integrated circuit, the packaging and all those things, did not really exist until recently. And that's why we came up with a new architecture for doing it, and that allows us to do the original renditions of this idea.The thinking was that we have the solar panels, and we aggregate all of the power. We have this giant antenna that points to Earth and then sends it. And in that case, you would be pointing to one direction, and you couldn't move it around because it was mechanically pointed. And if you wanted to reorient it, you have to mechanically reorient that antenna and point it in a different direction. We are doing it all electronically. So we have this very thin, very flat sheet that transmits the energy. Because of the coherent addition of all these billions and billions of sources — it's like an army of ants.So a swarm? A solar swarm?Exactly, exactly. So we've gone from the old mindset, which was what I describe as a big elephant, as opposed to an army of ants. I mean, each one of them is capable of doing different things, but because of the swarm nature, you can actually make it very lightweight and spread out.How old is the project that you're working on at Caltech?We've been working on this for close to eight years now — seven or eight years actively. We've been working on the power transfer part of it — the part that I'd been working on even before this project, which is what led to this project — for like 10 or 12 years. Wireless power transfer for both terrestrial, as well as space-based applications.And the powerless transfer is converted from sunlight into lasers? Microwaves? What?It’s microwaves. It’s radio frequencies, essentially microwaves. Then you transmit it, and then you recover that on the ground.Whenever I hear about any space project, I always think, “Well, was this possible before SpaceX? And is the reason we're talking about it because of that decline in launch costs?” Does your project depend on that, or is it just a fantastic enabler of it?I would say it's one of the four or five enablers that converged to make this closer to something that can actually be done. Definitely, SpaceX is a catalyst in lowering the barrier for space enterprises — anything that you want to do, non-governmental stuff, smaller projects — SpaceX and alike. I mean, there are other places like Blue Origin, things like that.So people are trying to do that. They are trying to level the playing field so that more entrepreneurs can get into it. Now it can be in academia, industry, or anywhere else. And that plays a role. And again, there are all these other technologies and architectural changes that also enable us. So I would say that's definitely one of the four or five catalysts that had to come together to make this happen.I've seen a video of you describing how there are small wafers that add up into bigger panels which are arranged into this giant array. Each one would be like a power plant in space. How big would each of those be?Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Each one of these power plants, you can think about them on the order of a kilometer by kilometer, or about a mile by a mile. So that is like a square mile or square kilometer. Something in that range. It depends on the orbit you choose and the size of the ground station. There's a little bit of a tradeoff. You can make it larger in space and smaller on the ground, or smaller in space and larger on the ground. So there's that trade off you can play with. But yeah, it's about a square kilometer or square mile in space, each one of them.And how much power could that theoretically generate back on Earth?So somewhere between like several hundred megawatts to a gigawatt, depending on the angles and things like that. It's a substantial amount of power.How would that compare to a nuclear reactor?It would be comparable. And it can be even higher than that in some cases, depending. The other interesting thing I should say about comparing to these other kinds of generators is that, since it's a modular system — this is actually a formation flying of satellites; each one of the modules is about 20 to 60 meters, depending on different designs for different orbits; they are formation flying in close proximity to each other — and this means that if one of them fails, you can actually replace it without having to replace the whole thing. So it's very modular. You can actually have robustness because of that.I think when they had to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, it was a pretty big deal.Yes.And I'd hate to think it would be as involved with fixing each of these panels. All we’d be doing is space walks.Exactly. That's an excellent point because the way we've designed them, one of the key elements is the cost structure of these modules. It has to be economical at the end of the day, because we are using the same silicon technology that's used for all these electronics — and all the other stuff we're making at low cost. So the idea here is: For that component, we just decommission it, let it burn in the atmosphere and just put a new one in there. We don't have to replace components. It's just like a new satellite that’s put in the orbit, and the other one is just decommissioned. And the cost structure allows for that.Would you envision this as just one arrow in the quiver? Or do you view this as something where we could get substantially all our power from space? What are sort of the potential and limitations?I think, like any other technology, if it's successful, it'll be phased in. You can't really do it all at once. Now, as more and more of these stations are going to be put in space, then you can see how this will respond to the system. But my anticipation is that it would definitely be filling in the gaps in the baseline.So, for example, if you look at the load line that the power generation has today on the Earth, it has changed because of the photovoltaics, quite interestingly. They had this duck — they call it the duck curve — because in the middle of the day, there's lower demand. The way it changes in the early afternoon, it goes up, peaks, and then comes back down and kind of looks like a duck.But the interesting thing is, now photovoltaics have kind of brought up the middle of the duck. So they've brought up this middle gap that they had. And then now it's gotten to a point that, at some points, the bulk price of power is actually negative during the day. And what this does is it allows you to fill in the gaps where you need it. So for example, you could have most of your power being transmitted to New York in the afternoon, but three hours later, you can shift that power to LA, for example.I think one thing people might say is, “We're already worried about too many Starlink satellites in orbit. These are much, much bigger! I mean, you would be able to see these from the Earth.” What do you make of that concern?So, there are different aspects to this. Is it mostly a concern about, for example, space junk and getting crowded and all those things?There’s the space junk concern. There are also just these sort of astronomical concerns, that it would be hard to do astronomy. And more sort of aesthetic concerns.The aesthetic aspect, I can't talk to. I guess the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But the astronomy aspects: Again, there are obviously going to be windows, and there are going to be the times that this system passes overhead. But just to think about things, the area that is out there at 36,000 kilometers, which is the geosync, is actually 36 times larger than the area of the entire surface of the planet, including all of the water and all the oceans and everything. If you take that area, it's a much bigger sphere. So there's a lot more room, if anything, out there compared to other things that we make. So I'm not too concerned about that.There are also people who think about, “Is it going to cause interference?” and all those things. And those are the kinds of things that we've learned how to deal with in radio systems. We have many different radio systems working concurrently and seamlessly, and we don't seem to have problems with that — like Wi-Fi and 5G and this and that. And you have Bluetooth, and all of these things seem to be working together. And the main reason is that we've learned how to do it in that respect.There's also another set of concerns some people raise. “It's a health concern. Is it going to fry birds flying overhead?” And the answer to that is actually interesting, because the answer is that the energy density that anything, even in that beam spot, will get is comparable to what you get from standing out in the sun — except for the fact that it's what we call non-ionizing radiation as opposed to the sun, because it has UV and all those things that can actually change the molecules and the chemistry. So they can cause cancer (UV does), but radio frequencies don't. All they can do is generate heat. The benefit of this thing is that with that power level, you'd recover probably close to three times, three to three-and-a-half times, more than what you recover from photovoltaics. And you can have it during the day or night.I was recently reading a big report from Citigroup about the space economy, and they went into some detail about space-based solar. That's the first time I remember reading Wall Street research about that technology. At this point, is it still so early that you're not getting much private sector interest?First of all, I can tell you that there has been a tremendous amount of interest. I mean, especially recently, over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot more. And partly I think it’s because of the fact that the technology … I mean, 10-20 years ago, it was not really realistic because of the cost structure, the complexity of tech technologies, and all those things. But now people are starting to see the pathway. So we've had a lot of interest from various places. And it's kind of growing exponentially in a way, recently.So I'm anticipating seeing a lot more of that investment. In fact, we've been approached by several investors in this regard, too. But it'll take time. It's not a short-term project. It's not an app that we can start today and have a first prototype working in a few weeks or months. We've been working on this for quite a while, and it has to continue on. We, in fact, are going to have a launch sometime soon, to have a first demonstration of some of the key components of the technologies that we are launching.The Chinese seem pretty interested in this technology.They are. And it's interesting. A lot of this thing has happened in part because of these new technologies that have been developed at Caltech and at other places that made it possible. So people are taking another look at it. There was this old kind of mindset about it, and this new mindset has renewed interest in it, because of these things. Yeah, the Chinese are interested. The United Kingdom is very interested in this. The Japanese are very interested in this. There are a lot of other efforts in other places — India is actually even interested in it. So we've actually seen a lot of interest all over the world, in this area.Is there something you need government to do or to stop doing at this stage in the development of the technology?A great question. One is, in terms of investment, definitely. These are the kind of things that, to get started, you need a big entity like government to put investment in it — in terms of research and development — because the barrier to entry is pretty large, regarding the amount of initial investment. Of course, the return eventually is going to be large, too.That's important also from a regulatory perspective. It's important for government in general — about the technologies related to wireless power transfer, both terrestrial and space — I think the government needs to be more proactive in terms of allowing it to flourish and not getting in the way. With everything new that comes in, there of course needs to be a thoughtful discourse about it. But if it gets to a point of becoming too much of an impediment to innovation and progress, then that would not be a good thing.So I think allowing these technologies to flourish — in terms of spectral allocations and other things of that sort — would be a good thing to continue to do.Are there key, deal-breaking technological challenges that you still need to solve? There are. I mean, it is fair to say that not all the technical challenges have been solved, but the pathway has become more clear over the last several years in terms of at least how we go about solving them. It's sometimes the unknown unknowns that get you at the end of the day. But we have more of the things that we know that we need to figure out. And I think we have a clear pathway.But in general, nobody has built a coherent structure of this magnitude anywhere — not even on Earth, let alone in space. So for example, that analogy that I used earlier: If you have an army of ants, you want the ants, that are like a mile apart, to be synchronized within a few picoseconds (and a picosecond is one-trillionth of a second).So the timing accuracy of that — that kind of thing … We have solutions; we are working on things. It's a combination of various advanced technologies that allows us to get this kind of timing synchronization. But those are the kind of challenges that we're trying to overcome and solve when you go to this scale. And it is something that has emerged because we've solved the other problems. Now we are at the point to say, “Okay, well, now we are scaling it up. How do we do these things?” And we need to solve these problems.How long until space-based solar arrives? Are we talking the 2030s? The 2040s?I'm more on the optimistic side, I guess. I think probably by the end of the 2020s, you will have some demonstration, some power transfer demo. We are going to have to show it soon. We are going to have some technology demonstrations.But if you want to have a substantial amount of power transferred, probably before the end of this decade. It would probably not provide a whole lot of our power at that point. That takes another decade or two to get to that point — if this pathway turns out to be the right pathway to go down.Ali, thanks for coming on the podcast.No problem. It's my pleasure. 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