Deep Future

Implementing Science Fiction

Pablos

Virtus Solis

It is important to first understand that We are all made of energy.

Solar panels have been improving and hold great potential but they are rendered useless by the relentless and uncannily predictable onslaught of night. There’s a simple way to fix this – put the solar panels in space.

Space solar is an idea that has been around for decades, but it is laughably expensive to launch enough solar panels on rockets for anyone to take it seriously. Still, the idea is enticing, because solar panels orbiting Earth get sun 24×7, 365 days a year. They receive 8 times as much energy as terrestrial panels. They can beam power down to Earth anywhere on the planet using radio waves, even in the middle of the night, during a snowstorm – right through clouds. No need for the miraculous breakthrough energy storage that wind & solar farms on Earth require.

What about safety? Beam forming technology makes it possible to send a diffuse beam of radio waves to a large antenna on the ground. The 10GHz band can’t penetrate your skin for more than a millimeter. I’ve stood in front of this beam and at most you can detect a slight warmth, much less than standing in the sunshine. Humans should never end up in the path of the beam, but if they do there is little to no health risk.

What about the ridiculous cost? Even uncontested in the private space launch market, SpaceX has gotten launch cost down 20x from the Space Shuttle. They’re at $2300 per kilogram. This idea gets irresistably cost effective at about $300 per kilogram. The SpaceX target for Starship is $20 per kilogram. In something measured in years, not decades, space solar will become the lowest cost baseload energy anywhere on Earth. It will also be the primary economic driver for private space launch.

Why Virtus Solis? Most of what we’ve seen elsewhere is still in research but we are thrilled with this team’s focus on commercializing this technology as fast as possible. The engineering team is ambitious but humble and practical. They’ve consistently impressed us with better answers than we expected to our hardest technical questions. You can learn more from their blog.

We are all Made of Energy

We made almost 8 billion humans that are alive on Earth, and we need to make enough energy to take care of them. We see this at the most fundamental of all problems to solve. If we solve energy, we can solve a lot of other problems for free. Americans get about 9 times as much energy as the average person in the world. This means unlimited access to clean water, the health benefits of sanitation, the safety of light all night, refrigeration to preserve food & vaccines. We take all this for granted, but over 3 billion people live on less energy than a single toaster consumes.

The real goal is to deliver as much energy
for every human on Earth
as we do for an American.

We never see the target set that high. What will it take to produce 10 times as much energy globally? It sounds impossible, but we’ve done it before. Over the last century we’ve done just that. Over the next century, we’ll grow from ~160,000 terawatt hours to ~1.6 million terawatt hours, but it doesn’t need to take that long, we could do it in a few decades.

The upside is almost unfathomable. What if every human on Earth could have the same living standard as an American? Abundant, clean, low cost energy means we can scale clean water, sanitation, recycling & food production. When people have access to the resources they need to support their lives, they have a lot less to fight over and we can expect a more peaceful, prosperous & ethical world will continue to evolve.

Descycle

The creation and destruction of electronics is a nasty yet unavoidable business. The creation involves mining for metals and the destruction entails polluting the environment. This is a growing global problem. What if there were a non-toxic, low-energy, scalable, and less expensive process to extract these metals out of the earth and electronics waste?

We’re thrilled to be working with Descycle, a clean technology company developing “Green” metals processing based on a novel class of chemistry, Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES) – simply mixtures of salts without water, in which metals behave differently than in water-based systems. Battery metals (e.g. nickel, copper, cobalt, rare earths, etc.); precious metals (e.g. gold, silver, palladium, etc.) can all be extracted through this process. This technology can obviate the use of pollutive smelters, toxic chemicals, and strong acids in metals processing.

Descycle has teamed up with mining companies and data center decommissioning partners to be the first-mover in many of these markets. The value of the positive environmental impact alone is hard to quantify. What is much easier to quantify is the value of the gold, palladium, etc. that is guaranteed to be in the e-waste. One ton of printed circuit boards will yield 253 grams of gold, 62 grams of. Palladium, and 1.2 grams of silver. We know this because we put in there. Mining a ton of stone might yield 9 grams of gold on a good day but we always strike gold in electronics waste.

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We’ve known the Descycle geologists and management team for over 10 years. They have a long track record in finance and mining and are also investors in Descycle. There’s also great potential that eutectic processes possess in extracting iron, zinc, aluminum, arsenic, mercury, lead, chromium, and sulphur from contaminated environments. We’re elated to join Descycle in addressing one of the world’s biggest problems.

Risc0

civ·i·li·za·tion – the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced

Creating better ways for humans to organize themselves, to cooperate and work together in new ways make it possible to become more “civil.”

One pillar of my own personal philosophy came from the Cypherpunks in the 1990s, the insight that we could use cryptography to create technologies that offer a level playing field, to preserve freedom. The most important & ambitious goal of all is to create a decentralized computing platform, accessible to everyone. To make that possible, we needed a way to transact, to reward people for contributing resources to the system – hence Bitcoin. The noise and hype around cryptocurrency since has obfuscated the north star. Cryptocurrency is a milestone, not a destination. We’re not just going to the moon, we’re going to the stars.

Decentralized computing must solve for these important attributes

  1. Decentralized – No central point of control, anywhere.
  2. Scalable – Linear growth with low latency, low cost, low energy.
  3. Secure – Bitcoin is the benchmark to meet or beat.
  4. Private – Private by default.
  5. Programmable – Support modern programming languages.
  6. Accessible – Any modern computer can participate without permission from any authorities.

Bitcoin solves 1, 3 & 6.
Etherium solves 1, 3, 5 & 6 (but now compromising on 3).
Cardano, Solana, Algorand, etc. are attempts to solve 2 by compromising on 1 &/or 3.

Risc0 is a zero compromise blockchain that solves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. It addresses the systemic issues of current systems without tradeoffs.
I’ve known this team for over 20 years as they’ve worked on cryptographic protocols. They built & exited three companies together. Their new zero-knowledge powered blockchain is the first thing I’ve gotten excited about in crypto since beta testing Bitcoin and I’m proud to be among their investors.

Ladon Robotics

No crew, no fuel, no emissions. We have (mostly) self driving cars, why not a self driving cargo ship? While we’re at it, why not make it sail in the wind?

Photo by Strandgutsuche

The shipping industry literally burns half of their operating budget, as fuel. Most people don’t realize that ships have two gas tanks: One with refined diesel, like you’d use in a semi truck, and the other full of “bunker fuel.” When the ship is close to shore, it burns the cleaner stuff, but as soon as it gets out of sight, it switches to burning the thick, black, unrefined gunk optimized for creating air pollution.

But why burn any fuel at all? We’ve been sailing across oceans for centuries.

Ladon Robotics is building autonomous ships driven by the wind and sun. We invested because this vision for the future of shipping is irresistibly better.