Speaker 1: Okay, I want you to close your rides for a second. Seriously,
humor me.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm with you.
Speaker 1: Imagine you are standing on the surface of the Moon.
It's just dead silent. You're looking out over that gray, dusty,
regless craters stretching out to the horizon. The Earth is
just hanging there like a blue marble in this pitch
black sky.
Speaker 2: It's a striking image. It feels very cold, very industrial.
Speaker 1: Right, and instead of just rocks and silence, you see
a factory, a massive, silent industrial complex, humming with an
energy you can almost feel through the soles of your boots,
and stretching away from it, pointing up toward that black
sky is a long silver track sort of like a
high speed rail line, like a launch track exactly. And
then suddenly, with absolutely no sound because you know, there's
no air to carry it, right, total vacuum, no fire,
no explosion, a satellite the size of a shipping container.
Just it accelerates along that track. It's moving faster than
a bullet. It hits the end of the line and
it's just it vanishes into the heading forward of it. Wow, now,
open your eyes. This isn't a scene from a sci
fi novel set in the year like twenty three hundred.
According to the roadmap we're unpacking today, this is a
plan for the next four years.
Speaker 2: That is the part that stops people in their tracks,
isn't it. We're so used to hearing about future tech,
but we always frame it as you know, decades.
Speaker 1: Away, right, it's always someday.
Speaker 2: We think of flying cars and moon bases as things
our great grandchildren might see. But the roadmap we're looking
at today suggests humanity is staring down the barrel of
a transition that is so radical and so fast that
we barely have the vocabulary to describe it.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. Today we are pulling on a
thread that starts with a single post on X by
Elon Musk, analyzed by the sharp mind of researcher named Farzad,
and ends with well, it ends with the civilization level shift.
We're talking about the space based AI roadmap.
Speaker 2: And just to set the stakes right at the top,
because I think people hear space AI and they immediately think, oh, cool,
faster internet from my phone or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, better Netflix stream on.
Speaker 2: A plane exactly. But this is not that. This isn't
about better reception. This is about a fundamental physics problem.
The entire premise here is that artificial intelligence is about
to leave the planet because Earth Earth literally cannot handle
it anymore.
Speaker 1: We've hit the ceiling.
Speaker 2: We have absolutely hit the energy wall, We've hit the
thermal wall. And the solution proposed in these documents involves
first putting massive data centers in Sun synchronous orbits, and
then well then using electromagnetic railguns on the Moon to
put them there.
Speaker 1: Just like you described, I still can't get over the railguns.
I mean, we're going to get there, I promise, But
before we get to the Moon.
Speaker 2: There aren't weapons, to be clear, right right.
Speaker 1: There, they're delivery trucks, but it sound like weapons. We
have to eat our vegetables. First. We have to understand
the why why would anyone go through the immense pain
and cost of building a factory on the Moon. It
just seems so exorbitantly expensive and.
Speaker 2: Risky because we're running out of juice. It is basically
that simple. If you look at the last couple of
years of AI news, what has the headline always been,
It's been about chips.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, do we have enough? H one hundreds. Is
TSMC printing enough silicon is invidious stock going up again?
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's all been about supply chain constraints on the
silicon itself, the actual physical hardware.
Speaker 1: Right, It's been a total supply chain panic. Everyone is
hoarding GPUs like they were toilet paperback in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: You're not wrong, but that's yeah, that's kind of yesterday's problem,
or at least it's a problem that's being solved. Factories
are coming online, production is ramping up. The new problem,
the hard problem that keeps utility CEOs awake at night
is electricity. The grid cannot support the silicon we are
now able to print.
Speaker 1: That's the real bottleneck, not the chips, but the power
to run them.
Speaker 2: Precisely.
Speaker 1: Varzod's analysis broke down some numbers on the US power
grid that I found genuinely staggering. I think most people,
myself included. You just you plug your phone in and
you just assume the wall has infinite power. You don't
really think about where it comes from.
Speaker 2: And it's not infinite, not even close. So let's look
at the reality. The United States in total generates approximately
four hundred and sixty gigawatts of power.
Speaker 1: Four hundred and sixtys.
Speaker 2: That is the whole pie. That number accounts for every
single house in the suburbs, every steel mill in the
Rust bell, every street light in New York.
Speaker 1: City, every hospital, every EV charger.
Speaker 2: Every single toaster in the country. Everything, four hundred and
sixty gigawatts.
Speaker 1: Okay, so four hundred and sixty is the cap. That's
everything we've managed to build over the last one hundred
years or so.
Speaker 2: That's our baseline. Now, look at the demand that's coming
down the pipeline just from the hyperscalers. You know, the
big tech giants.
Speaker 1: Google, Microsoft, Open AI, Amazon, the.
Speaker 2: Big players, right, they all have these road maps to
scale up their AI infrastructure ultimately to try and reach
AGI artificial general intelligence. To do that, they want to
add another one hundred gigawatts of demand.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, one hundred.
Speaker 2: One hundred gigawatts just for data centers.
Speaker 1: So hang on, you're saying they want to add demand
that is on almost a quarter of the entire existing grid.
Speaker 2: Correct, narrowly twenty five percent more demand just for AI.
And here's the friction point, the part where the plan
hits a wall. You cannot just snap your fingers and
build twenty five percent more power plants in two years.
It is physically and bureaucratically impossible.
Speaker 1: I mean, it takes a decade just to get the
permits for a new nuclear plant, right, let alone pour
the concrete and actually build the thing exactly.
Speaker 2: Look at the votical nuclear plant in Georgia. That took
way way longer and costs billions more than expected. And
that's just one plant.
Speaker 1: And it's not just nuclear. Wind farms face all that
local opposition. People don't want them ruining the view the
whole NMB thing.
Speaker 2: Sure not in my backyard. And solar, which is great,
needs massive battery storage to be what's called baseload reliable,
meaning it works when the sun isn't shining, and that
adds huge costs.
Speaker 1: And what about the wires themselves, the transmission.
Speaker 2: Lines another bottleneck. Upgrading the actual copper wires to carry
that much more power or can take years and years
of planning and construction. So you have this immovable object
of infrastructure reality meeting this unstoppable force of AI demand.
Speaker 1: And this isn't happening in a vacuum. It's not like
that AI demand is the only thing asking for more power,
not at all. It's competing with civilization's most basic needs.
I mean, if you plug in a new data center
in northern Virginia that sucks up as much power as
a small city, and it's the middle of January and
a polar vortex hits, people need to heat their homes, and.
Speaker 2: The grid operator have to make a choice. It's a
zero sum game. Do we cut power to the data
center that's training the next chatbot, or do we let
the grandmother and the suburbs freeze?
Speaker 1: In a democracy, the data center loses that fight every
single time, and it.
Speaker 2: Should and rightly so. So the AI companies are looking
at this map, at this reality, and they're realizing we
can't scale here. It's not a question of money anymore.
It's a question of physics and politics.
Speaker 1: We are physically unable to build power plans fast enough
to keep up with the exponential growth of these AI
training runs.
Speaker 2: But there is another bottleneck, and this one is arguably
even worse than the power generation. This one is pure thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: The heat.
Speaker 2: The heat thermodynamics is a cruel mistress when you run
electricity through a computer chip to do math, which is
all AI really is just massive, massive matrix multiplication. That
electricity encounters.
Speaker 1: Resistance and resistance creates heat. Basic physics, basic physics.
Speaker 2: And if you don't remove that heat, and I mean immediately,
the chip melts, It literally destroys itself.
Speaker 1: There was a stat from Jensen Hwan, the CEO of Nvidia,
that was mentioned in our source material, and this one,
I mean I had to read it three times. It
made me laugh out of sheer disbelief. It sounds like
a joke.
Speaker 2: It is a wild statistic, I know, the one you're
talking about. He said that for every server rac that
weighs two tons, So think of a big, heavy metal
cabinet packed with expensive chips.
Speaker 1: Okay, two tons like a car roughly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for that two tons server rack, he said,
about one point nine to five tons of that weight
is just cool equipment.
Speaker 1: That's ninety seven percent.
Speaker 2: Ninety seven percent.
Speaker 1: So you're telling me that only three percent of this giant, heavy,
expensive machine is actually doing the thinking. The other ninety
seven percent is just there to keep the three percent
from catching on fire.
Speaker 2: That is the absurd reality of high performance computing on Earth.
Think about the inefficiency of that. You're building these massive
concrete buildings. You're filling them with water pipes, huge air
conditioning units, chillers, fans, heat exchangers, just to run a
little slice of silicon.
Speaker 1: It's like buying a semi truck just to transport a
single envelope.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. And on Earth we are
constantly fighting the environment. We have ambient heat. If it's
ninety five degrees outside in Texas, your AC has to
work that much harder just to keep the chips that
they're operating temperature.
Speaker 1: You have a humidity, you have dust, all of it.
Speaker 2: It's a constant battle. So we've hit this hard physical ceiling.
We're running out of power to feed the AI, and
we're running out of water and space and equipment to
cool the AI.
Speaker 1: So the premise of this whole thread today is that
Muskiness team have looked at this game board, realized all
the pieces are completely locked, and they've just said, Okay,
we can't win this game on Earth, so let's change
the board.
Speaker 2: And that's where we enter phase one. The orbital solution.
Speaker 1: The timeline for this and the roadmap is it's just
so aggressive. The source suggests this is targeted for within
three years. Three years. My shoes are older than three years.
What exactly is phase one?
Speaker 2: The concept is pretty straightforward at a high level. You
launch the AI, compute the actual servers into space, specifically
into what are called sun synchronous orbits.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us. I know orbit means
it's going around the Earth, But what makes it sun synchronous?
Is there just a fancy term for being really high up?
Speaker 2: No, it's not about altitude so much as it is
about the angle and the timing. See, a normal satellite
like the International Space Station goes around the Earth and
spends about half its time in direct sunlight and the
other half in the Earth's night time.
Speaker 1: And that's bad for solar power.
Speaker 2: It's terrible for solar power because it means you need huge,
heavy batteries to survive the night.
Speaker 1: Batteries are heavy and expensive, and heavy things cost a
lot of money to launch into space.
Speaker 2: You've got it, that's the core problem. But if you
launch into a very specific inclination, it's almost a pole
to pole orbit. You can effectively ride the terminator line.
Speaker 1: The terminator line, yeah, the line between day and night
on Earth.
Speaker 2: That's the one.
Speaker 1: So you're basically surfing the sunset. Yeah, forever.
Speaker 2: That is a fantastic way to put it. Yes, the
satellite never goes into the shadow because the Earth is
rotating underneath it, and the satellite is orbiting at a
rate that perfectly matches that rotation relative to the sun.
It is bathed in sunlight twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week.
Speaker 1: No clouds, no night, no rain, no weather.
Speaker 2: At all, and crucially no atmosphere to filter the light.
The Sun pumps out more energy in a single second
than humanity has used in its entire history. On Earth,
we catch a tiny, featured fraction of that after it
pushes through the ozone layer of the clouds and all
the air. But in space, in space it's an energy buffet.
It is for all practical purposes infinite clean power.
Speaker 1: So that just it completely solves the power problem, the
hundred gigawatt problem. Solar panels in space are vastly more efficient,
and they run constantly. You don't need the batteries. But
what about the cooling Ah, Yes, you said earlier that
ninety seven percent of a server rack on Earth is
cooling gear because you have to use water and air
to physically move the heat away. Space is a vacuum,
doesn't that make cooling harder? I remember from a physics
class that a vacuum is a great insulator, like a
thermos flask.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: If I put hot coffee in a vacuum flask, it
stays hot for hours. Won't the chips just melt even faster?
Speaker 2: You're spot on. And this is where it gets really counterintuitive,
but also incredibly elegant. A vacuum is a perfect insulator
against conduction or convection. You can't use a fan in
space because there is no air to blow, okay, but
space allows for something called radiative cool and it's incredibly
effective radiative cooling.
Speaker 1: Unpack that for the non physicists among us.
Speaker 2: All objects that are hot emit infrared radiation. They glow
with heat even if our eyes can't see it. It's
how those thermal cameras work, right.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: On Earth, radiating heat is very slow and inefficient because
the air around the object is also warm and radiates back.
So we force air or water over the chip to
strip the heat away physically. But in space you have
the ultimate heat sink, the deep dark void.
Speaker 1: How cold do that?
Speaker 2: It's roughly three kelvin, which is minus two hundred and
seventy degrees celsius minus four fifty five fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: That is cold. That is unfathomably cold.
Speaker 2: It is effectively absolute zero. So if you attach your
hot computer chips to large radiator panels, just big flat
sheets of metal, and point those panels away from the
sun and toward deep space, the heat just leaves. It
radiates away as light energy into the nothingness.
Speaker 1: You don't need the pumps. No pumps, no compressors, no
water loops, no fans.
Speaker 2: I think zero.
Speaker 1: So that one point nine to five tons of cooling
equipment we talked about.
Speaker 2: Gone, You delete it. You just you don't build it.
You replace it with a passive metal sheet. You can
strip the hardware down to just the essential components, the
compute chips, the solar panels, and.
Speaker 1: The radiator, which has to drastically reduce the cost and
the complexity of the hardware itself massively, and.
Speaker 2: There's zero maintenance. There are no moving parts for the
cooling system that can break down. It's just elegant engineering.
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds like a dream for an engineer. Yeah,
but getting stuff to stace is expensive. Or at least
it always used to be. I mean, if I want
to ship a ton of gold to orbit, it used
to cost way more than the gold was worth.
Speaker 2: This is the lynchpin. This is the piece where without it,
this entire plan is a hallucination. It's a PowerPoint presentation
that goes nowhere. And that piece is the Starship rocket.
With Starship, this becomes a logistics problem and not a
physics problem.
Speaker 1: The numbers mentioned in Farzod's analysis were about mega tons
a mega ton of satellites.
Speaker 2: The goal, as stated in the roadmap, is to launch
one mega ton of satellites per year a million kilograms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a thousand metric.
Speaker 2: Tons, which sounds immense, and historically it is immense. But
you have to look at the new tool we have.
You have to look at the lift capacity of.
Speaker 1: Starship, which is designed for what exactly.
Speaker 2: It's designed to carry one hundred to one hundred and
fifty tons per flight to low Earth orbit. So do
the map to hit that megaton? That thousand tons heart
you're talking about roughly what seven to ten launches per
year are.
Speaker 1: Think seven to ten launches. That's that's nothing.
Speaker 2: It sounds like nothing, right, I.
Speaker 1: Mean SpaceX is currently launching their Falcon nine rockets almost
every other day. They did something like ninety launches last year.
Seven launches is a slow Tuesday for them.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that is why this is suddenly feasible. We aren't
talking about needing one thousand single use rockets. We are
talking about a handful of launches from a vehicle Starship,
that is designed from the ground up to be rapidly reusable.
Land it, refill it, and launch it again, maybe even
the same day.
Speaker 1: And we are already seeing Starship flight tests. We've seen
them land, We've seen them catch the booster with the
giant chopsticks at the launch tower. We know the hardware exists.
This is not a paper rocket.
Speaker 2: It's not imaginary tech now.
Speaker 1: So from a pure execution standpoint, putting massive amounts of
compute into orbit is surprisingly doable. It sounds completely crazy
on the face of it, but when you break it down,
the MAK actually works.
Speaker 2: It's the principle of economies of scale being applied to
orbit for the first time. When the cost to launch
a kilogram of mass drops by a factor of one hundred,
the entire business case for space manufacturing and infrastructure just
great round it flips on its head.
Speaker 1: Okay. So we have these giant server farms floating in space.
They're powered two hundred and forty seven by the sun.
They're passively cool by the void. But they need to
talk to us on the ground. A supercomputer in space
is totally useless if I can't ask it to write
my emails or solve my protein folding simulation.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If the Internet connection is as slow as bad hotel WiFi,
doesn't matter how smart the AI is.
Speaker 2: Connectivity is the final piece of this Phase one puzzle,
and the beautiful thing is the infrastructure for it is
practically already there.
Speaker 1: It's called starlink, right, the thousands of Internet satellites that
SpaceX has already put up there exactly.
Speaker 2: The Starlink satellites don't just talk to the ground. They
talk to each other using optical laser links. It's a
mesh network in the sky. So the plan is to
integrate these new AI compute satellites directly into that existing
laser network.
Speaker 1: So walk me through it. If I'm on my phone
in New York and I ask a really complex AI query, Okay.
Speaker 2: So your request goes up to the nearest starlink satellite
above you. That satellite then laser beams your query over
to an AI compute cluster that's also in orbit, probably
in that Sunsein corporate nearby. The AI does the thinking,
that's the energy intensive part, and then it beams the
answer back down to you through the starlink network.
Speaker 1: And because this is all happening in lowerth orbit, we're
only talking about a distance of a few hundred kilometers.
Speaker 2: The latency, the delay is negligible. It's actually comparable to
using fiber optic cables on Earth. And here's a fun fact.
Light travels roughly forty percent faster in the vacuum of
space than it does through glass fiber cables.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, the glass slows it down.
Speaker 2: Yes, the refractive index of glass slows light down. Vacuum doesn't.
So over very long distances, say from New York to Tokyo,
a space based internet connection can actually be faster than
a ground based one.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. So you're not sending the raw data back
and forth, like you're not trying to upload the entire
Library of Congress to space and back.
Speaker 2: No, that would be slow and expensive.
Speaker 1: You're just sending the question up and getting the answer
down exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a highly efficient architecture. You keep all the heavy lifting,
all the energy consumption in orbit where the energy is
free and abundant, and you just beam the results down
to the user.
Speaker 1: So that's Phase one. And honestly, if the roadmap just
stopped right there, I would still be incredibly impressed. Data
centers in the sky. That's a cool Wired magazine headline.
It solves the earth bound bottleneck.
Speaker 2: It's a huge step forward on its own.
Speaker 1: But the roadmap does not stop there. It goes to
phase two. And this is where I really need you
to walk me through the physics, because this part sounds
like complete madness.
Speaker 2: Phase two Moon factories and mass drivers.
Speaker 1: And the timeline is targeted to begin within four years.
Four years. Now. I have to play the skeptic here
for a minute. NASA had been trying to get people
back to the Moon with the art of his program
for a decade. Timelines in aerospace are notorious for slipping.
How can anyone seriously talk about building factories on the
Moon in four years?
Speaker 2: It is an incredibly unbelievably aggressive timeline. Let's just call
it elon time.
Speaker 1: We all know the drill elon time.
Speaker 2: So maybe four years means eight, maybe means ten. But
the key thing is the logic of the plan holds
up regardless of the calendar date. The question is why
build on the Moon.
Speaker 1: And I assume the answer is because hauling everything up
from Earth is still a massive pain, even with a
rocket as big as starship Exactly.
Speaker 2: Earth is what we call a deep gravity well, think
of it like a deep pit. To get anything out
of that pit and into orbit, you have to achieve
an escape velocity of about eleven kilometers per.
Speaker 1: Second, which is what mock thirty three.
Speaker 2: Something like that. It's incredibly fast, and it requires massive
chemical rockets, huge fuel tanks, and a ton of money.
You are fighting the planet's gravity every single inch of
the way.
Speaker 1: The old saying is you have to burn ninety percent
of your fuel just to lift the other ten percent
of your fuel.
Speaker 2: That's the tyranny of the rocket equation in a nutshell.
But the Moon, the Moon is different. It's tiny. It
has only one sixth of Earth's gravity. The escape velocity
from the lunar surface is only about two point four
kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: It's a much shallower pit to climb out of.
Speaker 2: It's barely a ditch. And that fundamental difference in physics
is what enables the next step, the rail gun.
Speaker 1: Which is technically called a mass driver, right.
Speaker 2: Right, And the concept is actually quite simple. You build
a long track on the lunar surface, maybe a few
kilometers long. You line that track with powerful electromagnets basically
linear motors. Okay, You place your payload, say a satellite
casing made of aluminum that you mind and process right
there on the Moon, onto a magnetic sled, and then
you just you pulse the magnets in sequence like a.
Speaker 1: Bullet train, but way, way faster.
Speaker 2: Much much faster. You accelerate the object along the track
until it hits that lunar uscape velocity of two point
four kilometers per second. And here is the absolutely crucial part,
because there is essentially no atmosphere on the Moon. There
is no air resistance.
Speaker 1: No drag, nothing to slow it down.
Speaker 2: Nothing. On Earth, if you try to launch something at
mock seven at sea level, it would just burn up
instantly like a meteor. The air is too thick. But
on the Moon you can accelerate it to incredible speeds
right there on the ground and.
Speaker 1: At the end of the track. What happens.
Speaker 2: It just flies off, It coasts into orbit. No rocket engine,
no burning fuel, no explosion, just pure kinetic energy that
you derive from electricity.
Speaker 1: And where does that electricity come from?
Speaker 2: From solar panels on the Moon.
Speaker 1: So let's trace this loop out because it's just wild.
You mind materials on the moon lunar regolith, which has
metals and silicon. You use solar power to run a
factory on the Moon that builds the bodies of the satellites.
Then you use more solar power to run a giant
magna gun that shoots those satellites into space.
Speaker 2: It becomes a self sustaining industrial loop. You stop depending
on Earth for the bulk materials. The Earth becomes a
place for living and space becomes the place for industry.
You fundamentally decouple our economic growth from the finite resources
of our home planet.
Speaker 1: And this is what allows you to scale to numbers
that are frankly incomprehensible by today's standards. The roadmap we're
looking at talks about scaling to one hundred tarot whites
of AI compute per year.
Speaker 2: That numbers it's really hard to visualize. It's almost meaningless
without context.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I need a comparison for one hundred tarot watts.
Give me an anchor.
Speaker 2: Okay, remember our starting number, the entire United States power
grid everything we have is four hundred and sixty gigawatts.
That is zero point four to six terrawats.
Speaker 1: Okay, point four to six. So one hundred taro watts
is my god.
Speaker 2: It is roughly two hundred times more energy than the
entire United States generates today. For all purposes. We are
talking about a level of computing power that is orders
of magnitude beyond anything that exists or could ever exist
on Earth today. It is a capability level that is
functionally infinite compared to our current constraints.
Speaker 1: If you tried to build one hundred tarowatts of data
thenters on Earth, you would literally boil the oceans.
Speaker 2: You would absolutely alter the climate in catastrophic ways. You
would run out of land, out of water. It is
physically impossible to do one hundred tarrawats of compute on
the surface of this planet. But in space, the Sun
is right there. It doesn't care. It's already burning. You're
just catching what it's already putting out.
Speaker 1: This feels like the moment in the conversation where we
have to zoom out, because when you start throwing around
numbers like two hundred times the US power grid and
moon factories, we are talking about tech companies anymore. We're
not talking about quarterly earnings reports.
Speaker 2: It is bigger.
Speaker 1: We are talking about the fundamental evolution of the human specie.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the Kardashev scale.
Speaker 1: I love the Kardashchev scale. It's one of those concepts
that once you hear it, you start seeing it everywhere.
Could you break it down for any listener who might
not have come across it before?
Speaker 2: Sure. It was proposed by a Soviet astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev,
back in the nineteen sixties. He was trying to figure
out a way to classify hypothetical alien civilizations if we
ever found them. He decided the most objective metric would
be to measure a civilization's level of advancement solely by
the amount of energy it can harness and use.
Speaker 1: Okay, so where are we right now on that scale?
Speaker 2: We are effectively a type zero civilization, or maybe a
type point seven if you want to be generous on
a good day, a type one civilization is one that
can harness all of the energy that falls on its
home planet from its star.
Speaker 1: And we aren't even there yet.
Speaker 2: Not even close. We still mostly burn dead plants and dinosaurs,
fossil fuels which are just stored ancient sunlight. We're scraping
the bottom of the barrel.
Speaker 1: Two.
Speaker 2: A Type two civilization harnesses the total energy output of
its host star.
Speaker 1: That's the classic dison sphere concept, right, building a giant
structure that completely encloses the Sun to catch every single
drop of energy exactly.
Speaker 2: Now. To be clear, we are not building a dice
and sphere next week. But this roadmap, this space based
AI plan, this is the first concrete, industrial engineered step
toward becoming a Type two civilization.
Speaker 1: Because we're stopping our reliance on the filtered secondhand energy
that hits the Earth's surface, and we're going directly to
the source.
Speaker 2: We are going straight to the tap. The Sun is
a massive fusion reactor that burns twenty four to seven
with or without us. By putting our most energy hungry
infrastructure or intelligence infrastructure into space, we are bypassing the
filter of the atmosphere. We're harvesting the star directly.
Speaker 1: It honestly gives me chills. I look at my toddler
who's napping in the next room, and I think she's
going to grow up in a world where this is
just normal. She might look up at the moon and
see it time glint of light and just know that's
a factory. Oh yeah, the moon factories. They've always been there, right.
Speaker 2: It completely changes the definition of scarcity. Right now, intelligence
is scarce because compute is scarce, and compute is scarce
because energy is scarce. But if you unlock one hundred
tarowatts of solar powered compute in orbit, intelligence becomes abundant.
It becomes like air.
Speaker 1: You can waste it.
Speaker 2: You can waste it. You can have an AI design
one thousand different variations of a coffee cup just for fun,
because the marginal energy cost is effectively zero.
Speaker 1: But let's bring this back down to Earth for a second,
because while we are dreaming of star harvesting and Type
two civilizations, there are very real economic and geopolitical games
being played right here, right now. There are gonna be
winners and losers in this transition. This isn't just kumbaya.
We all go to space together. This is big business.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, this is going to disrupt everything.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk cost. Farz Odd's analysis suggests that counterintuitively,
space based AI eventually becomes the cheapest option.
Speaker 2: It has to be for it to work at this scale.
Think about all the costs you incur building a data
center on Earth. First you have to buy the land,
which is expensive, especially near population centers.
Speaker 1: Then you have to deal with an NV laws not
in my backyard. Yeah, no one wants a power hungry
data center built next to their neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Then you have environmental regulations, You have to hire security guards,
you have to pay for electricity at peak commercial rates
which are always going up. Okay, and in space, no
land cost, no neighbors to complain about the noise or
the view, no environmental regulations in orbit at least not yet,
no staff to pay. It's all going to be automated
robots and the fuel the energy is free.
Speaker 1: So once you pay that initial capital cost of the launch,
which thanks to Starship and eventually Moon manufacturing is dropping
towards zero, the operating margin is just incredible.
Speaker 2: It's almost all profit.
Speaker 1: So if you are at Google or Microsoft or Amazon
and you are currently pouring billions and billions of dollars
in building these concrete bunkers in Iowa, Virginia to Housier servers.
Do you suddenly own a bunch of stranded assets?
Speaker 2: That is the multi trillion dollar question. If Musk and
SpaceX pull this off, terrestrial data centers might start to
look like landline telephones. They still work, but they're obsolete.
They're just too slow and too expensive to run compared
to the orbital alternative.
Speaker 1: Does this level the playing field? Though? I could see
an argument where if a small startup can rent some
cheap space compute, maybe they can finally compete with giants
or are or does it just make the one company
that owns the rockets the absolute, undisputed king of the
entire economy.
Speaker 2: It's the classic railroad tycoon scenario, isn't it. If you
own the tracks, you own the economy. In the eighteen hundreds,
it wasn't the farmers who got fabulously wealthy. It was
Vanderbilt who owned the rail lines that carried the farm
goods to market.
Speaker 1: Precisely and right now, Scarship is the only vehicle capable
of this kind of lift. There is no second place.
China's working on things. Blue Origin is working on New Glen,
But in terms of a flight proven, reusable super heavy lifter,
it's just SpaceX.
Speaker 2: And this brings up the massive national security angle. If
the United States, assuming SpaceX remains a US aligned company,
has a functional monopoly on orbital supercomputing, that is a
trump card unlike any other in history.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate strategic high ground. Whoever controls the
orbital compute layer, they control the future global economy. And
it's not just about running chatch EPT faster. It's about
running simulations for material science, for drug discovery, for advanced
weather modeling, for cryptographic cracking. It becomes the brain of
the world.
Speaker 2: Imagine a future scenario where the US has one hundred
terawatts of AI compute available to simulate a wargame or
a national cyber defense, and a rival nation has a
few coal powered data centers on the ground. It's not
a fair fight. It's like bringing a calculator to a
supercomputer fight.
Speaker 1: And there's a Tesla connection here too, right The source
material mentions something about the rebellionaire.
Speaker 2: Investment these right Well, without giving any financial advice, we're
just analyzing the source here. The logic is all about
vertical integration. Tesla isn't just a car company. It's an
AI and robotics company. They're building optimists, the humanoid robot
and FSD they're full self.
Speaker 1: Driving software, both of which need just obscene amounts of
training data and processing power exactly.
Speaker 2: So, if Tesla can utilize SpaceX's orbital compute network to
train their robots and their cars, their capability scales almost
infinitely compared to a competitor who is stuck on a
waiting list for a grid connection in Texas.
Speaker 1: It's a synergy that spans from the surface of the
Earth to lower orbit, all the way to the surf
hence of the Moon.
Speaker 2: It's the definition of long term thinking, the idea of
holding a stock through years of volatility because you believe
the underlying infrastructure play is just that massive.
Speaker 1: It's not a bet on car sales next quarter. It's
a bet on the physics.
Speaker 2: The physics say space is better for AI, so the
theory goes, the economy will eventually follow the physics. I
take time, but money always always finds the path of
least resistance.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's do some speculating. We've covered the roadmap we've
covered the physics, the economics, what does the world actually
look like if this happens, let's say five or six
years from now. The timeline slips a bit, as it
always does, but the system is online and starting to scale.
Speaker 2: Well. The acceleration of AI itself is the first thing
you'll feel. I think if we truly remove the power
and cooling constraints, AI improves much faster than even the
current scaling laws predict So we.
Speaker 1: Aren't just talking about a slightly better seria on our phones.
Speaker 2: No, No, we are talking about medical breakthroughs happening at
warp speed. Imagine an AI running in the cold vacuum
of space with functionally unlimited solar power, simulating millions of
potential cancer treatments in parallel twenty forty seven without stopping.
It accelerates the process of science itself.
Speaker 1: Self driving cars become perfect, or at least dramatically better.
Speaker 2: Very likely, the brain of the car network gets smartrder,
and smarter because the training models running in orbit can
be exponentially larger and more complex than anything we can
run on the ground.
Speaker 1: And then there's the elon time factor. We have to
address the elephant in the room. Again. We've been hearing
about robotaxes next year for what almost ten years.
Speaker 2: Now, laughs. That is a polite way to put it. Yes,
he said three years for phase one and four years
for phase.
Speaker 1: Two, which in the real world usually means.
Speaker 2: Maybe it takes six years for phase one. Maybe it
takes ten years to get the Moon factory running. But
here's the catch, and this is the important part. Even
if the timeline slips, the physics remain true. The fundamental
economics of solar energy in space plus passive vacuum cooling,
plus the low gravity of the Moon, those facts don't
change just because of project schedule slips.
Speaker 1: It's inevitable. It might be late, but it's inevitable.
Speaker 2: That's the argument. Once you realize that it is physically
cheaper and more efficient to do this in space, capitalism
itself will drive it there, whether it takes three years
or thirteen years. Gravity and the sunlight aren't changing their minds.
Speaker 1: I have this mental image that I can't shake. Now.
I'm walking my dog at night years from now, A
look up at the Moon and it looks exactly the
same as it always has, that glowing white orb But
I'll know intellectually that up there, silent robots are quietly
building other machines, that invisible railguns are silently firing canisters
of intelligence into the void, and that whole invisible web
is running the phone in my pocket.
Speaker 2: It's the silicon sky. We are literally wrapping the planet
in a new layer of intelligence, which.
Speaker 1: Brings us, I think, to the end of this particular thread.
We started with a tweet about running out of power sockets,
and we somehow ended up with the blueprint for a
Type two civilization.
Speaker 2: It's a journey from a mindset of scarcity to one
of abundance, from the physical limits of Earth to the
vast potential of the Solar system.
Speaker 1: So here's the final thought for you listening right now,
and I want you to really sit with this for
a moment. This roadmap we've discussed paints a picture of
a world where are our intelligence infrastructure. The very brain
of our society floats above us. It's completely detached from
Earth's limitations. It is immune to our weather, our power grids,
our politics, our borders.
Speaker 2: It is arguably the biggest leap and fundamental infrastructure since
the invention of the electric grid itself.
Speaker 1: So my question is this. Does that make you feel liberated?
Does the idea that humanity is finally leveling up, securing
our energy future and truly reaching for the stars does
that fill you with hope? Or does the idea of
a silicon sky controlled by a handful of entities totally
and physically out of reach of the average person does
that terrify you?
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate high ground in every sense of
the word.
Speaker 1: It really is. We want to know where you stand
on this. Are you ready for the moon factories or
do you want to keep the servers down here on
the ground where we can at least see them. Leave
a comment below let us know if you think this
is the great savior of AI or maybe the beginning
of a classic sci fi dystopia.
Speaker 2: I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'll definitely be watching the moon
a little more closely from now on.
Speaker 1: Me too. Thanks for joining us on thrilling Threads. We'll
see you the next one.