🚀 America took one small step toward saving humanity this week
Also: The new Covid variant; nuclear fusion; quantum computing, and more ...
“Now, for the first time ever, we possess the ability to edit not only the DNA of every living human but also the DNA of future generations — in essence, to direct the evolution of our own species. This is unprecedented in the history of life on earth. It is beyond our comprehension.” - Jennifer Doudna, Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
Note to subscribers: This issue of Faster, Please! is a bit different because of the Thanksgiving holiday this week here in the United States. No long-read essay, for instance. You’ll probably see a similar format around Christmas and New Year’s. Happy Holidays!
Short Read
🚀 America took one small step toward saving humanity this week
The SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched Wednesday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Southern California is meant to help the human race, not win some “billionaire space race.” The rocket was carrying NASA’s DART — Double Asteroid Redirection Test — spacecraft, which, if all goes well, will collide with a small asteroid next October. (“DART’s target asteroid is NOT a threat to Earth,” NASA’s DART explainer reassuringly notes.) Unfortunately for fans of the 1998 movie Armageddon, actor Bruce Willis declined NASA's invite to the event.
In an interview with Eric Berger of Art Technica, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's chief of science, said, “I believe we have a planetary defense program that is worth talking about now. I'm really proud of what we have been able to do. But I still believe we can do better."
Not only does planetary defense make the strong case for further investment in space, but also for further scientific discovery, technological invention, and commercial innovation — all of which leads to more economic growth and wealth creation. Stagnation, or even “de-growth,” is a recipe for human extinction, as well as needless suffering from poverty, illness, ecological collapse, and the decline of human freedom.
Of course, killer comets aren’t the only threat out there. In 2020’s excellent The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, philosopher Toby Ord explores various natural and manmade threats to modern civilization and humanity’s existence. Among them: asteroids and comets, supervolcanic eruptions, stellar explosions such as supernovas and gamma-ray bursts near our solar system, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics natural and engineered, hostile AI, a totalitarian surveillance state, and extraterrestrial contact. Overall, Ord figures there’s a 1-in-6 chance of an existential catastrophe over the next 100 years.
So what to do? Ban AI and CRISPR? Reduce our electromagnetic signature so we don’t attract ETs? Attempt to live like pre-industrial societies? Maybe, but exploding stars and space rocks don’t care about any of that stuff. Such a path also means renouncing humanity’s potential.
In his book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, UK physicist David Deutsch writes about the possibility for an “appallingly narrow escape” from the sorts of scary scenarios Ord outlines:
We have such a chance because we are able to solve problems. Problems are inevitable. We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future. We shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best. Even if our civilization moves out into space in order to hedge its bets, as Rees and Hawking both rightly advise, a gamma-ray burst in our galactic vicinity would still wipe us all out. Such an event is thousands of times rarer than an asteroid collision, but when it does finally happen we shall have no defence against it without a great deal more scientific knowledge and an enormous increase in our wealth.
DART is a start. But as the NASA scientist said, we can do better. Indeed, we must do better. And that means becoming richer and smarter.
Micro Reads
🦠 New Coronavirus Variant Arrives in Europe, Sets Off Global Fears of Restrictions - Wall Street Journal | I’m cautious about the early analysis here. But what’s clear is that the B.1.1.529 strain is a “variant of concern,” a WHO label for virus strains that, according to the WSJ, “have been proven to be more contagious, lead to more serious illness or decrease the effectiveness of public-health measures, tests, treatments or vaccines.” Certainly financial markets are taking this variant seriously with stocks, oil prices, and government-bond yields slumping as I write this Friday morning. In a note today to clients, Capital Economics makes this economic point:
. . . the global economic backdrop is very different now than in previous waves of the virus. Supply chains are already stretched. A virus-related surge in goods spending, or port closures, would exacerbate existing supply strains and add upward pressure to goods inflation. Likewise, a new, more dangerous, virus wave could cause some workers to temporarily exit the workforce, and deter others from returning, making current labor shortages worse.
📈 U.S. Consumer Spending Powers Ahead Despite Inflation Pickup - Bloomberg | One reason news of this dangerous new Covid variant is such a gut punch is it comes amid some really good economic news. Bloomberg: “Purchases of goods and services, unadjusted for changes in prices, increased 1.3% [in October], the most since March, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Even after accounting for higher prices, spending still exceeded projections in a sign that consumers started their holiday shopping early.” The report helped nudge Q4 economic forecasts and tracking higher — to 6 percent from 5 percent at Goldman Sachs, 7 percent from 5 percent at JPMorgan, and to 8.7 percent from 3 percent at Morgan Stanley.
⚛ Nuclear fusion: why the race to harness the power of the sun just sped up - Financial Times | The FT gives its “big read” treatment to important recent advances in fusion technology, as well as accompanying investor interest. Lots of great quotes, stats, and explanations of various technical approaches in the piece. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sam Altman, who recently invested $375m in the US fusion start-up Helion: “I couldn’t be more optimistic. In addition to being our best path out of the climate crisis, less expensive energy is transformational for society.” By the way, that Altman investment is a good chunk of the $2.3 billion that private fusion companies have raised this year. The piece also notes that according to one analysis, by 2050 the world will need 12 times more clean electricity than is produced today.
So fusion when? One of the more optimistic estimates comes from Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off that’s developing technology able to generate powerful magnetic fields, a critical capability that would precede construction of a fusion power plant that could produce more power than it consumes. FT: “The next step towards power production is the construction of a demonstration plant called Sparc, about half the size of a tennis court, which CFS hopes will achieve net energy by 2025 and then a commercial power station in the 2030s.”
🐺 Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation - Jennifer L. Raynor (Wesleyan University), Corbett A. Grainger, and Dominic P. Parker (University of Wisconsin–Madison), PNAs | Biodiversity has big economic benefits, as this June 2021 paper shows (bold by me):
Recent studies uncover cascading ecological effects resulting from removing and reintroducing predators into a landscape, but little is known about effects on human lives and property. We quantify the effects of restoring wolf populations by evaluating their influence on deer–vehicle collisions (DVCs) in Wisconsin. We show that, for the average county, wolf entry reduced DVCs by 24%, yielding an economic benefit that is 63 times greater than the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock. Most of the reduction is due to a behavioral response of deer to wolves rather than through a deer population decline from wolf predation. This finding supports ecological research emphasizing the role of predators in creating a “landscape of fear.” It suggests wolves control economic damages from overabundant deer in ways that human deer hunters cannot.
(Thanks to Scott Ruesterholz for the pointer — and this comment: “If wolves are a significantly pro-growth policy, imagine what lions could do? Or better yet, dinosaurs; maybe, those Jurassic Park folks were smarter than we realized.”)
💡 The impact of the US-China tariff war on China’s economy: New evidence from night-time lights - Davin Chor (Dartmouth University), Bingjing Li (University of Hong Kong) | A clever bit of analysis that uses satellite readings of night-time luminosity to gauge the impact of the 2018 Trump administration tariffs on China’s exports to America. Chor and Li’s findings “show that locations within China that were more exposed to the US tariffs experienced a larger decrease in night light intensity, pointing to a contraction in local economic activity.
Figure 1 provides an example of the variation across locations that the night lights data reveals. The figure plots night-time luminosity in the prefecture-city of Suzhou, in Q1/2018 and Q1/2019 respectively. Night lights dimmed to a greater extent in the two highlighted regions – the Huqiu New & Hi-Tech Zone and the Suzhou Industrial Park – relative to the rest of Suzhou. The decrease in night light intensity was greater in these two manufacturing zones that feature a high export-intensity, suggesting a possible link to the tariff war. If export demand took a hit from the US tariffs, the resulting contraction in production and in labour demand would reduce lights emitted from factory night-shifts and from the worker dormitories often situated in close proximity within China’s industrial areas.
The research reminds me of a great “natural” economic experiment: North and South Korea. Before the Korean War, north and south were pretty much the same, sharing a population, culture, and institutions. The north might even have possessed a bit of an economic edge containing, as economist Charles Jones has noted, “a disproportionate share of electricity production and heavy industry.”
Of course, the two post-war socioeconomic models have performed quite differently and quite to the advantage of South Korea. And you don’t need GDP numbers to understand that reality. The different economic results are suggested by this famous satellite photo where South Korea is brightly lit and North Korea is a dark sea other than a cluster of lights that are the capital Pyongyang and its environs.
💻 Quantum Computing's Possibilities and Perils - International Monetary Fund | There’s plenty of focus here, as is typical in these sorts of analyses, on the threat quantum computing could pose to current methods of encryption with “far-reaching implications for financial stability and privacy.” But we shouldn’t forget the potential benefits from quantum computing, which tend to get underplayed a bit. I am especially excited by the potential for quantum computers to become a meta-innovation that helps us innovate: From the piece:
By solving problems with more accuracy and speed than digital computers, quantum computers have the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, revolutionize financial market modeling and simulations, and empower machine learning and artificial intelligence. They could be used to model subatomic particles, molecular interactions, and chemical reactions. This could revolutionize chemical engineering and material science and allow the design of new materials, such as solid-state batteries. Quantum computers could also help us understand climate change.
📱 Tweetstorm of the issue: