Elon Musk vs. Greta Thunberg; asteroid mining; the GDP Blip; AI and jobs; the Antikythera Mechanism, and more ...
Quote of the Issue: “How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story ‘Nightfall,’ about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove people mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.” ― film critic Roger Ebert in his May, 17, 1999 review of Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace
😎 Team Elon (Musk) vs. Team Greta (Thunberg)
Do you believe humanity has the will and know-how to create a future of vast abundance (a universally prosperous multi-planetary civilization of healthier, longer-lived inhabitants). Or must we reject “fairly tales of eternal economic growth” and settle for scarcity and stagnation to prevent environmental collapse?
British businessman and economist Adair Turner — best known for his stint as top UK financial regulator during the Global Financial Crisis — terms this choice “techno-optimism” versus “the end of consumerism.” So is Turner more of a Musker or more of a Thunberger? A bit of both. In a recent lecture (highlighted last week by columnist Martin Wolf in the Financial Times), he paints himself as long-run techno-optimist. (Wolf calls it the “Upward and Onward” scenario.) Turner argues that we “face no relevant long term planetary limits to our ability to produce and use as much zero carbon energy as we could possibly want.” Love it.
His confidence is based on a couple of beliefs (neither of which involve asteroid mining, more below). Turner thinks a combo of solar, wind, and hydro power can produce cheap, limitless, zero carbon energy. He also sees “no inherent scarcities” in the supply of minerals needed to build these energy systems — silicon for solar panels, copper for electrical transmission, and lithium for batteries. Turner notes, for instance, that estimates of economically accessible sources of lithium keep increasing, “reflecting a familiar pattern in which once a mineral becomes more valuable, more resources are identified.”
But this green energy transition will take time, maybe until 2050. That means reducing carbon emissions ASAP will require near-term changes in lifestyle and consumption, particularly in agriculture. Options include “non-radical” change in food production (such as more efficient use of nitrogen fertilizer), diets of less meat and dairy (perhaps nudged by methane taxes), and, finally, “radical changes” in food production (vertical farming, breeding bugs for feedstock or food, synthetic carbs and protein).
A few things: First, I’m deeply skeptical of plans requiring rapid and significant lifestyle changes, especially in the United States — it took 30 years for adult cigarette smoking rates to halve — and especially if they involve snacking on bugs.
Second, there’s the problem of what Turner calls the “rebound effect” (or Jevons Paradox) that suggests “as green energy gets cheaper and ever more abundant, humanity uses so much of it that it reaches new planetary boundaries (e.g. a lack of land for solar PV panels).” (See: bitcoin mining.) So we need to think about how to generate vastly more carbon-free energy in the future, which means nuclear fission and fusion deserves more than the passing mention Turner gives them.
Third, the unlikely possibility of massive lifestyle changes means there should be more emphasis on carbon-capture technologies to deal with short-term adverse effects. Capturing and storing CO₂ has become a green technology of huge interest to ultrabillionaires such as Bill Gates and, yes, Musk. This really is a “faster, please” situation.
🌌 Searching for a killer app for the business of space
Speaking of asteroid mining, the subject came up during my recent AEI event on the future of America in space. It was an all-star panel: Quartz space reporter and author Tim Fernholz, MIT astronomer Sara Seager, Harvard business prof Matt Weinzierl, and AEI economist Stan Veuger. While all broadly agreed about the theoretical potential of a space economy, they conceded there are still lots of questions needing answers.
Weinzierl:
The big gap between enthusiasm and reality has been “Where’s the demand? Why are we going up there? Who’s paying for this other than the government?” And to be perfectly candid, that question has not been solidly answered.
Of course, one potential “killer app” is the extraction of space resources. And about that, Seager — part of the team that may have discovered signs of life in the Venusian atmosphere — was notably positive.
Seager:
I love the topic of asteroid mining, and initially I was on the board of the since-discontinued Planetary Resources. I think the problem there is that investors aren’t comfortable with a decades-long investment. Imagine if you have to invest for 40 years — you might not even be around 40 years later.
But the reality in terms of space science is that we know how to get to an asteroid. We know how to land on asteroids — at least, the Japanese landed. We know how to bring material back. Right now, NASA has OSIRIS-REx, which scooped up a tiny amount of an asteroid, on its way back. So we absolutely can put all the components together.
Now, we don’t know how to drill on the asteroid. We don’t know how to chemically sort the material we need to bring back to Earth. But we actually do know how to get at least 90 percent of the job done. It’s just so far away that people don’t want to really engage.
💥 Blip, boomlet, or boom for the US economy?
Last week, President Biden signed the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. With this latest spending splurge, Washington has now committed more than $5 trillion in fiscal support since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. That's an amount equal to 25 percent of the pre-pandemic 2019 economy. No other country is even close. And as Wall Street expectation for the size of the ARP rose, so did their real GDP forecasts. Goldman Sachs has been among the most bullish. From GS, just this evening: “We have raised our GDP forecast to reflect the latest fiscal policy news and now expect growth of 7% on a full-year basis and 8% on a Q4/Q4 basis in 2021. We have also lowered our forecast for the unemployment rate to 4% at the end of 2021, 3.5% at the end of 2022, and 3.2% at the end of 2023, which makes us the most optimistic of the forecasters included in the Bloomberg consensus survey.”
What’s to worry about? Unexpected and sustained inflation that could cause unexpected Fed action, risking a slowdown. I also worry that this demand-driven growth spurt will distract Washington from taking pro-productivity actions that would boost the supply-side of the economy and really power long-term growth.
📈 The miracle of progress that some people won’t accept
What are your take-aways when you view these two charts, both from the Financial Times? (See you on the other side of the images.)
What those charts say to me is “progress.” Progress that, indeed, borders on the miraculous. In particular, that second chart tells me two things. First, there are a lot fewer deeply poor people in the non-West than there used to be. Second, the more that a nation opens itself to the global economy and dabbles with innovative, entrepreneurial market capitalism, the better it is for them. Yet when some folks see that second chart they mostly see a story of inequality, of unfairness. And for them, that’s where the story ends — unfortunately.
🤖 How AI is affecting the job market
Andrew Yang, now running for mayor of NYC, made a surprise splash in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries by calling for a universal basic income. One of his justifications was looming technological unemployment across business sectors would soon “create riots in the street.” At the time, this claim seemed — at least to me — wildly hyperbolic given jobless rates were at their lowest levels in decades. It turns out that my (lightly) data-driven intuition was correct. In the new analysis “AI and jobs: Evidence from US vacancies,” economists Daron Acemoğlu, David Autor, Jonathon Hazell, and Pascual Restrepo find that the skills requirements in a decade of job postings show “that despite the notable surge in AI adoption, the impact of AI is still too small relative to the scale of the US labour market to have had first-order impacts on employment patterns – outside of AI hiring itself.” Bigger and broader impacts will surely come, but they will be complementary and creative as well as replacing. Too much attention has been placed on that last part.
💻 Hacking the world’s first computer
The Antikythera Mechanism is an astronomical calculator, often called the world’s “first computer.” Sponge divers found it in 1900 aboard a sunken Roman-era cargo, halfway between the Peloponnese and Crete. A corroded lump when pulled from the Aegean, figuring out just how the mechanism works and the scope of its functionality has been more than a century-long project. But it appears researchers have made a real leap in understanding, creating a digital model of the Mechanism that is enabling them to build a physical replica. So that’s pretty cool. But even more than that, as an Ars Technica article notes, “The mechanism's very existence offers strong evidence that such technology existed as early as 150-100 BC, but the knowledge was subsequently lost. Similar machines with equivalent complexity didn't appear again until the 18th century.” One wonders where 21st century civilization would be if this technology hadn’t been lost.
⚛ Atomic aftermath: Fukushima, 10 years later
We’re now a decade past the March 11, 2001, meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. And the cleanup continues. Most notably: Molten nuclear fuel has yet to be removed from the site’s three reactors. What’s more, according to a story and cool pictorial in the Wall Street Journal, a recent survey finds that “more than 80% of the Japanese public doesn’t feel significant progress is being made and is concerned about further accidents.”
But it turns out that lots of progress has been made. After the disaster, 12 percent of the Fukushima prefecture was a no-go area; now its 2 percent. And even inside the nuclear plant grounds, the WSJ piece notes, “radiation levels are sufficiently low that protective clothing is required only for those who go within about 100 yards of the buildings housing the damaged reactors.”
Overall, the picture is probably a lot rosier than many might have expected given how dangerous and terrifying it all seemed back in 2011. In that way, Fukushima is reminiscent of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in then-Soviet Ukraine. Viewers of the HBO mini-series heard characters speculate about tens of thousands or millions of deaths. But only 50 can be directly attributed to the disaster, although maybe 4,000 might eventually die as a result of radiation exposure. No fatalities have ever been found to be directly attributable to radiation exposure from the Fukushima meltdown. What has proven quite deadly is the impact of Japan replacing its zero-carbon nuclear power with dirtier and more expensive power generated by imported coal and oil. One study — covering only Japan’s largest cities — finds the increase in electricity prices led to a reduction in energy consumption, causing an increase in winter-time mortality of nearly 1,300 additional deaths in the 2011-2014 period.
Today, the Japanese government is pushing a nuclear restart. Not only did it come close to power cuts this winter, but the country now realizes that it cannot meet its longer-term energy demand and carbon emission goals — carbon neutrality by 2050 — without nuclear.
📺 The lessons of Challenger: The Final Flight
The second episode of this late 2020, four-part Nextflix documentary about the doomed “space truck” starts with a mid-1980s appearance by Jerry Seinfeld on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The comedian is lamenting how the American public is already bored by the Space Shuttle program. Maybe, he wondered, NASA “should make it exciting. … Maybe they should send up some guy that doesn’t want to go. ... I mean, I think everybody would watch that. Dragging some guy down the hall, put him in a space suit. He’s holding onto the door jam. See his face in the glass on liftoff.” Seinfeld mimes a terrified astronaut pressing his face against the orbiter’s window.
That was about all the comedy in the episode, which focused on a regular person becoming an astronaut — but a most willing participant: schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Of course, the impending-but-avoidable disaster cast a sense of gloom over the story of the selection process and the series overall. Yet I had forgotten just how much public enthusiasm there was initially for the program. And while there was an element of national pride involved — America is back, baby! — it was more than that. Part of the thrill was based on the confident belief that the Space Shuttle was going to open space to everybody, not just former test pilots and scientists. As McAuliffe herself said back then, “[Having a teacher in space] is exciting students about a way of life that's part of their future. They've got to get ready for this. Their grandchildren are probably going to be on space stations and students have to prepare for that future. And I think that will help them to do that.”
And some were even more optimistic than McAuliffe. The documentary also features former child actor Peter Billingsley (A Christmas Story), who was a spokesperson for NASA’s Young Astronaut Program. Billingsley said NASA told him that after the presumed successful Challenger flight, he and McAuliffe would do a national tour promoting space. And after that, Billingsley claimed, that NASA told him the next step would be a “kid in space.”
The Space Shuttle proved more expensive, more dangerous, and less reliable than NASA first thought. But I think it did show that Americans don’t need a geopolitical Space Race to be interested in space commerce and exploration. The real possibility that they might get there themselves — as in now the case during America’s bourgeoning space renaissance — might be enough to sustain a national commitment even when successful launches become commonplace.
Next Steps
The device that reverses CO2 emissions | BBC
This Startup Wants to Fill the Skies With Cargo-Filled Robot Planes | Bloomberg
Japan’s innovators seek their lost mojo | Financial Times
Scientists want to send 335 million seed, sperm and egg samples to the moon to create a lunar Noah's Ark | CBS News
PsiQuantum expects commercial quantum computer by 2025 | Financial Times