🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #39
"Supply-side progressivism," energy from supervolcanoes, William Gibson's 'The Peripheral,' and much more!
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— The pushback against “supply-side progressivism” is finally happening
— Limitless energy, the Yellowstone supervolcano, and the Elon Musk Effect
— The techno-optimist Up Wing lesson that William Gibson's "The Peripheral" inadvertently teachesBest of 5QQ
— 5 Quick Questions for … aviation historian Dan Grossman on the past and future of airships
— 5 Quick Questions for … economist Heidi Williams on metascience, DARPA, and moonshotsBest of the Pod
— A conversation with astrophysicist Gioia Rau on exoplanets and the future of space science
Essay Highlights
💢 The pushback against 'supply-side progressivism' is finally happening
I’ve been waiting for left-wing pushback against the center-left pundits (finally) pushing the idea that well-intended environmental legislation from the 1970s makes it awfully hard to things done here in the 2020s. NYT columnist Ezra Klein’s most recent piece — in which he suggests regulatory burdens may be to blame for the decline in construction worker productivity since 1970 — seems to have crossed a line. Krugman reminds whippersnapper Klein that before all environmental regulations made it hard to build nuclear power plants, new housing, and congestion-priced roads, America was a pretty dangerous place, even if you were just talking a walk outside or going to work. But to quote Krugman himself, “Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.” A more productive America is an America of greater wealth and technological capability. Imagine if energy abundance had been a huge priority for the past 50 years, and this country was dotted with fusion reactors from coast to coast. Global warming would be even less of a priority than it currently is. Because it wouldn’t be a thing.
🌋 Limitless energy, the Yellowstone supervolcano, and the Elon Musk Effect
A recent article in the journal Renewable Energy suggests inserting 100 5-mile long, engineered copper cylinders into the Yellowstone Caldera magma chamber and connecting them to 10 powerful steam turbines to extract an astonishing 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy to power a country's entire electrical grid. It’s an ambitious idea that will require some drilling innovation, as well as some regulatory reform. The the bright side, the social license for radical innovation is expanding thanks in part to the Elon Musk Effect. (I would also credit Marc Andreessen’s viral “Time to build” essay and Peter Thiel’s memetic “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”) These ideas are part of a conversation about what humanity just might be able to do. I’m guessing they will inspire other entrepreneurs and technologists, here and elsewhere, to pursue or think about these and other ambitious undertakings.
🎰 The techno-optimist Up Wing lesson that William Gibson's "The Peripheral" inadvertently teaches
Amazon’s The Peripheral, based on William Gibson’s 2014 book of the same name, takes place during two periods, the early 2030s and the turn of the (next) century. At some point during that span came the Jackpot, an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” catastrophe. But from that cluster of catastrophes, which killed off 80 percent of humanity, emerged a world that has taken a technological leap forward with nanotechnology. My primary Up Wing takeaway concerns the issue of acceleration. What if all those scientific advances that began as the “Jackpot” catastrophe was emerging had happened a decade or two earlier, especially nanotech? I would venture humanity would’ve possessed the tech tools needed to stop the Jackpot or at least greatly mitigate its impact. The Peripheral shows how even a Down Wing story could be made into an Up Wing story — or least a less Down Wing story — with a few minor tweaks. It wouldn’t be hard for some character to make the point about the cost of progress delay.
Best of 5QQ
Dan Grossman is an aviation historian who writes at Airships.net. He’s also author of the 2019 book with Cheryl Ganz and Patrick Russell, Zeppelin Hindenburg: An Illustrated History of LZ-129.
Fiction of the alternate history genre with a "steampunk" aesthetic often depicts a reality with ubiquitous airships. Was this ever in the cards, or was it inevitable that airplanes would take over for most uses?
It is strange that Steampunk fans have embraced the airship, because the airship is completely incompatible with the era of steam: The key element in the development of the airship was the internal combustion engine. Airships are a better match with the lesser-known aesthetic known as Dieselpunk.
But many futurist visions do include an airship to signal to the audience that they are watching an alternative vision of the future. This was never going to be the case. There is a natural limit to the abilities of an airship in terms of speed, payload, and even safety, while airplane technology quickly exceeded those limitations and kept advancing.
Heidi Williams is the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University
Do we know the extent to which the DARPA model can be duplicated? Can it be duplicated, and do we know how to duplicate it?
I'm sure that you could find books somewhere by people that don't like the DARPA model, but almost all we hear about are the successes and people just lauding this as the best thing that could possibly happen. And in my view, that's just really unfortunate that I have not seen a lot of retrospective thinking about, what in our project portfolio worked better or less well? And what about our hiring practices are limiting? In general, they don't pay the program managers that well. They have a very specific hiring structure that's kind of constant across the programs. And there are a lot of people that have expressed concern that, actually, they're kind of structurally unable to bring in the right people at the right time because of some specifics. But it seems like the model is just so successful that people haven't even taken the opportunity to reflect on opportunities for improvement.
Best of the Pod
🔭 A conversation with astrophysicist Gioia Rau on exoplanets and the future of space science
Gioia Rau is an astrophysicist and program scientist at Schmidt Futures. Previous to joining Schmidt Futures, Gioia was a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
It might seem to some people that NASA hasn't really done much since the Apollo program. But there's a lot more to space science than crewed missions. It seems to me like NASA’s doing a whole lot of things right now.
Absolutely. The time we are living now is a time of revolution for so many aspects in space exploration. Not only human exploration, which of course during the Apollo time peaked, and now hopefully also with the Artemis mission, named after the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is coming. But the James Webb Space Telescope, which is really a marvel of engineering. We never before have thought that we could put a telescope inside the rocket like an origami and then deploy it in the atmosphere. And we are discovering with Webb so many different things about the universe. Our early universe: Webb is basically a machine to look back in time. With its infrared vision, we will be able to look back over 13.5 billion years. But also with Webb we can discover galaxies over time, again, with the infrared sensitivity. So to discover even the earliest and faintest galaxies. We can discover the life cycle of the stars, as in the infrared, Webb which is able to look through the dust clouds which are otherwise opaque to the visible light. But also we are, as we mentioned before, able to see the atmosphere of these exoplanets, and so understand if in there there are building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe, but also understand how our own solar system was formed.