Solocast #3: Nuclear, Nanotech, and the next Industrial Revolution (Book Recap: “Where is my Flying Car?”)
This episode is a solo-cast. I take you through through a book am incredibly stoked on called Where Is My Flying Car? by engineer and futurist J Storrs Hall.
This book totally changed my personal mission, and showed me might unfold in the next 50 years with the right progress in technology.
The book explores the possibilities of nuclear energy, nanotechnology, and AI. We’ve gotten off track on the pace of innovation, why it happened, and what we can do to create a more abundant, exciting, and beautiful future.
Links to Platforms:
Take-aways I shared in the episode:
Living on a floating airship city in the sky is entirely possible. We have the ability to achieve the "impossible"; we just forgot.
We’ve haven’t seen meaningful progress in nanotechnology in decades.
There are two types of failure: failures of imagination and failures of nerve.
As during the first Industrial Revolution, a combination of technologies enabled and reinforced each other. There is another Industrial Revolution in the offing.
The author explores the Great Stagnation, which set in during the 1970s and how we’ve fallen off the Henry Adams Curve.
(The Henry Adams Curve is like Moore's Law for Energy Consumption.)
I didn’t realize how broken the grant funding system is. Nor did I fully realize that many “green activists” aren't "pro clean energy" -- they are "anti-energy" which is fucking nuts.
It’s possible for technology to regain a pace of innovation that would allow us to live in a Jetsons-style world by 2062.
Nanotechnology may lead us to a world without scarcity of material things.
Energy consumption is a better measure of poverty than GDP or earnings data.
We are not starved for energy-rich materials. We're starved for the technology to cheaply access that energy.
Nuclear safety concerns are outdated.
Nanotech will break your brain; it’s basically godlike control over the material world with the ability to remake matter at will.
Nanotech and nuclear are mutually reinforcing, like oil/gas, steel, and combustion engines were during the first Industrial Revolution.
No matter where people live or what technology people have, people spend about an hour per day traveling. Imagine the possibilities of where you could travel in that hour if you had a flying car.
Links for episode topics:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: All right, my friends, hello and welcome. I'm really excited about this episode. I'm going to do something a little new with it. I'm going to dedicate this entire episode to a book I just finished that I absolutely love called Where Is My Flying Car? It's a new book from Stripe Press. The physical version is absolutely gorgeous. I actually think the author wrote a previous version and then Strip Press republished it, but it's an exceptional book. I've really enjoyed reading it over the last month or so. I have already gifted it to probably five or ten people. Every time I’d finish another chapter, I would like think of someone new to send it to. I want everybody I know to read this book. I want the whole human race to read this book. I want half of our species to be working on the problems outlined in this book. And this is certainly not the last time you will hear about it. I already actually scheduled an interview with the author, so he'll be coming on soon and I look forward to talking to him. But I really wanted to take some time to kind of recap the main themes of this book for myself and for you. It's not the easiest read in the world, honestly. It's a little technical; the author is a PhD and a scientist and an engineer, so there's a lot of examples and sort of dense like math, napkin math examples. So, it took me a little while to read, but I think the core concepts in here are so exciting, and some of the passages in here are absolutely thrilling and totally kind of changed how I think about my work and what we might see over the rest of our lives and kind of the history and the future of technology. And I'm just really jazzed up about it as you can tell. So, I want to kind of get a tight, condensed, curated version to kind of at least bring you up to speed on the basics of the book and some of the ideas in there. And for that reason, I'm a little dangerous because I'm pretty early on that like curve of somebody who just found a new idea and thinks they understand it. I don't have the background that the author has. I don't have a technical or scientific background, and this is pretty much the first book I've read like this, at least with this level of sort of technical detail. I don't know if there's 10 others like it. So, like take it with a grain of salt that I don't have a ton of context that a professional sort of scientist or futurist might have, but some of my favorite books I've ever read were like the first book in a genre. So, I was blown away the first time I read Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I was blown away the first time I read The Accidental Superpower, The Systems Bible, those books that are the first ones to kind of open your eyes to a whole new way of thinking about the world tend to stick with you and tend to kind of blow down the walls of the universe and let you see a little farther, which is really cool. But yeah, grain of salt there.
Hey, everybody, quick interlude before we dive into the episode. I want you to take a moment to tell you about the early-stage investment fund that I just opened up with two of my buddies, most talented and favorite people, Bo and Al. We've all been angel investing individually for a while, and we just decided to combine our powers and start up a rolling fund. So, it's new this quarter. We are going to invest about 2 million bucks a year into the most promising early-stage technology companies we can find around the world. That's incredibly topical for this episode because I was motivated to start the fund in part by reading this book and thinking about how incredible the future can be if we can find, develop, and distribute the most impactful technologies in the world and get them in everybody's hands and start all living better lives. We're raising money now. We're having conversations with investors. I'm honored that many listeners and readers have kind of joined the fund to invest with us. Head to rolling.fun and read the fund note. It's linked in the show notes below. Accredited investors can invest with us through Angel List today. If you have questions, you want to talk more about it, please reach out to me. We'd be honored to work with you. And if you're an entrepreneur working on anything that I'm about to talk about and bring forth this second Industrial Revolution, please reach out to me, teach me. We'd love to be a part of your journey. On with the show.
I want to start with a quote. I pulled out a ton of quotes and I restructured them a little bit so that I think I can make kind of a logical progression here. And I think this kind of passage sums up the book the best way possible.
The power and sophistication of our information processing systems and devices today are demonstrably fantastic, ludicrous, and insane from the point of view of anyone in the sixties. The same astronomical increase is possible with matter and with energy. And we have known how to go about doing it since 1960.
So, the core thing about this book is we have basically gotten off track on the pace of innovation in the physical world and especially in the energy world for really no good reason, for social reasons, for he calls them failures of imagination. And what's the other one? Failures of imagination is kind of like not thinking of what's there and failures of nerve is the other one. It is just like cowardice about kind of what's possible, the fact that we went to the moon 50 years ago and we haven't been back, the fact that we have nuclear energy but haven't really progressed with it, the fact that Fineman was theorizing about nanotechnology 50 years ago, but we haven't seen meaningful progress in it. So, he really paints this picture of what the world could be like with these technologies at a mature state, the way our information technologies have progressed over the last 50 years. So that's what he's saying in that passage. Our information processing systems blew away the world of 1960, but it's one of the only places where innovation has continued or at least continued to get dispersed and distributed. So, here's an example. This is one of the first passages. I think somebody shared this on Twitter and I read this passage and I was like I have to read this book. And the passage turns out to be right at the end of the book when he's kind of laid all of this stuff out, but I actually think it is a brilliant hook to kind of- as soon as I heard this, I then wanted to read the book to understand how to make that world possible. So, here's this passage, and it ends up being a little bit of a comedic like portrait of heaven achieved through technological means. So here we go.
What I'd really like to do is float along over the ocean at 3000 feet in an open decked airship, Mai Tai in hand, watching the endlessly fascinating cloudscapes and the spectacular sunsets while being wafted from island to island by trade winds. Imagine an airship or rather an airborne village whose gas bag consisted not of a few big balloons in a fish shaped cover but a cluster of a billion or so small balloons randomly spaced and tied together by an invisibly thin diamond thread, a diamond thread the width of a bacterium, half a micron should be about right. The whole business could be made to look from any really reasonable distance like a naturally occurring cloud. Below this, shaded from the tropical sun by a balloon cloud, hangs of village of terraces, courtyards, and esplanades. A center is connected by walkways while private residences, other villages, and the surface are reachable by wearable, folding powered wings. Given the nanotech necessary to build a cloud city, it seems possible those wings could be made to look like great white birds’ wings. It seems less likely that the inhabitants would be interested in wearing white robes or playing harps.
So, I think these are so- like imagining that world where these airships are possible and held up by these kind of like cloud shaped balloons and tiny micron threads, and we'll talk about some of the technologies as we get into those, but all of this seems just impossible. We see this stuff in sci-fi and just kind of treat it like, oh, that will never happen. We so easily forget that our parents and the generation before them saw impossible things happen over and over again. We have those miracles today that just sit invisible before our eyes. Flight was considered incredibly impossible, let alone to become commercialized and available, and we have the ability to achieve the impossible again. We have the Library of Alexandria in front of us. We have flight, we have missions, really. We have space travel. Like there are so many things that were considered impossible where we've forgotten how to kind of reach for those impossible things and demand them of ourselves and our society. And look at sort of the first Industrial Revolution as one of those like impossible things. There's a combination of technologies that kind of all happened around the same time that enabled each other, that reinforced each other and that lifted billions of people out of poverty. We had steel came about in the Industrial Revolution which enabled the internal combustion engines and enabled railroads and railroads then fed into the sort of supply chain of both of those things and enabled us to move natural resources. Flight came around well after that but as a result of those technologies, and oil and gas critically were the sort of energy source of all of those things. There's a great passage in here that he talks about 400 years ago, no one would have known what to do with a gallon of gasoline even if they were handed it. And that's actually kind of where we are with these nuclear materials. We have this incredibly dense, powerful fuel source, but we don't yet have the steel and the internal combustion engine and the pieces around it to get usable energy out of it and distribute that energy to make it usable by all these people. So, a passage here that I'll just talk through, he talks about four different levels of humanity, so different kinds of levels of existence, and uses an example of a mode of transportation to kind of exemplify those levels. So, level one would be those people who are living barefoot today. They may not be able to wear shoes. Their income is around a dollar a day. Level two is the bicycle. So, at $4 a day, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a bicycle. It's a tool that they can use. There's about 3 billion people at level two today. We have about 1 billion people at level one, so in that kind of initial level of poverty. Level three, we have 2 billion people that make $16 a day about. They can afford and use a motorbike, which is a bike plus energy, much more meaningful tool to get around. And then at $64 a day, there's 1 billion people at level four who can own a car. And this is sort of the framework that he sets out. And then here's the passage where he talks about the power of the Industrial Revolution.
The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated. In 1800, 85% of the world's population was at level one. Today it's only 9%. The average American moved from level two in 1800 to level three in 1900, and then to level four in the year 2000. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved out of level one, erasing the rich poor gap, and making the world's wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped. And we can state the great stagnation story nearly as simply. There is no level five.
So, the great stagnation, we'll talk about it a little bit. He talks about it a lot in the book. I want to focus more on the sort of positives and the dream, frankly, because it is kind of more fun to talk about than like complaining about what's gone wrong with where we are now. But of course, the Charlie Munger – I’m wearing my Munger shirt – the Charlie Munger style inversion problem is like instead of asking what do you have to add, ask what do you have to remove? And there's certainly some answers to what can we remove in order to improve the pace of our innovation. And there's a great passage about this. The great stagnation is something that we talk about – roughly around 1970, a lot of things sort of got off track. There's actually a really good website I think called the WTF Happened in 1971 or something like that. You can Google something like that. And it's just maybe hundreds of charts that show things getting like weird and wacky in 1970. It's a bizarre scroll. And this definitely explores some of those things that either started to happen or started to get off track that are really, really meaningful to what we're going to see happen the rest of our lives and how our children and our grandchildren are going to be able to live. And whether the technology is going to keep growing with the pace of our civilization and whether we can leave the planet and continue to live better or whether we're just going to be crabs in a bucket, trying to kind of crawl over each other for scarce resources. So, and I like this reframe, so we have this great stagnation, but Hall actually calls it a great strangulation. So, let me talk through this a little bit. Here's the quote:
Looked at under the hood, the great stagnation was really the great strangulation. There is a difference. A stagnation might elicit a resigned shrug, a murmured, boy, it would have been nice to live in the years of low-hanging fruit before the stagnation set in. A strangulation calls for Sherlock Holmes and [inaudible 13:40]. The stunning progress of the Industrial Revolution from the 1700s to the 1970s wasn't a miracle but the result of a large enough percent of enough generations being determined to be greater than the last and innovating their way through technology and science towards being greater in fact. They were able to do so in part because the entangling brambles of regulation that snag us at every turn largely weren't there. Conversely, the great stagnation that followed didn't happen to us. We did it to ourselves. The really interesting question is whether we can undo it.
So, there's some sad pieces in this. There's a lot of calls to challenge the way government funding is given, the way grants are given, the way resources are allocated to science, fundamental science and innovation and distribution. There are some really sad things, like I didn't realize how broken the grant funding system is. I did not realize that many like “green activists” aren't so much pro clean energy as they are anti-energy. They don't want us to have greater resources because they don't want us to have greater impact on the planet. And that's sort of a subtlety that I don't know that I understood until reading this. And it's really quite sad because I feel like it gets us stuck, stuck in technology, stuck as a civilization. If we can't progress towards these cleaner sort of self-contained ever improving things, growth is kind of built into our society. And I think socially things get really complicated and messy and difficult without it. And it didn't even occur to me that anyone would frankly be like anti-energy or anti-innovation, but I find that to be a really kind of upsetting worldview and the fact that it exists is a little worrisome. And hopefully, sort of the technological progressives can share messages like this and paint a picture of how beautiful the future can be, floating around in airships created by nanotechnology and powered by nuclear energy. The thing that is just kind of the core thesis of this book – there's a lot of them, it's really dense, there's so much in here – but it's a simple idea that it remains perfectly possible technologically to regain the pace of innovation that we had and have a Jetson style world by 2062 if we decide that's what we want to do. We have within reach, in our eyes, it's a little foggy, it's a little out of reach, it's hard work, but we have this I'm going to call it the second Industrial Revolution in our grasp that we can will into existence in our next lifetime. And think about how exciting it was to live in that time when steel was getting discovered and new bridges were getting built over spans that we never thought would happen. And oil and gas were electrifying. Like the electrification of America, imagine seeing the marvel of a light bulb for the first time and then seeing that spread across the country in a matter of decades, refrigeration, air conditioning, that there are people who lived through most of these things and saw them all get deployed and we can have that kind of existence. It's not just- We'd be lucky to see a moon landing at this point; I would love to see us land on Mars. But there's so much that we can do here to support that. So, let's talk about the second Industrial Revolution, because for it to be- it needs to be multiple things coming together in the same way that the first Industrial Revolution was oil and electricity and railroads and steel. The second Industrial Revolution sort of as laid out in here is a combination of three major interacting and mutually accelerating technologies. And those three are nuclear energy, which Hall says can give us energy too cheap to meter basically in the same way that today kind of bandwidth is too cheap to meter or information almost, like bits is too cheap to meter. The second technology is nanotech manufacturing. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. We'll talk about each of these a little bit more, but the sort of tagline there is just the ability to remake the physical world at will. When you think of nanotech manufacturing, think of precise control on an atom level. So, atom by atom sorting or atom by atom building. And what's cool about that is like you can build something like a mile high tower out of diamond because you don't have to find naturally occurring diamond. You can create a structure out of diamond molecule by molecule from sort of the raw atomic components. And that is like a mind-blowing thing in a lot of ways that it just turns us into a post scarcity world. You can manufacture food, you can manufacture a vaccine, you can manufacture a space elevator that's 10 miles high made out of carbon nanotubes that have this kind of incredible strength and lightness. And that's what creates that thread, that diamond thread the width of a bacterium that we talked about in that sort of initial airship example. The third technology is AI, using incredibly powerful compute and sort of emergent computing properties to solve some of these really gnarly problems, mathematical problems that go into and come out of both of these other technologies. And if combined, we can increase productivity by orders of magnitude. We can lengthen our lives. We have the potential to totally eliminate scarcity. This will help us get to multiple planets. This will help us live on, create colonies in space and on other planets. This is, he doesn't talk about this, but I imagine terraforming is a lot easier if you have some nanotech and nuclear power to kind of help drive that along. And here's his analogy to sort of the first Industrial Revolution and talks about- leads us into those kind of order of magnitude gaps.
So powered factories and commerce led to something like a two order of magnitude increase in what the average person could have or do and the greatest improvement in general quality of life the human race has ever seen. A human eating a diet of 2000 calories per day can produce and therefore use a daily average of about a hundred watts of energy. Today, the average North American uses about a hundred times that and largely because of the technology that came out of the Industrial Revolution. There's another passage in there actually, where he talks about how energy usage is actually a much better measure of poverty than GDP or earnings or anything like that. If you are using ever increasing amounts of energy, then your lifestyle is improving. So, all the focus that we have on energy efficiency, using less, great, but really what we should be focusing on is innovating the methods of our energy sources, like making energy cheaper, making energy more available, making it too cheap to meter. And my snarky ass quote about this was if our parents spent as much time focused on funding and supporting and improving nuclear energy, we wouldn't worry about leaving the lights on. I know all of us got yelled at for leaving the lights on, wasting energy. But really the sources of energy are so abundant. There’re a few things in here. With these technologies, there's accessible energy all around us. He says a gallon of seawater has as much raw energy potential as a gallon of gasoline or that the sea floor contains as much uranium as if it was made entirely out of solid coal. We are not starved for energy rich materials. We're starved for the technology to cheaply access that energy. And that technology is within our grasp. We can squint and see it from here. There’re labs where some of it, much of the components exist. It's just not scaled. It's not quite refined enough. Some of these things have been “10 years off” for 20 years, but they're underfunded, underdeveloped, maybe misattributed. We've had a long sort of history of ignoring or looking unfavorably upon nuclear energy which he has a few great counterarguments to in here that I don't want to do all of because that's a little bit of a tangent, but that is exceptional. Let me continue this quote here about the orders of magnitude that came from the Industrial Revolution and what can happen next.
It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to imagine another Industrial Revolution giving us another factor of 10 or maybe even another hundred. We should already be up another extra factor or two or three by now if only we had continued the energy trajectory we were on before 1970. We might have had flying cars, space travel, and the rest before 2062, but the Henry Adams Curve, the heartbeat of our civilization, flatlined. Now, if we get into nuclear energy as the first of those three technologies I want to deep dive on a little bit. The Henry Adams Curve, which he just mentioned there, if you've heard of Moore's Law, you can basically think about it like Moore's Law for energy. Moore's Law predicts that the number of- the density of transistors on a microchip will continue to kind of, I don't know if it's double every year or something like that. And it's basically held true for the last 50 years and it's what's really driven this massive increase in computing power that we had. Computers used to be massively underpowered and the size of a room and huge and expensive and slow. And now we all have incredible super computers in our pockets that we all take for granted. But Moore's Law is what drove that. And that is the pace of innovation in the power of computing. The Henry Adams Curve was sort of a pace of innovation of energy technologies, and going back 300 years, we've had a steady trend of about 7% of yearly growth in the usable energy available to our whole civilization. There's a couple of components there. Some of that comes from population growth, but some of it also comes from the energy efficiency growth rate. And some of it comes from the increase in the energy consumed. But as long as those continue to grow, our lifestyles are all going to get better. Our technologies are going to get better. Energy is really upstream of a lot of other types of innovation and enables a lot more things than we think. And the proliferation of those technologies mean that more and more and more people are lifted out of that poverty, out of that level one poverty, and they're getting greater tools and greater lifestyles and more comfort and more safety and longer lifespans. Actually, I'm working on this book on Balaji, Balaji Srinivasan, and he talks about for most of history, the actual measure of technology was increase in lifespans. And that was like the measure of scientific and technological progress. And we've a little bit lost sight of that in favor of market cap, unfortunately, but that we can get back to that and that energy feeds into those things. And in the 1970s, we got off the Henry Adams Curve. He talks about this a lot in the book. We fell off the Henry Adams Curve and it would be like if we fell off Moore's Law today. Like if for the rest of your life, your computer never got more powerful. Your phone never got more powerful. Your camera never got more powerful. Your battery life never got longer. We'd see such stagnation. You wouldn't have a better software package every year. You wouldn't see new apps come in. You wouldn't see- like we would just have essentially the same thing that over decades would feel crappier and crappier. And that is functionally what's happened in energy, but it doesn't have to have been. So, there is just so much interesting stuff in here about sort of ways that we can approach revisiting or reinvigorating some of that nuclear power. He talks about safety concerns are largely overblown, that we are building significantly safer plants. We have the capability to build much, much safer plants if we build sort of the same thing over and over again, rather than redesigning everything from the ground up that makes it incredibly expensive. We can reduce regulation that makes it incredibly expensive to build one of these nuclear power plants. Another interesting component actually is that almost all of the progress in nuclear has happened inside the Navy, in the US Navy, because they're a little bit insulated from sort of the like regulatory bodies. There's one person who can just kind of say like shut up and keep going. Of course, there's defense spending, but there's also like just a little bit of a- There is a little bit more of a dictatorship, I guess, a little bit more structure and a little less- there's no nimbyism in the Navy. Like if you want to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or a nuclear powered submarine, and the order is given and the plans begin. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but you don't have to go to a city council meeting and convince somebody to put one in their backyard. But Hall does talk about how much those safety concerns are overblown or at least outdated. Like I think outdated is fair. There's the nuclear waste concern is also outdated let's say. There's a lot- I think he said early nuclear power plants could only use 50 or 60% of the nuclear material that they took in, and the waste product was dangerous. Now they're up to somewhere above 99% efficiency and that continues to improve. So, there is less and less and less waste. Nobody wants to create that waste. So, they're getting more efficient. They're getting meaningfully safer. Elon Musk has done some famous examples. He will travel to a nuclear power plant, something where the citizens are concerned, and he'll eat their food and drink their water and just prove how little true radiation risk there is. People just tend to misunderstand that. I'm not the right person to explain it to you, but you will find explanations in this book. But I really loved reading about some of what's possible here. I really have kind of thought for a while, and people sharing really helpful things, that is like nuclear power is way cheaper, nuclear power is way less intrusive. Nuclear power is better for the environment. Sure, sure, sure. Great, great, great. I thought a lot of- I'm kind of like I’ve never been against nuclear power. Like it's better than a coal plant, but I hadn't really thought about all the things that become possible when we start to lean on nuclear power. And that's some of the stuff that really got me excited in this book. So, there's a little bit of a passage here that I'd like to share that kind of gets me going on this.
So, a nuclear reactor which could fit in a closet could produce a megawatt of power. A megawatt can power easily 500 homes for a year, and that small scale seems like it wouldn't work. Like if you talk to any nuclear technology person today, they will say like that's insane, that'll never work. But Hall's point is that is where the computer started, the scale of a room, tens of millions of dollars to build one. But with 50 years of sort of industrial kind of improvement and supply chain improvement and innovation, we could have this sort of unit, this closet size unit that could power your home for generations, many generations. And this is a passage that I really like here.
With 50 years of experience and experimentation, Isaac Asimov’s speculation about the appliances of 2014 will no longer have electric cords of course was completely reasonable given the physics and the rate of technological improvement up until then. We really, really, really should have had atomic batteries by now. And if we did, guess what, your iPhone would never need charging and your Tesla would have a range of 3.5 million miles.
Here's another one:
With the physical productivity of a nanotech industrial base, what would have been a ridiculously expensive way to power a house or a vehicle, becomes perfectly reasonable. It has other benefits, this nuclear battery, like being able to put your home anywhere, including a mountain top, a South Pacific Island or floating in the jet stream at 50,000 feet. No power lines, no oil, and no emissions.
How fucking awesome is that? Like a closet sized battery that can power your home for a hundred years, just incredibly cool devices. It's so sad that Asimov had a reasonably correct projection that we are now eight years past. And we can even conceive of an appliance without an electric cord. Like imagine someone giving you a lamp that's just like you imagine Duracells in there, not an atomic battery that made it a standalone functional light for as long as can be imagined. But something that he mentioned in there, that last passage with the physical productivity of a nanotech industrial base. So, I want to transition to the second of those two sort of mutually reinforcing technologies that will drive the second Industrial Revolution. And nanotech wasn't something I really knew much about until reading this book. It is also mind blowing, perhaps even more mind blowing than nuclear. Like we at least kind of can wrap our heads around Mr. Burns style nuclear power plant and maybe even a nuclear battery that comes from that, but nanotech will break your brain. The kind of short version is just like it's a godlike control over the material world. It's the ability to remake matter at will. His more precise definition is atomically precise machinery. But that's really the outcome. There’re a few things that we'll kind of talk through a little bit about the specifics here, but it's pretty mind blowing. The people I mentioned this to kind of say like, oh yeah, I read that Michael Crichton book Prey, which I haven't read yet, but I'd like to, but that seems like maybe the most popular version of what nanotech can be or nanites, I can't remember exactly what sci-fi that was from. But it basically lets you pull carbon out of the air to create new matter, new raw materials. And here's a thought experiment that he uses to kind of kick this off:
Suppose that since 1960, we had made progress in nano factories at the same rate that we made progress in computers. So, anyone who has a computer now could have a nano factory. This isn't a big thing. Mind you, it's about the size of a computer. It could be as small as a cell phone and you'd probably have one as part of your cell phone, just a quick update for your iDock app or whatever we want to call it. It synthesizes the dose, your dose of a vaccine from the CO2 in the air and a small vitamin tablet inside the device. This is a possibility. It's been a possibility for a long time. The mind-boggling elephant in the room is the question that Fineman asked: why has it taken so long for us to move in that direction? If we really grasped our opportunity, the entire physical world of the Jetsons would be here right now.
That's the end of the quote. I took a little liberty to hopefully make it a little more clear. But this is a wild thing. It is not just the end of scarcity of specific materials, hopefully the end of scarcity of things like food. It allows us to engineer materials that we haven't had before. Importantly, it actually allows us to create things on a much more smaller scale than we could. So, there's like motors on an atomic or molecular scale. And it's tiny. Here's this passage that describes that. It's a little bit building on the Jetson’s theme.
The reason that the world of the Jetsons is all buttons and levers and no gears or engines is because in this kind of future, there won't be any visible motors. Motors will be everywhere, but they'll be microscopic, like the motors in your muscle cells. Things will simply move smoothly, silently, and when you want them to like your arms and legs do.
And so that's the end of the quote. And if you think about these, like sort of like liquid, almost willful like liquid things that turn into other people, you see them in, I don't know, like X-Men or Marvel movies or whatever, and it's just you don't even really conceive that technology can do that, that something can go from the size of a bracelet on Iron Man's wrist to armor that covers his whole arm. But that's the kind of thing that we're talking about. And this is where I get dangerous because I start to conflate like an actual scientist's book with some absurd comic book shit that I've seen. But I think if I understand that even halfway correctly, some of that stuff becomes incredibly true. And what happens in this, like I said, the name of this book is Where Is My Flying Car? The sort of theme of the book is what happened to the flying car that seemed so clear that we were going to get in the forties and the fifties. We were starting to have more and more popular airplanes. We had a ton of people designing flying cars. We had all these races. We had miracle upon miracle upon miracle. And it just seemed so obvious that we were going to have flying cars by think of the forties, the version from the forties of the world fare that had us all living in space stations by the year 2000. They weren't crazy to think that based on the technologies that they had seen. And a lot of this book is spent looking at the technologies of flight and lift and thrust and power density and what becomes- what is possible, what is practical. The author actually went and got his pilot's license as part of the research for this book, which was awesome, and you learn a ton about flight in there. And we do end up with a very practical sort of recipe for a flying car at the end. And part of it is because we can use this nanotech to manufacture things that have never been possible to be manufactured for or at least at costs that have never worked before. So, there's a few things here that nuclear and nanotech really mutually reinforce each other really well. I don't understand this perfectly, but I think it's a really important thing to kind of think about this lollapalooza. I'm going to go back to my Charlie Munger shirt. It says lollapalooza on it. This lollapalooza almost of like multiple technologies reinforcing each other and compounding to this place that's like totally mind blowing. So, there's three reasons that Hall gives us for why nuclear and nanotech just kind of go together. And think about go together in the way that chemical fuels like oil and gas and steel machines go together, like railroads and cars go together in the first revolution, those power densities of nuclear energy and the power needs of nanotech roughly kind of like fit together and support each other in the same way that chemical fuels and steel machines did. And there's three versions of- or three reasons for that. One is that nanotech can continuously sort of rebuild pieces of let's say a tiny nuclear power plant that is exposed to radiation. That'll break parts down over time, but nanotech makes it almost trivial to kind of continually rebuild those things. We can build precise and extreme and tiny structures. Some of the rarest material on earth, these like carbon nanotubes is incredibly strong, incredibly light things. We can build like teeny tiny nuclear reactors that are built around 25 grams of fuel. And that’s how you get a nuclear reactor that's the size of your iPhone or the size of a roll of paper towels or something like that. You can build these very light satellites. You can build these autonomous little robots who can build this sort of hive mind of little things that work together well. The third is isotopic separation, which admittedly I barely understand, but it's a machine to separate and sort atom by atom for different properties. So, different fuels, different sort of radioactive molecules have different properties and is really, really hard work, expensive work, and dangerous work to separate them and handle them on an atomic level. And nuclear lets us do that or nanotech would let us do that, which would enable much more progress in sort of a nuclear and much more safe progress in a nuclear process. So, what happens- I'm going to hit one more sort of metaphor here now that we kind of see all these things coming together to take us from the first Industrial Revolution to the second Industrial Revolution here and to hammer home like what that means for us in our daily lives. Like I don't think any of us remember pre-Industrial Revolution, but almost everybody was living at that barefoot level of poverty. We were hungry. We were sick. We were dying soon. It was not great. And it was because it took us a year to farm enough food to feed ourselves. It took another year to weave a shirt. So, here's a quote that he has in the book that shows us the power of those progress and the power that machines have to decrease the cost of things that we really need to continue to improve our lifespans and this sort of compounding body of technology that makes our species run. The total amount of labor necessary to create one tunic worked out to be three months of full-time work. At the average wage in the United States as of 2020, that would make the tunic cost $15,000. By contrast, we can go to Amazon today and get an equivalent one for about $50 or two and a half hours of work. The difference is the Industrial Revolution. Because of the machines we've invented, each hour of human labor today produces 300 times what it did seven centuries ago. And your medieval counterparts back then would spend a year to earn as much as you make in a day. The promise of nanotech is that this can happen again. Things that now take us a year's work could be done in a day. A $3 million flying car, if we could build one, would cost just $10,000 to make. We forget, this is back to the beginning of this kind of like we have miracles all around us that we take for granted. We forget that we have within reach the ability to add more miracles to our long history of producing technological miracles. And we should be hungrily chasing them, trying to add to the work that millennia of ancestors have done to get us where we are. We should not accept stagnation. So, let's talk about the flying cars and how this all sort of comes together. He really branches off into all these different technologies. He keeps coming back to flying cars as like the heartbeat of the piece. There's a lot more exciting stuff than just flying cars in here, but there's a ton about that. And that starts actually with travel theory, which is interesting. I had never heard this before, but it basically says no matter what, no matter where they live or what technology they have, people spend about an hour per day traveling no matter what. If you have a car, you might drive 30 miles to work and back, but if you were on foot and that's all you have, you probably work somewhere where you just can walk 20 minutes away or you walk out to your farm. I found that really interesting. So, his case for flying cars is like, look, if we create a tool, a technology that gives you increased range, you're still maybe only going to fly an hour a day or travel an hour a day, but you can go from New York to Detroit instead of just New York to 10 blocks north of New York. We have much more quality of life. It's more about quality of life. It's not necessarily about over and over again humans have proved that they will spend what they have to improve their quality of life. So, you kind of shrug and say like why is a flying car important? Somewhat ironically, he makes a case that it's safer. It's more efficient because we're not having cross traffic patterns. We can reach far greater places. We can visit more people. We can see more of the world. It is a very cool- and we don't need any reason past it's fucking cool, and it's the next step, and it's what we should be doing. So, affecting to create the nuclear car, we have- I was talking about how nuclear and nanotech sort of pile in there. One, chemical fuels are super heavy. So, with nuclear, we don't have to fly around nearly as much fuel, and there's a quote in here. Let me see if I can try to find it. But it basically talks through if a 747 didn't have to carry around all its fuel for a 12-hour flight, it could carry four times as many people, something crazy like that. So, the capacity, even if all we did was add nuclear power to the planes, the 747s that are flying, we could massively increase their capacity. With nanotech, then we can construct much lighter, much stronger materials. Manufacturing gets incredibly cheap. One of the things I also hadn't considered in nanotech that he talks about in here, he takes us through a thought experiment of if we had sort of mature nanotech, how long would it take for that nanotech to recreate the entire infrastructure, physical infrastructure of America and due to the sort of compounding nature, the rice grains on the check board and the nearly instantaneous compounding rate of a machine that can replicate and create more machines that then can create more machines that can create or rebuild that physical infrastructure. It sounds unbelievable. He says with mature nanotech infrastructure, we could remake the entire current stock of the United States physical infrastructure in a week. All the bridges, all the roads, all the railroads, all the skyscrapers, all the planes, all the cars. That's mind blowing. And again, like sounds impossible, but we've seen the impossible happen over and over and over again. So why not strive for it again in our generation? This is the stuff that gets me so fired up. I finished this book- I didn't even finish it. I was like halfway through this book, and I was like I need to dedicate my life to helping usher in this second Industrial Revolution. I hope some of this turns you on as well and you get fired up about this. I'd be hard-pressed probably to go get my PhD in nanotech at this point, but there's a lot of ways to lend my sword to the cause. And this is one of them. I hope some of you take up arms with me when we're done here. So, here's a quote actually about this, the flying cars concept and some more of the efficiencies that come in there.
According to these projections, aircraft should get into low earth orbital speeds in the coming decade. And orbit is an extremely efficient way to travel. It takes no more energy total to get to orbit then it takes a 747 dragging its bulk through the atmosphere halfway around the world. And you could get to Sydney from New York in under an hour instead of more than 20.
It's just this kind of, I don't know, fresh thinking, like pushing the extremes of what's possible that gets me really excited and thinking about what the world looks like with planes flying through orbit or even Elon Musk was talking about using starship to go kind of from point to point all around the world. And that there are flights that it would be cheaper for, maybe not quite yet, but that it's within realm of possibility to use starships to go city to city. Here's another passage I want to leave you with at the very end. This was another one of the first ones I saw that that drew me in. And before I do that, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for bearing with me on this rant. I have been gifting and recommending and trying to get everyone I know to read this book. I hope this inspires you to pick it up or at least to look at the world a little differently as a result of this summary. I'm excited to have the author on the podcast soon and to have another kind of similar conversation here. I left out so much. There's something on every page that either blows your mind scientifically or makes you think about what's possible or makes you curious about going to look something up. It's just a force. I absolutely adore this book. I adore the message of it. The thinking in it is so clear and interesting and sort of like scientific first principles but with an eye towards really our lifestyle and how it can help all people on earth, and it gets into stuff- there's something at the end that's like it's basically perfect control over the weather. It talks about solving the climate crisis. It talks about high production greenhouses. It talks about space elevators and how to get things into orbit, low marginal cost orbit launches. It just over and over again blows my mind. And I hope you pick it up and enjoy it half as much as I did because I'm on one about it. Here's the final passage I want to leave you with. And it takes a leap from just talking about mere boring flying cars to imagining a flying city. And he's got a little napkin math in here about what would have to go into that and what becomes possible and how we might live in the future. Here we go.
Imagine an aircraft with a 10-mile wingspan. That's roughly the scale of Manhattan. It might be a flying wing shaped like a manta ray. It might have a cord of five miles at the center and a thickness of up to a mile. Internally that's enough volume for 4,400 square miles of floor. So, if you have 10 million people in there with 12,000 square feet a piece to live, and that still leaves room for state rooms, 250 levels of roadways, service, 50,000 elevators, atrium spaces for cathedrals. A 747 weighs about a thousand pounds a passenger. If we have a whole life in there, let's budget five tons per citizen for an airborne city. And that gives us a wing load of about 150 pounds per square foot, which works out to be the same as a 747. Given the ridiculous wingspan and the virtually infinite Reynolds number, we might get a lift to drag ratio of a hundred. We would need a billion pounds of thrust. With two square miles of thruster area or a thousand foot wide strip running the entire 10 mile wingspan, that's 36 pounds per square foot. We need a total of 250 million horsepower or 200 gigawatts to power the flight and the city. This might barely be possible with chemical fuels, but a single line of nuclear power plants every 250 feet along the wing would suffice to keep an airborne mega city flying indefinitely. That sounds like a lot but would only occupy a hundredth of a percent of the internal volume of the city.
That's the passage. And that blew my mind the first time I read that. It's like vendor's gone crazy. It's like the snow piercer train in the sky. It's either dystopian or utopian depending on how you want to think about it. But that is just an incredible vision. And I love even a drip of hopium that we could see that kind of world in our lifetime, maybe not a 10-mile flying city but one mile flying city or the tech to make it possible, or somebody bold enough to even undertake building it over a few decades. I love this book. It gave me a fresh dose of optimism and excitement and enthusiasm. It made me really want to go back and kind of look at some of these fundamental technologies. It gave me a renewed and ever increasing energy about nuclear. It gave me, I mean, an education from zero about nanotech, and it actually was part of what motivated me to start this venture fund, because if I can't be a founding scientist, I can do my damnedest to be sure that some of them get the capital that they need and the attention that they need and the stories get told about people working on this stuff and what becomes possible. I hope we can work on removing some of these regulations. I hope we can welcome nuclear power into our lives, try to dispel some of the harmful rumors that are around. And I just really appreciate your listening. I hope you get half as excited as I am, and I'd love to talk to anybody about this. If you want to carry on the conversation, if you're working on anything in this space, if you've come across great resources in this space, send them to me. I'll be sharing it and getting us closer to this utopian technologically progressive, multiplanetary, energy abundant, post scarcity world that is within reach and that I think we can all live to see. Thank you for listening. Have a great night.