Creating an Age of Wonders
Joined October 2020
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28 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
7 Nov 2021
Space travel will frame our place in the cosmos, vanquishing our delusions of grandeur, underlining the preciousness of what we have and the duty to protect our heritage for future generations.
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May 27
The right historical analogue for AI is not Pets.com. It is fibre.
The dot-com bust destroyed WorldCom. It did not unlight the fibre.
Netflix runs on that fibre. YouTube runs on it. AWS replicates across it.
The applications were waiting on the last mile.
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May 25
The market priced AI as if compute and intelligence were the same thing.
They are not.
The chip is the easy part. The scarce asset is the slot: permitted power, transformer capacity, cooling, networking, operators, and the legal right to turn electricity into computation 24/7.
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May 24
Hyperscalers will spend $700B on AI infrastructure in 2026.
OpenAI is at -122% operating margin. xAI burns $1B/month. Anthropic just hit a $30B run rate at $600M Q2 operating profit. And GPUs will change the world - bringing abundance.
The real story of AI is still unwritten.
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Feb 3
How do you reach 547 AU in a human lifetime?
Dive toward the Sun. Deploy a sail. Let photon pressure accelerate you to 20 AU per year.
The Sun that bends the light also powers the journey.
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Jan 31
In December 2022 NIF achieved fusion ignition. Which means more energy out than the laser put in.
There are billions of years of energy in the oceans. Every gallon of seawater has 300 times the latent fusion energy of a gallon of gasoline. Access is the only limit.
And that limit is about to disappear.
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Jan 30
In 1968, we saw Earth from the outside for the first time. One photograph.
Today: daily global coverage. Any location, any day, retrievable on demand.
From miracle to infrastructure in a single lifetime.
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Jan 29
30 years ago we knew precise distances to about 1,000 stars.
Today: nearly 2 billion.
Gaia mapped a significant fraction of our galaxy with unprecedented precision. Not estimates. Not approximations. Exact positions and velocities.
We didn't just find the universe. We kept it.
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Jan 26
The Sun has been a telescope for 4.6 billion years. We just haven't reached the eyepiece yet.
New essay: The Solar Gravitational Lens—how we'll photograph continents on distant worlds before we ever visit them.
ageofwonders.org/essays/the-…
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Jan 26
An SGL telescope is engineering we already know how to do.
Solar sails diving close to the Sun could reach 550 AU in ~20 years. A mission launched in the 2030s could return the first exoplanet maps by mid-century.
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Jan 26
The first resolved map of an Earth-like exoplanet will be an Earthrise-level moment.
Proof that active geography exists beyond our solar system. The map that tells us where to go next.
The Sun built the lens. We can build the mission.
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Jan 25
Abundance that remains inaccessible is indistinguishable from scarcity.
The Sun floods Earth with 10,000x more energy than we use.
The oceans hold billions of years of fusion fuel.
The knowledge of humanity is online.
Yet billions live without electricity, clean water, or basic education.
Abundance doesn't automatically distribute. Access must be designed for.
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Jan 24
LIGO detected a distortion smaller than 1/10,000th of a proton's width.
Two black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago. The ripple reached Earth. And we were ready.
We built a sense that evolution never gave us.
Now we listen to the fabric of spacetime itself.
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Jan 23
770 million people lack electricity.
2.6 billion lack clean cooking fuel.
Both solvable today.
The physics permits solutions. The economics increasingly permit them. The infrastructure is being built.
Every day we delay, millions remain trapped in artificial scarcity.
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Jan 23
The Age of Wonders isn't something that happens to us.
It's something we create, one bold decision at a time.
Every solar panel installed. Every fusion experiment funded. Every piece of infrastructure that converts abundance into access.
The physics permits wonders. We permit delay.
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Jan 22
The Sun floods Earth with 10,000x more energy than humanity uses.
The challenge isn't scarcity. It's capture.
Solar costs have fallen 90% in a decade. Battery storage 89% since 2010.
The infrastructure for abundance is happening now. The only question is how fast we build it.
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Jan 21
What would you build if energy were effectively free?
Not free as in "no cost" — free as in "so cheap it's no longer a constraint."
Desalination for every coastal city?
Vertical farms in every urban center?
Carbon capture at gigatonne scale?
Space manufacturing?
The physics permits all of it. The question is what we choose to build.
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Jan 21
Most people try to self-improve with motivation.
I assumed motivation would fail and built around that.
- After 9pm: no decisions
- If it's not on the scoreboard, it doesn't get time
- Any two debt indicators fire means24 hours minimum recovery
Motivation is weather. Systems are law.
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