Ad Astra
If there is a common destiny of great men, it is their gaze turned to the stars. From Julius Caesar to Seneca, from Giotto to Thomas Aquinas, from Dante Alighieri to Petrarch, from Michelangelo to Caravaggio, from Amerigo Vespucci to Galileo Galilei, and then so many other men and women who have shaped entire eras. But the stars do not belong only to the greats of history: they also belong to ordinary people. Enrico Fermi recounted that, as a boy, he saw two shepherds stop to gaze at the sky, and that one commented to the other on what, to him, appeared simply as the magnificence of infinity. Today we are facing a change we do not yet fully understand: for the first time in history, we simultaneously possess enabling technologies and industrial capacity that not only permit exploration, but also make it possible for human civilization to extend beyond the atmosphere and, at the same time, structurally improve conditions on Earth. Two closely trajectories are becoming crucial: the first is solar energy, the second is computational capacity dedicated to artificial intelligence. The first concerns not only terrestrial photovoltaics but also the collection and conversion of power in orbit, where irradiance is more stable and (nearly) continuous, potentially offering a higher capacity factor, and where infrastructure can scale without many contraints. The second concerns the growth of computing power (accelerator architectures such as GPUs/TPUs), high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnections, and, of course, the physical constraints that are becoming increasingly dominant: energy and thermal dissipation to support increasingly dense data centers. At first glance, these two stories may seem distant or irrelevant. In reality, they converge at a single strategic point because abundant energy enables computation at scale, and advanced computation accelerates the discovery and optimization of energy technologies, materials, and industrial processes. If humanity is capable of harnessing solar energy in space and maximizing computation in space through dedicated infrastructure, even envisioning orbital data centers, two systemic effects could be generated, with varying propagation times in different regions of the planet: i) a drastic reduction in the marginal cost of energy and an increase in reliable energy access. II) a more universal diffusion of "cognitive" resources in the form of computational services and artificial intelligence models available on a large scale. The first effect could translate into a structural reduction in poverty and sustainable growth less constrained by fuel and geopolitical bottlenecks. The second makes currently unsolved problems in employment, healthcare, and scientific research economically and technically tractable, from diagnostics and drug discovery. The engineering challenges remain enormous: thermal management in a vacuum on an industrial scale, radiation degradation of electronics and materials (total ionizing dose), reliability and redundancy of autonomous systems, high-capacity ground-to-space links, in-orbit maintenance and servicing (Optimus?), orbital sustainability, and debris mitigation. To find potential solutions the main variable is the time needed. I remember once Elon told me that, for him, the most important thing is the value of his time. Generally speaking, the bottleneck is often a mix of technical and bureaucratic time, but the capacity to attract the world's best talent, concentrated in a few companies, is accelerating the process. Once we realize it's both a scientific and industrial problem, and a problem of scale: if the critical infrastructure threshold is exceeded, then energy and computation become multipliers of prosperity, and what today seems like science fiction could transform into the largest technological project of the century.