Techno-Optimist #4
CRISPR starts to make a real difference in people’s lives, Neuralink gives an update, we get the biggest solar storms in 2 decades, glueballs might be real, an exquisite view of the brain, and more!
Welcome to the fourth edition of Techno-Optimist, and hello to our 54 new subscribers who are excited about the future and tired of all the doomerism out there.
While my plan is still to switch to a weekly production once we reach 1,000 subscribers—we’re still a ways away from that milestone, just over 200 subscribers total so far—I’ve decided to sprinkle in occasional special features on some Saturdays between newsletters.
Next week, keep an eye on your inboxes as I’ll be republishing an article I wrote a few years ago, looking into the best places within the Solar System for colonization. If you want to see humans become a spacefaring, multiplanetary species, this is one you’ll enjoy.
Alright, let’s dive in.
“Being destructive is boring and stupid. Being creative is exciting and fulfilling.”
—Marc Andreessen
AlphaFold3 launches. Google’s DeepMind just released a new version of their biomolecule predictor called AlphaFold3. It improves the ability to predict protein structures over previous versions, and also expands its abilities to include the “structure and interactions of all life’s molecules,” not just proteins. Seeing as I’m talking about AI, I’m going to post an AI summary I found of a thread by Jan Kosinski, a biologist and entrepreneur who tested AlphaFold3 out. It’s actually pretty good.
“Jan Kosinski is excited about using a new computer program called AlphaFold3, which can predict how proteins, the machines inside our cells, shape themselves and attach to DNA. DNA contains the instructions for building proteins, and understanding how proteins interact with DNA is crucial for figuring out how our cells function and control what happens inside them. AlphaFold3 uses machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to predict these interactions. What Kosinski did was take a protein called a transcription factor, which helps start the process of turning genes on and off, and see where it attaches to a specific part of DNA. Even though scientists didn't know beforehand how this protein looked or where it should attach, AlphaFold3 could accurately predict both. This is exciting for a few reasons: It's like solving a puzzle: Predicting how these molecules come together helps scientists understand how genes are controlled. Speed and accuracy: This tool can do this quickly and accurately, which means less guesswork and fewer experiments needed. Consider the applications: This could help in computing a baseline gene regulatory network for the entire human genome. It could be used in personalized medicine to adjust this baseline based on individual genetic differences, known as SNPs, and further applied to study already sequenced populations to link genetic variations with physical traits and diseases.” (The Technology Brother) (@jankosinski) (Nature)
Neuralink update. Neuralink just gave a 100 day update on the first human participant to receive one of their implants. As I mentioned in the first edition of this newsletter, the Telepathy implant has granted Noland Arbaugh a newfound freedom unlike anything he’s experienced in years, “[The Link] has helped me reconnect with the world, my friends, and my family. It's given me the ability to do things on my own again without needing my family at all hours of the day and night,” Arbaugh shared. Following the surgery, some of the implant threads “retracted from the brain, resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes.” However, the team successfully modify the algorithm it runs on, enhancing its sensitivity to the extent that it “has now superseded Noland’s initial performance.” Neuralink is now seeking a second participant to expand the study. (Neuralink) (@elonmusk)
Biggest solar storms in two decades. We just experienced the most active we’ve seen our Sun in the past twenty years. It all came from Sunspot AR3664, which was similar in size & appearance to the great Carrington sunspot of 1859. AR3664 is massive, close to 200,000 km from end to end, or 15 times wider than Earth. It could be easily seen without any magnification at all, and many people did take a look with those eclipse glasses still lying around. Thankfully the CMEs (coronal mass ejections) hurtled towards us by AR3664 were weak compared to the Carrington Event, and didn’t cause too much trouble. That said, this is a great argument for increasing preparedness against strong CMEs like the one causing the Carrington Event, which we will inevitably see again. We have the technology, we just need to implement more of it — including grid shut down protocols, hardening critical infrastructure, and ensuring we have physical backup pieces for vulnerable parts of the grid (e.g., transformers) that can be rapidly installed if needed. On a related note, I saw lots of questions as to how you get the different aurora colors. Here’s a good explainer on X. (Spaceweather.com)
Jarvis lite? OpenAI has just released its newest upgrade, GPT-4o, which can “reason across audio, vision, and text in real time.” From what I’ve seen, there aren’t a lot of new abilities over GPT-4 per se, but it’s the speed and smoothness of the interaction that could expand its usefulness in a wide variety of circumstances. There’s a series of short videos that show you what I mean, everything ranging from real time language translation, to helping visually impaired people “see” what’s happening around them and navigate a city, to acting as a math tutor. We all want a Jarvis like AI assistant in our pocket, and now it looks like we’re starting to get close.
Not to be outshone, one day after OpenAI’s announcement, Google announced Project Astra, an “AI agent prototype” with roughly similar features. However, this is just an announcement for now, while GPT-4o is already available to some publicly, and should roll out to everyone for free in the next few weeks. At the same time Google also announced Google Veo, which creates high quality videos from text prompts. It’s actually pretty cool, check out some of their clips. (@OpenAI) (Ars Technica)
Space
NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) has advanced six ideas to the next stage. Each of these Phase II concepts will get up to $600k over the next two years to move their ideas forward, with successful projects receiving further funding and the possibility of eventually becoming actual NASA missions. Have a read through all of them yourself, they’re seriously interesting and I hope all of them get built. But what really caught my eye was an idea for using nuclear fission powered plasma rockets to get humans to Mars in 2 months. Seriously, it’s about time. (NASA)
There’s a new idea for astronauts to keep fit on the Moon: run around a “Wall of Death,” so called because of its popularity in the daredevil motorcycle riding community. Essentially you drive (or run) around in circles, using “inertia, friction and centrifugal force to remain upright—and avoid crashing to the ground.” Impossible to do while running here on Earth, but maybe the perfect exercise in the 1/6g of Lunar gravity. (Smithsonian Magazine)
Fusion enhanced plasma-based electric propulsion has been successfully demonstrated, according to a press release from private company RocketStar. Their FireStar Drive boosts the performance of plasma thrusters 50% by generating
“high-speed protons through the ionization of water vapor. When these protons collide with the nucleus of a boron atom, the atom undergoes fusion…Similar to the way an afterburner enhances thrust in a jet engine by introducing fuel into the exhaust, the fusion occurring in the thruster’s exhaust significantly improves its performance.”
The plan is to demonstrate the thruster in space later this year. For a much deeper dive, have a listen to physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder, who looked at RocketStar in a recent video. (@RocketStarSpace) (@skdh)
SpaceX released a short video of their new Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suit. It’s sleek, it’s cool, it’s exactly what you’d expect a 21’st century spacesuit to look like. If I ever go on a spacewalk, this is what I want to wear. (@SpaceX)
This year’s Lunabotics challenge just wrapped up, featuring “university teams from across the country to develop and deploy robots capable of utilizing lunar regolith in a simulated lunar environment.” You can see all the videos on YouTube, and check out some commentary from Dr. Phil Metzger, who was one of the competition judges. (YouTube) (@DrPhiltill)
Starlink is projected to generate $6.6 billion in revenue for SpaceX this year. Why is this important? Because that's how life becomes multiplanetary. SpaceX plans to use Starlink to fund further development and expansion of its Starship launch capacity, and ultimately to build a thriving city on Mars. (@rookisaacman)
Through the observing prowess of the JWST, a substantial atmosphere has been detected for the first time on a rocky planet orbiting another star. 55 Cancri E (aka Janssen) is a super-Earth around 8.8 times the mass and almost twice the radius of our planet. Apart from its size, it’s also rather un-Earth like for another reason: it orbits its star once every 18 hours, so close that its surface is likely an ocean of lava. The planet’s atmosphere appears to be comprised mostly of CO2 or maybe carbon monoxide, outgassed from the molten surface below. Fascinating place scientifically, but not somewhere you’d want to set up a summer home. (Science Alert)
Some of you may have heard of the Alcubierre drive, from a paper published in 1994 by physicist Miguel Alcubierre laying out how a real warp drive might work. The problem was that his idea required negative energy, something that may not even exist. Now a new paper suggests that a warp drive could be built without negative energy, using “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics." This probably isn’t the last word on the subject, but could be a stepping stone towards one day building a real warp drive capable of powering a real Starship Enterprise. Ad astra! (Space.com)
AI, Energy, Engineering, & Physics
Physicists may have just found the first glueball — a state of matter predicted by the Standard Model that consists of gluons alone, no quarks. Normal matter at its fundamental level consists of atoms, which in turn are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Those first two are themselves made up of three quarks each, held together by force carrier particles called gluons. But weird variations are possible, including a particle made up of gluons only. Followup is required to confirm, but another win for the Standard Model if it holds up. (Big Think) (ExploreCosmos_)
A Kickstarter campaign plans to build an “all-terrain exoskeleton” called the X1 to increase your ability to enjoy the great outdoors. It weighs in at just 3.5 pounds, can apparently propel users along at up to 16.7 mph (28.9 kph), and “reduces energy expenditures by up to 50%.” This is by no means the first attempt at an exoskeleton to assist in outdoor activities, and likely won’t be the last. But at some point I do expect to be able to buy one of these (or something similar from another startup) and greatly increase my physical ability and endurance when it comes to hiking and other outdoor activities. (Fox News)
Have a look at what’s being cooked up by Extropic AI, which plans to use natural fluctuations in matter as computational resources for AI. The result could be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than current devices. Full video dive into what they’re doing here, with a shorter version here. (Extropic)
A fusion device called WEST, the tungsten (atomic symbol W) Environment in Steady-state Tokomak, has chalked up a new record, keeping a plasma going at 50 million degrees Kelvin for 6 minutes, running with “15% more energy and twice the density” as previous experimental attempts. All part of the steps towards fusion energy power plants. (PPPL)
Drones are making a lot of progress lately, with a father-son team in South Africa creating a custom built drone that flew at speeds of 298 mph (480 kph). American Mayman Aerospace has gone even further with the release of their Razor drones — capable of speeds up to 500 mph (804 kph), able to do vertical takeoff and landing, and delivering everything from medical supplies to missiles. Lastly, a “Texas-sized” agricultural drone called the Hylio AG-272 is now the biggest on the market. It can carry a 18-gallon payload (about 150lbs), and spray 50 acres/hour. (Interesting Engineering) (Interesting Engineering) (@Hylio_Inc)
Medicine
Using more than 1.4 petabytes (1400 terabytes) of electron microscope image data, scientists have built a 3D reconstruction of a 1 millimetre cube of the human brain. It took almost a decade to put together, and will enhance our understanding of how the brain works. With this tiny cube having “57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, and 230 millimetres of ultrafine veins all packed into that microscopic space,” it gives you an idea of how almost unimaginably complex our brains are. (Science Alert) (H01 Release)
During a recent cargo return from the International Space Station, a small sample of cardiac tissue bioprinted in space was delivered back to Earth. Redwire Space ultimately wants to 3D print organs in space, where the microgravity makes it easier to create the intricate structures of functioning tissues and organs. (Payload)
Peter Diamandis’s XPRIZE has launched a new $101 million challenge aimed at extending healthy lifespan by 20 years. According to economists, “extending just one healthy year of life is worth $38 trillion to the global economy and extending healthy life by 10 years could net greater than $300 trillion.” Business case aside, imagine what that looks like personally for you and your family. With this prize, if anyone wins, we all win. (@PeterDiamandis)
CRISPR is starting to have real world medial impacts, with a new study using it to fix a rare form of blindness called Leber Congenital Amaurosis. 79% of trial patients showed improvements, with almost half reporting that the improvements were enough to raise their quality of life. One participant reported that she went from only being able to see silhouettes of peoples faces to being able to make out every major feature. It’s got a ways to go yet, but it’s hard to overstate how significant this is. Gene therapies more broadly are making progress, with another non-CRISPR trial successfully helping a UK toddler who was born deaf to hear unaided.
Let me say this again, we’re starting to make serious progress towards curing blindness and deafness. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s already changing lives. To me, that’s just amazing. (Science Daily) (AgBioWorld) (BBC)
We already knew that olive oil is good for you, but a new study suggests that a spoonful a day could lower your risk of dementia significantly. The metastudy looked at over 92,000 participants over the course of several decades, finding those who consumed about half a tablespoon of olive oil daily “were 28 percent less likely to die of dementia-related diseases compared to those who never or rarely consumed olive oil.” (Science Alert)
Weird & Wonderful
Ever wondered what the longest running laboratory experiment in the world is? Started in 1927 at the University of Queensland in Australia, The Pitch Drop Experiment consists of a glass funnel full of pitch, and watching it flow slowly out the bottom to give an estimate of how viscous pitch is. So far 9 drops have fallen, with another expected to drop “soon.” You can watch the live feed if you’d like. Can’t get much more exciting than this! (IFL Science) (TheTenthWatch)
Photos & Videos
Epic simulation from NASA visualizing what would happen as you approach a black hole. There are two different scenarios: one video has you skimming close to the black hole’s event horizon, and the other has you plunging through it. The simulations are very impressive, and took using the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to create. (NASA) (@NASA)
You’ve probably all seen pictures of the spectacular auroras lately, so I won’t spam you with more of those, but look at this incredible closeup of the sunspot that caused them! (@AJamesMcCarthy)
Have a look at this short clip of Starlink satellites being deployed during an orbital sunrise. (@SpaceX)
Made on Earth by humans: photos from a recent static fire of Starship, which will hopefully launch here again in the next few weeks. (@SpaceX)
Even after 34 years, Hubble’s still got it. Check out the structure in the beautiful image of the lenticular galaxy NGC 4753, around 60 million light years distant. (@JPMajor) (ESA)
Recommendations & Reviews
This week I have two recommendations for you. The first is an excellent article by Greg Autry, where he lays out Space Race 2.0, America versus China, which is now in full swing. As he says, the “bottom line is that China is now a near-peer competitor to the U.S. in [the] particularly critical and notoriously difficult area of space technology.” We’re still ahead, mostly thanks to SpaceX + some of the excellent science missions NASA pulls off; but the gap is narrowing fast. Hopefully acknowledging that Space Race 2.0 exists will motivate us to do more, faster, better. Consider two possible futures: if China comes to dominate space, that’s it, game over. Ongoing access to anything meaningful in space will be at their forbearance. If America and Co. win, everyone (including China) still get to play. Overall though I think that having some real competition is good for us, nothing like competition to help drive progress. Check out the show For All Mankind if you haven’t. It posits this exact scenario except with the USSR. Short answer, in that timeline we ended up getting to Mars in the mid 90’s. (Forbes)
This week I’d also like to highly recommend you all read the founding document for the ongoing techno-optimist resurgence. It’s rather aptly called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, written by entrepreneur and tech bro (a complement in these parts) Marc Andreessen.
It’s not short, but it is well worth reading through. If you’re on the fence about whether to take an optimistic view of technology—not that it’s perfect, but that its effects have over time been overwhelmingly more positive than negative—then you should read this.
Some excerpts:
“Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
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Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.
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We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.
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Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
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The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio. Who gets more value from a new technology, the single company that makes it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives? QED.
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We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development.
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Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth.
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We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.
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We believe…that people are the ultimate resource – with more people come more creativity, more new ideas, and more technological progress.
We believe material abundance therefore ultimately means more people – a lot more people – which in turn leads to more abundance.
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However, we are not Utopians…While not Utopian, we believe in what Brad DeLong terms “slouching toward Utopia” – doing the best fallen humanity can do, making things better as we go.
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Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire…The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.
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Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization.
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We invite everyone to join us in Techno-Optimism. The water is warm. Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life. (a16z) (@pmarca)
That’s it for today, but Techno-Optimist will be back in your inbox two weeks from now. Remember that next week I’ll have a special feature on where we should go as we step out into the Solar System.
Thank you all for reading — and until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon.
-Owen
Curing blindness and deafness are major big deals! I've read the Manifesto, and I agree everyone should read the whole thing. It gives me chills, and I prefer to be on this side of it. Also, I showed my husband the picture makeup of the brain and he said that he now understood what's wrong with me - easy for wires to get crossed. 😂