inspiration list

the sun produces 3.8 * 10^23 joules per second, more energy that we can possibly fathom. the earth could be entirely powered by a fraction of that energy. Nikolai Kardashev calls planets that are able to harness the full power of their sun as a type 2 civilization. companies like Reflect Orbital are already working towards this future. its only a matter of time until someone cracks the code of doing this at scale.

humans don’t need to sleep for 8 hours a night to feel refreshed. that is, if they have a certain gene. in 2019 researchers published their findings of this rare mutation [source]. with advancements in gene editing technology, there is quite feasibly a future where any human can gain back 2-4 hours of sleep every night without any negative side effects, giving us back one of our most precious resources: time.

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ai is infinitely patient, can listen to every perspective, and hold all relevant data in “mind” when making a decision. we suspect ai will significantly augment the role of politicians, if not replace them entirely. with new cities, financially intertwined communities, and blockchain adoption all on the rise, there is a great opportunity to invent new methods to govern shared resources in a transparent and fair fashion.

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we can predict new materials with ai [source], and we can create those materials with robots [source]. combining these technologies efficiently at scale will result in a Cambrian explosion of new materials. we will invent a plastic that never degrades into microplastics, and a metal as strong as steel yet as light as a feather! the possibilities are truly endless and who ever makes a leap forward in this field will become a true alchemist, creating entirely new forms of matter.

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thanks to companies like space x, it is pretty much inevitable that mars will be visited by humans in most of our lifetimes. to sustain human life on earth, many problems need to be solved. how do we shield against radiation? how do we grow food with barren soil? how do we reliably regulate air pressure? answering these questions and figuring out novel ways to build up entirely new infrastructures more efficiently (think robots building habitats) would have huge commercial impact on earth. as the cliche goes: dream big, start small.

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in just a short time, ai has dramatically transformed how humans interact with technology. our laptops, phones, and compute clusters were not designed with this new interaction in mind. there is a chance for a new, more efficient operating system to be created, one that is designed ai first. does data collection play a more central role? can we innately automate more tasks? what does the kernal look like? how will applications be used? is this even an os??

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in The world of physics, general relativity describes gravity and the vastness of space and time, while quantum mechanics explains the strange behavior of particles at the smallest scales. despite their successes, they contradict each other when explaining black holes. Finding a single framework that unites these theories might be one of the most significant discoveries of mankind.

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