As recently discussed on The Carbon Copy with Brian Janous, utilities are seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades, and almost entirely from data centers. These data centers are running the internet, serving videos, hosting blogs … | Continue reading
How much ancient text might we recover from the library in the Villa of Papyri in Herculaneum? How much was there to begin with? We know it was a huge luxurious villa filled with exquisite art works. Before the printing press, books were one of the highest value items one could o … | Continue reading
I recently completed an AI-driven interpolation of the 463 m resolution global MOLA altimetry dataset, using photoclinometry and the extraordinary 5 m resolution CTX collage by the Murray Lab at Caltech, down to a 7.2 m resolution global altimetry dataset. An example zoom over Je … | Continue reading
One from the archives, from an old (and not yet concluded) project to search for the origins of my name. What is this graph and what does it mean? It’s a kind of family tree, but the full explanation is below! Most genealogy is personal and pretty boring so I’ll skip that stuff. … | Continue reading
Originally posted on the Terraform blog. At Terraform Industries, we’re making cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. Among the list of the Terraformer‘s familiar attributes we include: In addition to these, it is generally underappreciated that Terraform’s synthetic … | Continue reading
This post is a follow on from my blog on optimizing resumes and my blog exhorting people to build more hardware! One part of my job running Terraform Industries is recruiting, so I’m privileged to meet, screen, and hire some of the best engineers who have ever lived. In my work l … | Continue reading
Mars Helicopter will fly no more. But there is work to be done and Mars helicopters to do it! We should build dozens and then hundreds as serialized standard spacecraft buses and run a global competition for the best instruments to fly attached to this bus. A fleet of helicopters … | Continue reading
Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agriculture on Earth, and the Salton Sea. Together with Los Angeles, this area uses over five million acre-feet (MAF) of water from the Colorado River ever … | Continue reading
Elon Musk is a divisive character. My intent here, as always, is to add some nuance and signal to a noisy, complex and/or obscure subject. Whatever your views on Elon, I feel that it is a worthy goal to move the conversation towards more meaningful engagement, hopefully without p … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. The second half of this chapter picks up with John at Acheron just after the onset of the global dust storm, marking a tra … | Continue reading
As a dubious public service, I humbly offer my translation and light editorializing to help inform less catastrophic space geeks what is happening with MSR. The usual disclaimers apply! I no longer work at, and do not speak for, JPL. I represent only my own opinions. Previously, … | Continue reading
Originally posted on the Terraform blog. Now that solar and wind are both significantly cheaper than coal, we should be accelerating deployment using every financial and regulatory tool we have available, right? Right?? Well, not exactly. [The same week I published this, Sammy Ro … | Continue reading
This is a follow on from my earlier post, now that the first letters prize has been won by Luke and Youssef, and we have this sort of data: A couple of years ago, this text was some ashy residue hidden in a charred, distorted scroll excavated from a destroyed Roman villa. Six mon … | Continue reading
TL;DR: The future of energy is solar+batteries+synthetics. As of Oct 2023, the global solar deployment rate is approximately one megawatt per minute. Over the last 2-5-10 years this has become increasingly inescapable. As of October 2023, this Nature Communications article report … | Continue reading
Originally published at Roots of Progress, based on this thread. Everyone knows the industrial revolution occurred centuries ago and involved steam engines. That was just the warm up. We are now a decade into the ~sixth and final industrial revolution. We are in the midst of a fu … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. The chapter is told from the perspective of John, and is quite long. Like the literary commentary podcast, I’ve split this … | Continue reading
Or, why Elon Musk’s impossible hardware businesses have succeeded. Audio version. “Why should I work on hardware???” I hear you cry. Not because I work on hardware, and I need you to validate my questionable life choices by repeating them. Definitely not because I find working on … | Continue reading
Originally published 26 June 2023. Terraform Industries is proud to publicly announce the Terraformer, our product designed to produce cheap natural gas from sunlight and air. The Terraformer is a carbon-neutral drop-in successor to drilling for fossil fuels. The Terraformer is d … | Continue reading
I’ve been putting this one off but no longer. Let’s talk about geoengineering. At Terraform Industries, we’re developing a carbon neutral supply chain for cheap, unlimited hydrocarbons derived only from sunlight and air. With this and similar technologies, I’m confident that huma … | Continue reading
Why? We believe that water should be unconditionally abundant. In the face of extended droughts, aspiring for greater usage efficiency is not, by itself, a sufficiently robust solution. The Colorado River, which supports $1.4t/year of US GDP, has seen annual flows steadily declin … | Continue reading
High Speed Rail (HSR) has been in the news, with a recent New York Times article listing some of the reasons that the California HSR project seems unlikely to ever be completed. Quite aside from Ca… | Continue reading
Part of the series on space stuff. It is a good intellectual exercise to create an intuitive diagram to communicate new ideas in a compact, succinct way. Edward Tufte has written the same book seve… | Continue reading
Part of my series on misconceptions in space journalism, which by this point we may as well admit is really just a paper thin cover for me to write a seemingly endless series of blogs on esoteric s… | Continue reading
Cheaper hydrocarbons from CO2 direct air capture and sunlight. terraformindustries.com Executive Summary Terraform Industries is a bet on cheap solar, synthetic hydrocarbon supremacy, and hyperscal… | Continue reading
This blog is a direct follow up of Starship Is Still Not Understood, and is part of the series on popular misconceptions in space journalism. I think it is relatively straightforward to think of co… | Continue reading
This blog is a follow up to So You Want To Start A Carbon Capture Company. In the last five months, the cadence of new entrants in this space, as well as new climate-focused funds, has only increas… | Continue reading
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts on Starship and Starlink. While the Starlink post has aged q… | Continue reading
It’s not called a Zeppelin unless it comes from the Zeppelin region of Germany, otherwise it’s just a sparkling airship. I have spent a lot of time writing about building cities on Mars , and I wou… | Continue reading
NASA’s selection of SpaceX’s Starship within the Human Lander System (HLS) program was both surprising and exciting for space nerds all over. Previously I have written about how Starshi… | Continue reading
In previous blogs I’ve talked about how Lunar Starship can save the Artemis program to build a sustainable Lunar base. I’ve discussed how a Lunar Starship can deliver roughly 210 T to t… | Continue reading
“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commenta… | Continue reading
Or, basic surface infrastructure for the Moon and Mars. I’ve written a few blogs about space stuff over the last couple of years but I’m not yet out of ideas. The usual disclaimers appl… | Continue reading
I’ve written more than a few blogs about energy before. Why would I write another? I can’t think of a single reason. More seriously, I recently reviewed a personal whitepaper I wrote in… | Continue reading
This post is part of a series on common misconceptions in space journalism. It’s also part of the sub-series on space resources, and why commercial exploitation of space resources is less ine… | Continue reading
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab… | Continue reading
This blog addresses the question of how SpaceX’s Starship could be used to ferry people and cargo to and from the Moon under a variety of different situations. It follows on from previous pos… | Continue reading
“Okay, wise guy, the SLS hasn’t turned out, everyone knows that, what do we do now?” Quoth some person on the internet. This blog is a followup to my previous post on the SLS and … | Continue reading
The SLS axiomatically cannot provide good value to the US taxpayer. In that regard it has already failed, regardless of whether it eventually manages to limp to orbit with a Falcon Heavy payload or… | Continue reading
I’m a bit late to the party but I’ve been enjoying some Collison podcast backlog and realized I had more to say about the “diminishing returns of science” trope that does the rounds from time to ti… | Continue reading
Just a quick note on some probably unoriginal ideas I had about categorizing biological data storage methods. While it’s important to note that these are listed in roughly the order of their … | Continue reading
I frequently read about proposals for new solar power developments where the resulting power is moved great distances to less sunny places, such as northern Europe from the Sahara, the US North Eas… | Continue reading
This post is inspired by the recent press release about the Rolls Royce Accel, an experimental electric aircraft being built to attempt the electric speed record. Close friends know I’ve been… | Continue reading
Part of my series on countering common misconceptions in space journalism. Previously I’ve written about how practical space station size is limited due to non-obvious problems with modularit… | Continue reading
Part of my series countering common misconceptions in space journalism. This blog is a follow on to my original post on Starlink. Starlink is an emerging high performance satellite-based internet r… | Continue reading
As in, Get With The Program, or Where the World Economy is Going. An update on my earlier post on the topic. Muscle power was the only source of mechanical work until the industrial revolution. Ste… | Continue reading
Part of my series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. NASA’s incredible campaign of rovers and landers have taught us amazing things about the Martian environment. Just in my li… | Continue reading
Part of my series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. The SpaceX Starship is a game changer for space exploration. It is intended to be far bigger, cheaper, versatile, and available t… | Continue reading
“[People and robots] wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” Part of my… | Continue reading