202211020929 Second-order thoughts about the 2020s

Much of these excellent thoughts are from Eli Dourado's great post on the subject.¹

• Bring science to market in order to end 202110220905 The great stagnation.
• mRNA vaccines are amazing. They can be developed quickly and cheaply. There is an HIV/AIDS vaccine in trials and it could be eradicated this decade. There are also "miraculous" treatments for cancer in this vein that aren't true vaccines, but could improve outcomes drastically.
• There are a number of anti-aging techniques coming out that are backed by more credible science than before (therapeutic plasma exchange, aging clocks, other senolytic drugs). Expect people to live longer and healthier by the end of the decade.
• Solar and wind costs were drastically cut in the 2010s and in the 2020s deployment will accelerate. We need a storage price of $20/kWh for a grid powered completely by today's tech. The closest we come is a $542/kWh battery based solution from Tesla.
• Instead of solar and wind we need scalable zero-carbon baseload energy — nuclear or geothermal. Current tech for nuclear targets around 6.5¢/kWh but is delayed until at least 2030. More likely is geothermal which looks to crack 3.5¢/kWh. Not only this but geothermal's drilling advancements mean that even Lockheed Martin's promising compact fusion reactor might not be able to compete if it comes to market this decade. This is because digging the wells this decade means we just have to replace the heat exchange pieces but not re-dig the wells, effectively halving the cost of new wells for the following 15 years, meaning 1¢/kWh energy by the 2050s. Fusion will kill in space though.
• Commercial aviation needs sustainable alternative fuels (SAF) which are advancing at the pace of carbon capture and ethanol conversion from the reclaimed carbon. This tech could decarbonize aviation at the drop of a hat.
• Trucking may require hydrogen fuel cells or SAF, and might require a push to make that transition because it won't be as obvious economically.
• All these energy changes mean that air pollution will plummet including the dreaded ultrafine (< 0.1μm diameter) particles that cause the majority of adverse health effects. Getting rid of this pollution may mean a sharp rise in global health and reduction in health care costs.
• Self-driving cars do seem like they'll happen at some point soon.
• Supersonics in aviation will have an impact on global trade and economies. It may not happen this decade though since some of the most optimistic timelines put first models arriving late 2020s — too late to have widespread impact before 2030. There also needs to be studies (like NASA's X-59 flights) to determine acceptable levels of sonic boom near cities and population centers.
• Urban passenger and delivery aviation may have an impact near the end of the decade, but the FAA will be heavily involved in the regulation and adoption of these techs.
• Hyperloop networks are unlikely before 2030s, but there remains some optimism around metropolitan loops like a DC-Baltimore connector. This could have large, knock-on, disruptive, or enabling effects on trade and economic activity.
• Space tech is building Starship models at the cost of about $5M, changing the cost of LEO cargo from $2,600/kg to $10/kg (more than 100x cheaper). These are also capable of being refueled in LEO meaning its capacity to haul from ground to LEO is the same capacity it can take to anywhere in the solar system. The gravity model of trade may take affect for an Earth-LEO system. This will also reduce the spending on engineering those payloads since the cost of a failure is so much lower.
• Starlink may be valuable serving a 3% niche of a $2.4T/year telecomms industry (0.3 * $2.4T = $72B/year).
• We may see the first human on Mars before 2030 since SpaceX has said it'll be a major failure if we're not flying humans to LEO by 2023.
• NASA's Artemis mission is a human mission to the moon's south pole by 2024, which could enable a permanent moon base by the end of the decade.
• Asteroid mining will probably not happen soon. Space resource extraction will eventually happen though. The materials on 16 Psyche are worth $10 quintillion.
• Custom silicon chips will be cheaper and more prominent.
• Crypto will be made or broken. It's been too long without a good use case. It needs to scale, it needs a good user experience, and actual normal people need to use it for transactions if it has a hope. I think it will fail.
• Augmented reality will be everywhere. Most tech companies have an AR glasses research project in the works now.
• Vertical farming could take off with advances in lighting and renewable resources (particularly direct-use geothermal for heating) and disrupt the industrial agriculture spaces.
• Construction tech is interesting but will have large political barriers.