Newsletter 58
Fusion reactors, hypersonic missiles and dream advertising
Hi, I’m Gavin. This is my experimental newsletter that explores thinking - how we might think better and learn together as we do so.
I explore several key topics through the lens of several core themes: systems thinking, scenario planning, trends, and cross-disciplinary innovation. These often relate to key issues: climate change, pandemics, astronomy, physics, health, history, philosophy, culture, rocketry, conflict, the impact of technology on society and more (lol!). With a larger question behind it all: how do we progress and how do we progress better?
I hope you like where we go. (891 - nope - 898 of us now! - welcome all new arrivals)
Gavin
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Reading list - the best stuff to read
(All the best reads I’ve come across, with excerpts, links and authors. Climate change, COVID and now China are now consistently the stories at the top so are semi-permanent )
🌏 Climate change & biodiversity loss
This is a good read. The buzz from COP26 has died down and it’s hard to call it a success. But while climate denialism are decreasing, other things are taking their place. (12 mins by Oliver Milman)
Ultimately, the extent of the suffering caused by global heating, and the increasingly severe responses required to deal with that, will help determine the reactionary response. While greater numbers of people will call for climate action, any restrictions imposed by governments will provide a sense of vindication to rightwingers warning of overreaching elites.
“My sense is that we won’t do enough to avoid others bearing the brunt of this,” Fieschi said. “Solidarity has its limits, after all. Sure, you want good things for the children of the world. But ultimately you will put your children first.”
I haven’t read this yet so it’s also in my tabs, but no doubt it will provoke reaction and took lots of time to research and investigate:
A Power Struggle Over Cobalt Rattles the Clean Energy Revolution
Nuclear fusion by the 2030s? I sure hope so. Great long read on all the competing companies and technologies racing towards nuclear fusion - the holy grail of energy production. (14 mins by Philip Ball)
And just as private space travel is now materializing, many industry observers are forecasting that the same business model will give rise to commercial fusion — desperately needed to decarbonize the energy economy — within a decade. “There’s a very good shot to get there within less than ten years,” says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies. In the FIA report, a majority of respondents thought that fusion would power an electrical grid somewhere in the world in the 2030s.
🦠 COVID-19
The Delta winter surge is not going well. (2 mins by Smriti Mallapaty)
The COVID-19 pandemic could cost an extra 300,000 lives in Europe, according to a study of the number of people in 19 countries who have been neither infected nor vaccinated1.
The study’s models also predict that the pandemic could lead to roughly one million hospitalizations in Europe, some of which would contribute to the projected death toll. But the authors of the analysis point out that their estimates are maximum numbers, which assume that all anti-infection restrictions are lifted and contacts between individuals have returned to their pre-pandemic levels. The analysis was posted as a preprint on the medRxiv server and has not yet been peer reviewed.
How Will the COVID Pills Change the Pandemic? (7 mins by Dhruv Khullar)
A day after the U.K. authorized Merck’s drug, Pfizer announced that its antiviral, Paxlovid, was also staggeringly effective at preventing the progression of covid-19 in high-risk patients. The drug, when taken within three days of the onset of symptoms, reduced the risk of hospitalization by nearly ninety per cent. Only three of the nearly four hundred people who took Paxlovid were hospitalized, and no one died; in the placebo group, there were twenty-seven hospitalizations and seven deaths. Paxlovid is administered along with another antiviral medication called ritonavir, which slows the rate at which the former drug is broken down by the body. Like Merck, Pfizer is now examining whether Paxlovid can also be used to prevent infections after an exposure. Results are expected early in 2022. (It’s not yet known how much of a difference the drugs will make for vaccinated individuals suffering from breakthrough infections; Merck’s and Pfizer’s trials included only unvaccinated people with risk factors for severe disease, such as obesity, diabetes, or older age. Vaccinated individuals are already much less likely to be hospitalized or die of covid-19.)
🇨🇳 China / Taiwan
This newsletter has had a China element in it almost every week since last year. The reason is simple: at this newsletter we try to look over the horizon and extrapolate future trends: China is a key trend.
But over the past couple of years (and in particular the last year) there’s been a step change on several fronts:
a brand new nuclear ICBM silo capacity in the 100s discovered in July
new stealth aircraft (see below) for new aircraft carriers (and a massive naval fleet under construction)
massively increased air missions near Taiwan
A large fleet of “dual use” ships that could be used for invading Taiwan
Full scale models of US ships on rails for target practice
Hong Kong being brought back under Beijing control
A full nuclear triad (air, land, submarine)
Successful missions to the Moon and Mars (with Mars on the first attempt)
A space station under construction
The highest tonnage to orbit in Q3 2021 of any provider (you’d find it hard to keep track of all the Chinese orbital missions)
But there’s more. Two big stories this week both from the FT.
General Mark Milley, chair of the US joint chiefs said that “We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in geostrategic power that the world has ever experienced.” Certainly it’s the biggest since the end of the Cold War - and really means we’re entering a new era, or new cold war. And this is why paying attention is important, if w are interested in future potential events.
Philip Davidson, the recently retired head of US Indo-Pacific command who warned earlier this year that the PLA could take military action against Taiwan within six years, says people should see the Chinese conventional and nuclear expansion for what it is — a piercing wake-up call.
“We have to recognise that the Chinese Communist party is doing everything they said they would do to replace US global leadership with their leadership. Our future prosperity and our security are at stake.”
And then we had the FOBS test in July. And now we’ve learned it was even more sophisticated than originally thought.
And:
Vipin Narang, a nuclear security expert at MIT, believes China is engaging in an “eye-popping” nuclear expansion because it thinks “the risk of a conventional war with the US is higher now than ever”.
He says the biggest risk is not nuclear war but “an exceptionally intense conventional war where China unloads its massive arsenal of conventional missiles in the Asia theatre without fear of US nuclear escalation”.
After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, critics said China would become more assertive over Taiwan as Biden had demonstrated little appetite for conflict. Biden argued that the withdrawal would allow the US to focus more on China.
This graph says a lot about the coming decade for all of us:
This is, as they say, concerning. So much news in this area since July is remarkable. It turns out China not only tested a new FOBS and hypersonic vehicle, but the hypersonic vehicle also fired something from the vehicle. This is alarming on several levels - not least that it’s never been done before and no other country has ever done it - or even understands how it would be done.
Experts at Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, remain unsure how China overcame the constraints of physics by firing countermeasures from a vehicle travelling at hypersonic speeds, said the people familiar with details of the demonstration.
Military experts have been poring over data related to the test to understand how China mastered the technology.
They are also debating the purpose of the projectile, which was fired by the hypersonic vehicle with no obvious target of its own, before plunging into the water. Some Pentagon experts believe the projectile was an air-to-air missile. Others think it was a countermeasure to destroy missile defence systems so that they could not shoot down the hypersonic weapon during wartime.
Noah has a piece on China’s growth.
I missed this last week but China has a new stealth fighter and a new variant to their existing one, the first looks like it’s designed for the new carriers - while the second looks like it might be designed for co-ordinating drone aircraft (so called ‘loyal wingmen’ drones) (8 mins)
🇷🇺 Russia - Ukraine
Of course it’s not just China. Russia is massing troops on the Ukrainian border. Something to eh, keep an eye on, this winter. (5 mins by Alberto Nardelli and Jennifer Jacobs)
That intelligence has been conveyed to some NATO members over the past week to back up U.S. concerns about Putin’s possible intentions and an increasingly frantic diplomatic effort to deter him from any incursion, with European leaders engaging directly with the Russian president. The diplomacy is informed by an American assessment that Putin could be weighing an invasion early next year as his troops again mass near the border.
The information lays out a scenario where troops would cross into Ukraine from Crimea, the Russian border and via Belarus, with about 100 battalion tactical groups -- potentially around 100,000 soldiers -- deployed for what the people described as an operation in rough terrain and freezing conditions, covering extensive territory and prepared for a potentially prolonged occupation.
🏛 Society - social media
As ever, Karen Hao is crucial reading. Read it all. (18 mins by Karen Hao)
An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
✈️ Airlines - Boeing not going
This is an excerpt from a book on the 737 Max crashes, and makes for fascinating reading on groupthink, cutting costs, forgetting safety and outright racism. (15 mins by Peter Robison)
There was another reason for the reluctance to admit that the design had fallen short—one involving race and nationality, not cost. The empathy Boeing’s aviators might have had for a pilot who looked like them wasn’t being extended to Suneja and Harvino. Conversations at Boeing kept focusing on how Harvino, once he took over the controls, hadn’t been able to trim the plane with the thumb switch. Boeing’s pilots, predominantly older White men, had long shared private jokes about the incompetent crews they ran into overseas. “Too dumb to spell 737,” went a frequent refrain of one pilot, according to someone who heard it. Another trainer would ask rhetorically if “Chung Fo Ho” could handle a given procedure.
In plain language, the directive was saying that Boeing’s brand-new airplane, supposedly a marvel of modern technology, could crash itself into the ground based on bad data from one tiny sensor. It sounded like the kind of single-point failure commercial aircraft weren’t supposed to have. And as Boeing employees began privately talking more with airlines about MCAS, elaborating on how the software worked, the pilot grapevine started jumping.
What most alarmed pilots was that this new feature overturned decades of Boeing design philosophy, the thing the manufacturer had always claimed set it apart from chief rival Airbus. “If it ain’t Boeing I ain’t going,” pilots would say, proud that a computer would never take the plane out of their hands. Now the colossus of American aviation was casually telling them it had done exactly that.
😴 Society - advertising in your dreams
This was a new one to me. How important is sleep and dreams, and how could dream advertising impact it? (14 mins by Adam Haar Horowitz et al)
There is no lack of grey areas that people will want to explore. Our responsibility is to create dialogue and map out these spaces before these scenarios become a fait accompli. Steps in this direction have already been taken. For starters, a group of more than 40 sleep and dream researchers from the scientific community recently co-signed a document rejecting dream advertising campaigns such as the one run by Molson Coors, while others have drafted a Dream Engineering Ethic to foster discussions on the implications of this emerging field of research and the ethical considerations that should guide this work moving forward. One of the clear policy questions is whether the Federal Trade Commission will release an enforcement policy statement that explicitly declares advertising that targets dreams without informed consent as deceitful, as they have done regarding subliminal advertising practices.
🧠 Russia - quiet submarines
I did not realise the new Yasen class of Russian attack submarine was quite so quiet. Binkov takes a detailed look, including what it may mean for how vulnerable US carriers might be. Scenario planning for joint Russian-Chinese navy coordination is also reasonable. Also bear in mind the rationale behind AUKUS recently too - arming Australia with very quiet nuclear powered submarines helps mitigate risk for the US.(19 mins)
🚀 Rocketry - Astra makes it
Astra has successfully send a payload to orbit, joining the small number of private companies that have done so. It was their fourth attempt. (Go to 1:44).
On the negative side: Scott Manley looked at the successful Russian ASAT test this week. Stuff like this endangers everything in LEO (but maybe that’s the point?).
And as ever Marcus House has a good summary of Starship/Boca Chica development, and a summary of the Elon Musk interview on that subject this week: (22 mins)
🌑 Space - nuclear moon
NASA is asking for companies to develop plans for a small nuclear power station on the Moon.
The reactor would be built on Earth and then sent to the moon.
Submitted plans for the fission surface power system should include a uranium-fueled reactor core, a system to convert the nuclear power into usable energy, a thermal management system to keep the reactor cool, and a distribution system providing no less than 40 kilowatts of continuous electric power for 10 years in the lunar environment.
Some other requirements include that it be capable of turning itself off and on without human help, that it be able to operate from the deck of a lunar lander, and that it can be removed from the lander and run on a mobile system and be transported to a different lunar site for operation.
Additionally, when launched from Earth to the moon, it should fit inside a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter cylinder that’s 18 feet (6 meters) long. It should not weigh more than 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms).
Philosophy Corner (a journey through thinking about thinking every week)
(A serialised section that started with Greek Tragedy and moved to philosophy. Something to spark ideas. Feel free to go backwards!).
Next in the series is Max Weber on leadership. (44 mins)
Documentary
(A good thing to watch - also serialised - so feel free to go back through past editions!)
Last week we finished The Mayfair Set. This week we’re on a break. Relax.
Podcast(s)
(The best stuff I’ve listened to, or been recommended by subscribers)
I didn’t get to listen to many this week, but a discussion around the mainstreaming of white power in the US is really good.
Still in my tabs
(Or stuff I haven’t read yet, but looks promising)
The Terrifying Future of the American Right
A Power Struggle Over Cobalt Rattles the Clean Energy Revolution
Long Live Participatory Socialism!
First electric autonomous cargo ship launched in Norway
More Alzheimer’s drugs head for FDA review: what scientists are watching
LightSail 2 has been flying for 30 months now, paving the way for future solar sail missions
End note
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