NextBigFuture.com

Helion Fusion CEO, David Kirtley, presented an update on the work as of December, 2022. They are working on their seventh-generation prototype system and they have had over 10,000 shots with the sixth-generation system. They create and form plasmas and accelerate two plasmas to merge at supersonic speeds. They do not inject beams and operate ... Read more

A new NASA NIAC phase 1 study is analyzing a 20-meter class infrared space telescope. It is currently impossible to find Earth-like planets in the habitable zones (where the temperature supports liquid water) of Sun-like stars. It is even harder to measure the composition of their atmospheres. But this is necessary if we want to ... Read more

Researchers developed a system called “ICE” (inducible changes to the epigenome) in DNA reparation, which actually advances aging, and also discovered that the process can be reversed by using OSK-mediated rejuvenation. Using the ICE system, young mice have aged quickly, but with dire consequences on the tissues in their bodies. Journal Cell – Loss of ... Read more

SpaceX had a successful Sunday, January 15 launch for Falcon Heavy’s launch of the USSF-67 mission to a geosynchronous Earth orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Following booster separation, Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters will land on SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2 (LZ-1 and LZ-2) at Cape Canaveral ... Read more

Fortune and others are reporting that Microsoft will close a $10 billion investment deal into the artificial intelligence startup before the end of this month. This is discussed in the All-in-Pod cast. The deal will have a unique structure in that Microsoft will get 49% of the company but 75% of future profits. Chamath is ... Read more

A Phase 1 NASA NIAC study will demonstrate the feasibility of a revolutionary power source for missions to the outer planets utilizing a new paradigm in thermal power conversion, the thermoradiative cell (TRC). This device, driven by a radioisotope heat source, will allow an order of magnitude increase in mass specific power (~30 vs ~3 ... Read more

Tesla cut the prices of their cars in the USA and Europe by up to 23%. This ensures that all by the Model Y performance will get the $7500 tax credit in the US. This price cut and the tax credit means the Model Y is selling for $22,000 less and the Model 3s are ... Read more

NASA NIAC phase 1 studies development of a nuclear fission fragment rocket engine (FFRE) that is exponentially more propellent efficient than rocket engines currently used to power today’s space vehicles and could achieve very high specific impulse (>100,000 sec) at high power density (>kW/kg). Fission Fragment rockets are several proposed nuclear rocket designs made since ... Read more

NASA NIAC has a phase 1 study for Artur Davoyan to study propulsion architecture for fast transit of heavy (1 ton and more) payloads across the solar system and to interstellar medium. This version of a pellet beams approach allow for larger vehicles to reach speeds nine times faster than Voyager 1. Inspired by the ... Read more

Jordan of the Limiting Factor goes into detail on electric semi trucks and the megacharging that will be needed. I will go over the scale of the shift for electric trucks. The motivation is that it will make trucks about 30% cheaper to operate by saving 80% of the fuel costs. It also means countries ... Read more

Peter Zeihan made a series of mostly unsupported and false claims about electric vehicles while being interviewed on the Joe Rogan show. James Stephenson goes through all of the over forty aspects of what Peter Zeihan said. Here is the video and I have below screen shots of the thorough take down of each unsupported ... Read more

Aerographite exists as seen in the petri dish from over two years ago. It is 15000 times lighter than aluminum and making 1 micron pellets and releasing them from where we have already sent the Parker solar mission near the sun they would reach over 2% of lightspeed. A steady stream of these small pellets ... Read more

Jeff Greason’s provides his fastest summary of leveraging the solar wind, pellet riding and Q drive to reach 24% of the speed of light. Q drive uses the solar wind as a power source to accelerate reaction mass. This can take 25% of the mass of the vehicle to go 4 times faster. Simply using ... Read more

The Jupiter Observing Velocity Experiment (JOVE) is a solar-powered technology demonstration of rapid flight to outer solar system targets, performing a flyby of the Jovian magnetosphere 30 days after launch. This is achieved using a magnetic drag device to accelerate with the solar wind plasma. This “Wind Rider” propulsion system can potentially also decelerate against ... Read more

SpaceX had four rockets on four pads and two Dragons on orbit today—as CRS-26 Dragon departed the space station with Crew-5 Dragon still attached to the orbiting lab, Falcon Heavy rolled out of the hangar, two Falcon 9’s readied for launch, and Ship 24 was stacked onto Booster 7. We have a real shot at ... Read more

The BaGuaLu AI system used the Chinese Sunway exaflop supercomputer to train the largest AI model with over 174 trillion parameters. The miraculous capabilities of neural net AI systems like ChatGPT (AI generate novel text and stories) and Dall-E (AI generate novel pictures) and Alphafold2 (protein folding) comes from the growth of the AI models. ... Read more

Businesses are a primary target for cybercriminals. Cybercrime is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Experts are constantly working on being able to offer new solutions to increase safety. Businesses are increasingly addressing these issues and will continue to do so in the future. Cybercrime has grown to become one of the most ... Read more

The CSIS International Security Program for the launch of a new report titled The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan by Mark Cancian, Matthew Cancian, and Eric Heginbotham. This event will feature a presentation by the report’s authors and a panel discussion with Lt Gen David A. Deptula USAF ... Read more

Virgin Orbit’s 70-foot-long (21 meters) LauncherOne rocket upper stage failed in a launch of nine satellites. Virgin Orbit developed very similar technology to the Pegasus under wing launched rocket from Northrop Grumman. Carrying the rocket on the large plane was fine ane the first stage was fine and the second and final stage did its ... Read more

Peter Zeihan has chosen to claim that the electric car revolution will start to fail around 2030 and “disappear” in the 2030s. This is another convenient claim that will give Peter Zeihan another stream of income lasting until he retires around 2040. It is something where EVs will continue to grow and scale but where ... Read more

Halter Ferguson Financial is a financial advisory, asset management company. They have announced they will release a 6-8 page report that leverages the Tesla Semi truck and Megapack analysis that Nextbigfuture released over the last month. Financial Manager Gary Black has also gotten on board the Megapack will be a very significant and profitable analysis. ... Read more

The UN has their latest world population projections. Overall Annual Global Deaths Will Double Over the Next 60 Years The overall level of absolute annual deaths will be increasing from 60 million per year to about 80 million by 2050 and 100 million by 2070. The annual global death rate will average an increase by ... Read more

Elon Musk tweeted it looks like V11.3 will be ready for wide release in about 2 weeks. Many major improvements. Looks like V11.3 will be ready for wide release in about 2 weeks. Many major improvements. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2023

Peter Zeihan was interviewed by Joe Rogan where Zeihan again predicted the collapse of China. This time Zeihan says it will happen within ten years. Zeihan has been predicting China’s meltdown since 2005. He repeats the call for China meltdown and possible breakup or breakdown multiple times. In 2010, he said it would happen within ... Read more

The Transporter-6 mission successfully launched at 6:55 a.m. PT on January 3 placed the Caltech Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) prototype, the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD) in orbit. It will test several key components of an ambitious plan to harvest solar power in space and beam the energy back to Earth. Space solar power ... Read more

I, Brian Wang, was part of today’s Farzad Tesla panel. Here is the youtube video recording. There was a discussion of the Tesla price cuts in China and the impact on margins.

The UN estimates that the world passed 8 billion people in December 2022 and April 2023 India will pass China’s population. There are errors in population estimates of at least 1%. China has been the world’s most populous country for hundreds of years. In 1750, China had about 225m people, more than a quarter of ... Read more

Tesla has reduced their car prices in China. Here are the new starting prices (in USD): • Model 3 RWD: $33,023 (11.7% drop) • Model 3 P: $48,014 (5.7% drop) • Model Y SR: $37,826 (10% drop) • Model Y LR: $45,103 (13.4% drop) • Model Y P: $52,381 (9.5% drop) This will likely reduce ... Read more

Mobileye presented their self-driving and driver-assist technology at the 2023 CES. Mobileye wants to change the terminology from level one to level to a user-based terminology. Mobileye Supervision and incremental improvement is like the incremental and profitable Tesla approach with Autopilot and FSD. Tesla’s FSD beta is already “eyes-on, hands-off” with 285,000 users for the ... Read more

There are forecasts that there will shortages of key minerals for EV batteries but there is also a potential glut of LFP batteries. It is also possible that both events happen with a temporary 2 year glut of LFP batteries and a shortage of nickel batteries. China’s new production capacity for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) ... Read more

A Tesla Model was intentionally driven over a cliff for a 250-300 drop but all four people survived. There were two adults and two children in the car. After investigating into Tuesday morning, speaking to witnesses and putting together evidence at the scene, the CHP (California Highway Patrol) said “investigators developed probable cause to believe ... Read more

The current Transastra Sutter ground telescope test model, comprising four telescopes, moved in early April to the Winer Observatory, where over two months it tracked multiple small, dark, fast-moving objects by collecting about 50 extended images every night built from over 6,000 exposures taken over an eight-hour period. They will launch a cubesat in 2023 ... Read more

NASA’s future telescopes need robust, high-sensitivity, kilopixel-format superconducting arrays that operate over the entire far-IR spectrum. Previously, some of the key technologies needed for these arrays were demonstrated on the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera (HAWC+) on the Stratospheric Observatory for Far-Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Those detectors provided excellent performance for suborbital far-IR applications, but their production ... Read more

In late 2023, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project will start a 10-year inventory of the solar system (LSST). It should increase the number of known objects in the solar system by over ten times. LSST will deliver a 500 petabyte set of images and data products that will address some of the most pressing ... Read more

New research indicates that tens to hundreds of planet-sized nomadic worlds may populate the spherical volume centered on Earth and circumscribed by Proxima Centauri, and thus may comprise closer interstellar targets than any stellar planetary system. For the first time, there is systematic analysis of the feasibility of exploring these unbounded celestial bodies via deep ... Read more

Canada’s realtime population estimate is 39.4 million. Canada will reach 40 million in 2023. The Century Initiative is a Canadian charity that aims to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. The USA is on track to having population increase from 330 million today to 434 million in 2100. If Canada’s plan is followed ... Read more

Statistics Canada reports total population growth increased by 776,217 people in the first nine months of 2022. Between October 1, 2021 and October 1, 2022, Canada added 865,882 people – increasing the total population from 38.43 million to 39.29 million people. If the same or higher growth rate is also seen in 2023, Canada could ... Read more

Jeff Greason describes how to go from 2% of lightspeed using dynamic solar wind soaring and then using pellets propelled from the sun to go from 2-6% of lightspeed using existing near term technology. At 6% of lightspeed the particles in the interstellar medium interact with the spacecraft like beyond nuclear fusion level energy. The ... Read more

How do we extract energy from space around a spacecraft? If there are differences in the speed of the solar wind or differences in flows of particles around a spacecraft or where a spacecraft is passing then highly efficient extraction of power can enable great capabilities. On earth, we had sailing ships millennia before turbines ... Read more

There has been very little mass media coverage of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft failing while at the International Space Station. The Soyuz had a severe coolant leak. It had already delivered to Russian and an American astronaut. Imagine if this was a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked at the Space Station. There would be a lot ... Read more

General Fusion of Canada is developing magnetized target fusion and is one of the top five fusion energy startups in terms of overall funding. They have raised about $322 million from Jeff Bezos, the Canadian and Malaysian governments. I track over 30 nuclear fusion projects and think this one, Helion Energy and HB11 Energy are ... Read more

The biggest developments in AI were the Openao Dall-e 2 and ChatGPT. OpenAI said Dall-E 2 was generating over 2 million images a day. People are using ChatGPT to write stories and articles and then having Dall-E 2 create the pictures for the ChatGPT article or story. Space SpaceX had 61 launches in 2022 up ... Read more

SpaceX successfully launched is targeting Thursday December 29 for launch of the the ISI EROS C-3 mission to a low-earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The 56-minute launch window opens at 11:17 p.m. PT (07:17 UTC on December 30). A backup launch opportunity is available ... Read more

Having the price of diesel above $3 per gallon guarantees a $30,000 per year incentive to switch from diesel to electric for heavily used Semi and large trucks. Currently, prices at the $4.5 to $5 per gallon level provide a $60,000 per year incentive to switch from diesel to electric. There will be a shift ... Read more

Here is an analysis of the available information for the electric Semi trucks that are currently available. I could not find detailed pricing for many of the electric semi-trucks because they have variable pricing based upon the location and situation. I believe they adjust prices based upon the available incentives. There are huge $185k incentives ... Read more

There have been about 250 million cars in the US in most years from 2010 to 2022. The level has slowly increased to 280 million. The insurance site Auto Insurance EZ compiled sales and accident data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the National Transportation Safety Board. The site found that hybrid vehicles had ... Read more

The highest power that can be used to charge existing Tesla Model 3 and Model Y is about 300 kilowatts. Tesla will likely be able to make minor modifications to enable existig 250 kilowatt chargers to increase power to 300 kilowatts. The higher power charging revealed at the Tesla Semi delivery day will enable new ... Read more

SpaceX Falcon 9 launched 54 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit. They were new Gen 2 technology but in the same Gen 1 form factor. It was SpaceX’s 60th mission of 2022. SpaceX had 31 missions in 2021, 60 in 2022 and plans over 100 in 2023. It is unclear what capabilities are in the smaller ... Read more

I was at a Q2B conference presentation by PsiQuantum on their work to develop fault-tolerant over one million qubit quantum computers. They are developing new optical and photonic components to achieve truly breakthrough capabilities. They have a staff of over 250 people and have dedicated fabs to create their systems. This seems like a viable ... Read more

The Japanese government will extend the operation of existing nuclear power reactors and replace aging facilities with new advanced ones. a roadmap for the next ten years was compiled as a “basic policy for the realisation of GX (Green Transformation). Before March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan’s 54 reactors provided around 30% ... Read more