Technology

How Overzealous Green Policies Force Europe to Bankroll Putin’s Military

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

There is a difference between healthy zeal for a basically good cause like reducing CO2 emissions, and unbalanced myopia. Back in September I wrote about the European power debacle (skyrocketing gas and electricity prices):

Shut down your old reliable coal and nuclear power plants. Replace them with wind turbines. Count on natural gas fueled power plants to fill in when the breeze stops blowing. Curtail drilling for your own natural gas, and so become dependent on gas supplied by pipeline from Russia or by tankers chugging thousands of miles from the Middle East. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, now we know what can go wrong.

In January I noted more specifically, “This energy shortage also makes Europe very vulnerable to Russia, at a time when Putin is menacing Ukraine with invasion.” Now it has come to pass. All the huffing and puffing about economic sanctions on Russia is mainly just hot air. Because Europe is utterly dependent on Russian gas, massive “carve-outs” have been made in sanctions in order to continue these purchases to continue. The vaunted SWIFT restrictions on Russian banks have been carved down to practical irrelevance. While sanctions may impact the lifestyles of oligarch playboys, this flow of euros to Russia ensures that Putin will not run short of money for his war.

Ecomodernist Michael Shellenberger writes that behind the Ukraine military drama “is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe.” Shellenberger asks, “How is it possible that European countries, Germany especially, allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War?” and then answers this question in his trademark style:

Here’s how: These countries are in the grips of a delusional ideology that makes them incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insists we don’t need nuclear and that we don’t need fracking. It insists that it’s just a matter of will and money to switch to all-renewables—and fast. It insists that we need “degrowth” of the economy, and that we face looming human “extinction.” (I would know. I myself was once a true believer.)

… While Putin expanded Russia’s oil production, expanded natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas, Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.

The numbers tell the story best. In 2016, 30 percent of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, that figure jumped to 40 percent. By 2020, it was nearly 44 percent, and by early 2021, it was nearly 47 percent.

…The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.

Europeans—led by figures like Greta Thunberg and European Green Party leaders, and supported by Americans like John Kerry—believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth requires making energy scarce. By turning to renewables, they would show the world how to live without harming the planet. But this was a pipe dream. You can’t power a whole grid with solar and wind, because the sun and the wind are inconstant, and currently existing batteries aren’t even cheap enough to store large quantities of electricity overnight, much less across whole seasons.

In service to green ideology, they made the perfect the enemy of the good—and of Ukraine.

There we have it.  It’s not just the Europeans. As I write this, shells are raining down on Ukrainian cities but the U.S. is not restricting its imports of Russian oil, lest our price of oil go even higher. The present oil shortage (even before the Ukraine invasion) is what happens when a president on his first day in office signs an executive order to cancel a pipeline expansion which would have enabled increased oil production from Canada’s massive oil sands, and the whole ESG movement hates on investing in projects for producing oil or gas.

All that said, what the West gives with one hand it may take back with the other. Although energy exports from Russia are theoretically permitted, Western private enterprises, including finance arms, are pulling back from any dealings with Russia. This means in practice, lots of wrenches are being thrown into the machinery of international finance, such that energy exports from Russia are being slowed, though not stopped. But in turn, the Russians are getting higher prices per barrel for the oil that does get exported. There are many moving parts to all this, so we will see how it all shakes out.

How to Set Working Directory in R for Replication Packages

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

The AEA Data Editor kicked it all off with this tweet:

“Please stop using “cd” (in Stata) or “setwd()” (in R) all over the place. Once (maybe, not really), that’s enough.”

Replies proliferated on #EconTwitter this week. In this blog post I am collecting solutions for R.   These days you might share the code used to generate your results for an empirical paper. That code would ideally be easy for other people to run on their own computers. File paths are hard (as I blogged previously).

A project for a single paper might have multiple code files. The code interacts with data stored somewhere. Part of the task of the code is to point the statistical program to the data set. It is frustrating if an outsider is trying to replicate a result and must alter the code in multiple places to point to their own location of the data.

Here is a concise summary of good practice, for any code language: “cd and setwd() specify the directory. When you share code and run on a different computer, they don’t work. Therefore, good practice to only specify once, at the beginning”

Continue reading →

Half of Deliberately Exposed Unvaccinated Volunteers in UK Study Did Not Get COVID; Why?

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

A British study by Ben Killingley and 31 co-authors recently appeared in pre-print form, where 36 (heroic) healthy young adult volunteers were deliberately exposed to the Covid virus by nasal drops. These volunteers then went into quarantine for 14 days, and logged their symptoms and were subjected to various tests for a total of 28 days.


Of the 36 subjects, only 18 (53%) became infected with the virus, as determined by PCR testing (the gold standard for Covid tests) and by direct counting of viral loads in mucus cells by FFA.

The study found that viral shedding (as estimated by mucus viral loads) begins within two days of exposure and rapidly reaches high levels, then declines. Viable virus is still detectible up to 12 days post-inoculation. This result supports the practice of people quarantining for at least 10 days after they first exhibit symptoms of infection. There were significant higher viral loads in the nose than in the throat,  which supports the practice of wearing masks that cover the nose as well as the mouth.


The cheap, fast, LFA rapid antigen test method (used in home tests) performed fairly well. Because it is less sensitive, it did not it did not yield positive results for infected individuals until an average of four days after infection, or about two days after viral shedding may have begun. But from four days onward, the LFA method was sensitive and reasonably accurate which supports the ongoing use of these quick, cheap tests.

These direct inclusions from the paper are helpful, but not earthshaking. The elephant in the room, which the paper did not seem to directly address, is why nearly half of the people who were exposed did NOT become infected. This raises all kinds of issues about what mechanisms the human body may have to naturally fight off COVID or similar viral infections. Gaining insight on this could lead to breakthroughs in preventing or mitigating this pernicious virus.

An article by Eileen O’Reilly at Axios probes these questions. There is nothing conclusive out there, but four ideas that are under investigation are:

1. Cross-immunity from the four endemic human coronaviruses is one hypothesis. Those other coronaviruses cause many of the colds people catch and could prime B-cell and T-cell response to this new coronavirus in some people.

2. Multiple genetic variations may make someone’s immune system more or less susceptible to the virus.  Some 20 different genes have been identified which affect the likelihood of severe infection, and a genetic predisposition to not getting infected is seen in other diseases where people have one or multiple factors that interfere with the virus binding to cells or being transported within.

3. Mucosal immunity may play an underrecognized role in mounting a defense.

This suggests nasal vaccines might have a chance at stopping a virus before it invades the whole body.

4. Where the virus settled on the human body, how large the particle was, the amount and length of exposure, how good the ventilation was and other environmental circumstances may also play a role.

These considerations support continuing with the usual recommendations of social distancing, wearing facemasks, and ventilating buildings, especially when caseloads are peaking. Also, the doses administered to the volunteers in the study were considered quite small by clinical standards. It was surprising that such a low dose was effective as it was in causing full-blown infections; and the particular strain used in the experiment was not necessarily one of the more recent highly virulent variants. After reading these results,  it is more understandable to me why so many reasonably careful friends and family members of mine (nearly all vaccinated, fortunately) have come down with (presumably) omicron COVID in the past two months. Just a little dab will do ya.

“Pfumvudza” Planting Technique Revolutionizes Crop Yields in Zimbabwe

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

Birth of a New Farming Method

Brian Oldreive is a Zimbabwean, born there in 1943. A star cricket player as a young man, he moved on to become a successful tobacco farmer. In 1978, he became convinced (given the harm that tobacco causes) that he should no longer grow tobacco. When he tried to switch to food crops like corn (called maize in Africa), using standard agricultural practices, he could not make a go of it. He ended up losing his farm and his livelihood due to his moral stand against growing tobacco. He went to work for another large farm, but even there it was a struggle to grow food at a profit. Soil was eroding and crop yields were falling.

He began to think that maybe there was a better way to farm than the usual Western model. One day in 1984 when he was walking in the forest, he noticed that the trees and bushes there grew just fine, with no help from humans, no plowing or irrigation. How was that possible? He observed two things. First, the ground was covered with a thick layer of leaves and other debris, which formed a natural mulch. Beneath this mulch layer (“God’s blanket”), the soil was moist. This was while the region was experiencing drought, and regular farmers’ fields were parched. Secondly, the undisturbed mulch layer naturally decayed to return nutrients to the soil.

Oldreive parlayed those observations into a system of no-till agriculture which mimics the created order. He called this “Farming God’s Way”. The emphasis is on high productivity from a small plot. This involves precision planting at the proper time, crop rotation (corn/beans), and deep mulching to retain moisture and keep weeds down. Nutrients are supplied by both compost and chemical fertilizers.

This method can be practiced by farmers owning no tool other than a hoe. This breaks the cycle of farmers or nations going into debt to purchase expensive Western agricultural machinery, which then may become useless due to inadequate maintenance out in the bush.    

This approach contrasts with conventional farming practice which plows up the soil, leaving it to erode away when it rains and to dry out when it doesn’t rain. Plowing also disturbs the natural ordering of the microbial communities within the upper and lower soil layers. (There is aerobic metabolism near the surface, and a whole different anaerobic community in the soil lower down).

Oldreive started by planting one small plot using this approach in the estate he was then managing:

I decided to copy what God does in natural creation and I observed that the leaves fall down on the ground and the grass dies down and there is a protective blanket over the earth, and that is how God preserves soil to infiltrate the water that we receive…

Many people did not believe me and said I was wasting time. But I was not deterred because I was convinced that this method would work. I decided to put the model into practice by starting with just two hectares. I prayed for wisdom and God showed me how to plant maize into wheat straw residue. This is just the same as what God does in nature.

That two-hectare (about 5 acre) plot confounded the skeptics, yielding about ten times more corn per hectare than the local average yields. He then planted more acreage using this approach. Over the next few years, while a number of conventionally-run farms around him went broke, he kept expanding and growing more food with his system.

Oldreive believed these insights were gifts from God which were meant to be shared with others. Therefore, he shifted his effort towards teaching other Africans how to farm with this method.

Things Fall Apart in Zimbabwe

Continue reading →

Optimal Policy & Technological Contingency

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

A person’s optimal choice depends on what they know. To consume more ice cream? Or to consume more alcohol? It depends on what we know about the expected utility across time. If a person thinks that alcohol has few calories, then it is understandable that they would choose to drink rather than eat. The person might be totally wrong, but they are acting optimally contingent on their knowledge about the world. (FWIW, 4oz of ethanol has 262 calories and 4oz of typical ice cream has 228 calories.)

The case is analogous for good government policy. The best policy is contingent on accessing the distribution of knowledge that’s inside of multiple people’s heads. It’s not sensible to assert that a policy is suboptimal if the optimal policy requires knowledge that neither a single individual nor all people together have. Even if the sum of all knowledge does exist, it may not be possible to access it.

Economists like to tell their undergraduate classes that it doesn’t matter who you tax. But that’s contingent on 1) identical compliance costs among buyers and sellers and 2) identical relevant information. If a tax comes as a surprise to the buyer or the seller, then it absolutely matters who is taxed.

When I was in 1st grade in North Carolina, my class went on a field trip to a Christmas tree farm. We learned a bunch about maintaining the farm and we got to choose a pumpkin to take home. At the end of our visit we took turns perusing the gift shop. My mother had generously given me a dollar to spend  and I was eager to spend it (I rarely had money to spend). Unfortunately, even in the early mid-90s, most of the things in the shop cost more than $1. So, I settled on purchasing some beef jerky that cost 99 cents.

Continue reading →

The Return of Independent Research

James Bailey2 Comments

Universities have been around for about a thousand years, but for much of that time it was typical for cutting-edge research to happen outside of them. Copernicus wasn’t a professor, Darwin wasn’t a professor. Others like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Albert Einstein became professors only after completing some of their best work. Scientists didn’t need the resources of a university, they simply needed a means of support that gave them enough time to think. Many were independently wealthy (Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier) or supported by the church (Gregor Mendel). Some worked “real jobs”, David Ricardo as a banker, Einstein famously as a patent clerk.

Over time academia grew and an increasing share of research was done by professors, with most of the rest happening inside the few non-academic institutions that paid people to do full time research: national labs, government agencies, and a few companies like Xerox Parc, Bell Labs and 3M. In many fields research came to require expensive equipment that was only available in the best-funded labs. “Researcher” became a job, and research conducted by those without that job became viewed with suspicion over the 20th century.

But the Internet Age is leading to the growth in opportunities outside academia, opportunities not just economic but intellectual. Anyone with a laptop and internet can access most of the key tools that professors use, often for free- scientific articles, seminars, supercomputers, data, data analysis. Particularly outside of the lab sciences, the only remaining barrier to independent research is again what it was before the 20th century- finding a means of support that gives you time to think. This will never be easy, but becoming a professor isn’t either, and a growing number of people are either becoming independently wealthy, able to support themselves with fewer work hours (even vs academics), or finding jobs that encourage part time research. If you work for the right company you might even get better data than the academics have.

Particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the frontier seems to be outside academia, with many of the best professors getting offers from industry they can’t refuse.

Even in the lab sciences, money is increasingly pouring in for those who want to leave academia to run a start-up instead:

I think it’s great for science that these new opportunities are opening up. A natural advantage of independent research is that it allows people to work on topics or use methods they couldn’t in academia because they are seen as too high risk, too out there, make too many enemies, or otherwise fall into an academic “blind spot“.

I’m still happy to be in academia, and independent research clearly has its challenges too. But over my lifetime it seems like we have shifted from academia being the obvious best place to do research, to academia being one of several good options. Even as research has begun to move elsewhere though, universities still seem to be doing well at their original purpose of teaching students. Almost all of the people I’ve highlighted as great independent researchers were still trained at universities; most of the modern ones I linked to even have PhDs. There are always exceptions and the internet could still change this, but for now universities retain a near-monopoly on training good researchers even as the employment of good researchers becomes competitive.

As an academic I may not be the right person to write about all this, so I’ll leave you with the suggestion to listen to this podcast where Spencer Greenberg and Andy Matuschak discuss their world of “para-academic research”. Spencer is a great example of everything I’ve said- an Applied Math PhD who makes money in private sector finance/tech but has the time to publish great research, partly in math/CS where a university lab is unnecessary, but more interestingly in psychology where being a professor would actually slow him down- independent researchers don’t need to wait weeks for permission from an institutional review board every time they want to run a survey.

Is an Academic Career Still Worth It?

James Bailey3 Comments

Being a professor is still great, but the alternatives are getting better fast.

I’m glad I started a PhD in 2009; I wanted to learn more economics and the opportunity cost was low, with the worst job market in a generation. When I went on the job market in 2013, I still thought academia was such a clear favorite that I didn’t even apply to private-sector or government jobs. I wanted to teach, yes, but above all I wanted freedom- the freedom to choose my own research topics, to think deeply, to not have a boss, to not spend 40+ hours every week in an office.

It’s easy to find essays about how academic jobs are terrible, or at least much worse than they used to be. To me, being a tenure-track academic is still great work if you can get it, for all the reasons Bryan Caplan explains here. But I do think the quality of the job is standing still while the alternatives get better. The academic superiority that seemed obvious to me in 2009 and 2013 no longer seems obvious in 2021, due to three big changes:

Higher Demand: The demand for workers with quantitative and/or programming abilities has never been higher. My impression is that now anyone with the ability to do a PhD in a quantitative subject could be making six figures in tech, data science, or finance within a few years if they set their mind to it. Of course, this is simply a difference of degree; its always been the conventional wisdom that you could make more money outside of academia. The gap seems to be growing now, but to me the more important change is

Remote Work: Quality, high-paying remote jobs have gone from rare in 2019 to common today, which is a game-changer for many decisions, including academic vs non-academic. Perhaps the worst part of an academic career is that it forces everyone to move- getting a PhD usually requires moving, and getting your first academic job almost certainly does. This is a huge cost for those who value family and community, a cost many people are unwilling to pay. In 2014 my wife’s career had just brought us to New Orleans, but the closest tenure-track job offer I had was a thousand miles away at Creighton University in Omaha. I took the job and spent the next three years flying back and forth, partly because I wanted to be in academia, but partly because there were no good private sector or government options for an Econ PhD in New Orleans either at the time. Back then the private sector and government economist jobs were plentiful but generally meant moving to one of a few cities (DC, NYC, SF, Boston) and spending all day in an office, so I ignored them. Today I wouldn’t.

Campus vs The Internet: So the practical side of non-academic jobs is getting better, but what about the life of the mind? When I first went to college I loved taking classes in new subjects and going to the events and seminars that were always happening on campus, and part of the appeal of being a professor was to be able to keep doing that. In graduate school I liked attending the seminars where visiting speakers would present their latest research, and hoped to get a job at research-oriented university where I could keep doing that. But these benefits of being on campus don’t seem so important anymore. Partly its that I feel too busy to take advantage of them; most of the time there’s a speaker on campus talking about something cool like a new translation of the Odyssey, I’m either catching up on work or home with my kids. But mostly the internet means this sort of thing is available to everyone all the time. I may have missed Emily Wilson’s talk at my campus but I heard her on Conversations with Tyler. I’m not at an R1 school with scholars in my field presenting new research every month, but there are now more great research seminars online than I have time to watch. The Internet makes it increasingly easy for anyone with the motivation to participate in the life of the mind regardless of where they live or what their job is- certainly as consumers, and in a future post I’ll highlight the increasingly impressive scholarly production coming from non-academics.

Earning Steady 9% Interest in My New Crypto Account

Scott Buchanan4 Comments

One reason for opening an account where you can purchase cryptocurrencies is to speculate on their price movements. There have been many cases where some coin has quadrupled in a few weeks, or gone up ten-fold in a few months, or even a hundred-fold within a year.

Another facet of crypto accounts is that in some cases you are paid interest on the coin you have purchased and hold in your account. That was the main draw for me. I already have a little Bitcoin and Ethereum exposure in my brokerage account through the funds GBTC and ETHE, enough to feel the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat when they go up, up, up and down, down, down, but I am not a big speculator at heart. So, I am drawn to the so-called “stablecoins”, whose value is tied to some major regular currency such as the U.S. dollar. It turns out that you can get high, steady interest payments on those stablecoins.

There are several crypto brokers which pay interest on coins. Some names include BlockFi, Celsius, Nexo, and Voyager Digital. Several such firms are reviewed here.  Initially I leaned towards Voyager, since it gives access to lots of the new, little alt-coins where you can 10X your money if you pick the right ones and jump in early. However, I still do my own taxes, and the tax reporting from Voyager looked daunting. Last I looked, they just provide a dump of all your transactions in a giant table, and it’s up to you to figure out capital gains/losses. The word on the street is that this is not as straightforward as it seems. Also, Voyager offered only mobile apps, not a desktop interface. All in all, Voyager seems more geared towards intense younger Robin Hood/Reddit crowd, punching daring trades into their phones at all hours.

BlockFi is quite staid by comparison. It only offers a few, mainstream coins. However, it is one of the best-established firms, and it provides a nice clear 1099 tax reporting form at the end of the year. BlockFi is backed by major institutional partners, and manages over $9 billion in assets.

Unlike some of its competitors, it is U.S.-based, and as such it is structured to function well in this jurisdiction. Also, its interest payouts are straightforward. In contrast, many of its competitors incentivize  you to receive your interest in special tokens issued by those companies, which adds another element of risk. Finally, BlockFi allows you to immediately transfer money in and out of your account by using a bank ACH link. I wanted that flexibility since I plan to keep a portion of my cash holdings in BlockFi instead of in the bank, but I want to be able to access those cash holdings on short notice and without penalty. (Last week I described some of my struggles over using the Plaid financial app which manages the bank-BlockFi interface, but I was able to get past that).

All in all, BlockFi is boring in a good way. All I want to do is make steady money, with minimal distraction. Here is a listing of the interest rates paid for holdings of Bitcoin and Ethereum:

BlockFi only pays significant interest for smaller holdings of these coins. (We will discuss the reason for this seemingly odd policy in a future blog post; it is basically an outcome of BlockFi’s conservative financial practices).

For Bitcoin, the interest rate is 4.5% for up to 0.10 BTC, which at today’s prices is about $4,700. After that, the interest plummets to 1%, and to a mere 0.10% for more than 0.35 BTC (about $16,000). There is a similar pattern for Ethereum. If your goal is to hold large amounts of these coins and earn substantial interest on them, there are probably better platforms than BlockFi.

However, the interest picture is brighter for the stablecoins. The biggest U.S.-based stablecoin is USD Coin (USDC), which is backed by significant institutions. Gemini Dollar (GUSD) is smaller, but also takes great pains to garner trust. Its issuer, Gemini, operates under the regulatory oversight of the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). It boasts, “The Gemini Dollar is fully backed at a one-to-one ratio with the U.S. dollar. The number of Gemini dollar tokens in circulation is equal to the number of U.S. dollars held at a bank in the United States, and the system is insured with pass-through FDIC deposit insurance as a preventative measure against money laundering, theft, and other illicit activities.” GUSD is the “native” currency within BlockFi, though users can easily exchange it for other coins. At this point I am holding just GUSD, though if I put in more funds, I would plan to partially diversify into USDC. Besides being much bigger, USDC now runs on multiple platforms, whereas GUSD is limited to Ethereum; if Ethereum finally does switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, it may be more subject to outages or hacking, so it would be nice to not be totally dependent on Ethereum.

For these two stablecoins, BlockFi currently pays 9% interest on holdings up to $40,000, and a respectable 8% on larger holdings:

A complete list of BlockFi interest rates (which change from time to time) is here.

The alert reader may at this point object, “Hey, you are losing most of the purported benefits of blockchain cryptocurrencies – – without holding the coins in your own wallet, you don’t actually own them, so you are back dependent on The System. Moreover, those stablecoins are centrally managed, not deliberately decentralized like Bitcoin and Ethereum. You are treating this like a plain bank account!”

My reply is, “Yes, I am treating it like a plain bank account – – but an account that pays me 9% interest, with no drama.” That is exactly what I wanted.

UPDATE MARCH 2022 – – BLOCKFI INTEREST ACCOUNT NO LONGER AVAILABLE. For some time now, state and federal government authorities have been hassling crypto exchanges that offer interest on crypto holdings. In February, the SEC fined BlockFi $100 million for allegedly violating securities laws, and shut them down from taking in any new funds for interest-bearing accounts. BlockFi hopes someday to provide a regulation-compliant interest product, but don’t hold your breath.

Zealous state and federal regulators have been attacking other crypto firms offering interest, such as Celsius and Voyager. The main player still standing that I am aware of is Gemini. Gemini is very conscientious about audits and has always tried to work closely with regulators. It is offering about 6.5% interest on stablecoins (which is still way better than money markets or CDs), and a measly 1-1.25% on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I’m Excited about a New World’s Fair

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

Everyone who attended the recent Emergent Ventures Unconference is excited. Craig Palsson is excited about the primal branding of the unconference. My co-blogger Mike Makowsky is excited about Plascrete (I was too! We listened to that pitch simultaneously).

I was most excited about the New World’s Fair. This is Cameron Weise’s project, for which he won an EV grant (see all the winners). I have always been interested in the history of World’s Fairs (though probably not as much as my wife). And they still exist, in a sense. There are still World Expos every few years, but as Cameron will tell you, these have mostly turned into “nation branding” exercises, promoting the host nation itself and whatever other countries set up their own exhibits.

But today, World Expos are not about promoting science, technology, and the future, as many World’s Fairs of the past did. And aren’t there already technological conferences, such as the Consumer Electronics Show (now just CES)? Yes, there are. And these are great. But they aren’t serving the same role as World’s Fairs used too.

This is the gap that Cameron Wiese is stepping into. I don’t know exactly what it will look like (he has lots of ideas!), nor exactly when it will happen. But I will be following his project closely, and you should too.

In the conclusion to his e-book The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen presents a solution to the stagnation: “Raise the social status of scientists.” I think a New World’s Fair would go a long way towards do this.

Starship: Quantity has a Quality of its own

James BaileyLeave a comment

If the SpaceX Starship ends up working as planned, it will do the same things our rockets do now, but at one one-hundredth the price. In an inspiring blog post, Casey Handmer argues that even people within the industry have yet to appreciate the qualitatively different opportunities that this price drop would enable:

By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

Second, and more importantly, shoehorning Cassini 2.0 or Mars Direct into Starship fails to adequately exploit the capabilities of the launch system. Not to pick on Cassini or Mars Direct, but both of these missions were designed with inherent constraints that are not relevant to Starship. In fact, all space missions whether robotic or crewed, historical or planned, have been designed with constraints that are not relevant to Starship. 

What does this mean? Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities. 

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production.

As they say, read they whole thing, especially the part about space tractors. I leave you with one final quote:

It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger