Technology, Connected - Can AI Data Centers Work in Space? StarCloud Co-Founder Philip Johnston Explains

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Philip Johnston, co-founder of StarCloud, joins Mark and Jeremy to explain how the company plans to build AI data centers in space.StarCloud is developing orbital computing infrastructure designed to run large numbers of GPUs using solar power. Instead of relying on water-based cooling systems, the company plans to remove heat through large space radiators and transmit data between orbit and Earth using optical links.The economics of the idea depend heavily on falling launch costs. As reusable rockets reduce the cost of reaching low Earth orbit, companies such as StarCloud are exploring whether energy-intensive computing could eventually be moved away from terrestrial power grids and data centers.In this episode, we discuss:How data centers in space would workWhy StarCloud wants to place AI GPUs in low Earth orbitHow space-based computers can be cooled without waterWhether solar power could reduce the energy costs of AI computingHow laser communication links compare with terrestrial fiberWhere orbital networks could offer lower latencyHow falling SpaceX launch costs affect the economics of space infrastructureWhat hardware StarCloud plans to launchThe engineering and commercial challenges facing orbital data centersPhilip also explains why StarCloud believes space-based computing could support the growing demand for AI infrastructure without placing the same pressure on terrestrial electricity grids and water supplies.The conversation examines whether orbital computing is a practical extension of cloud infrastructure or an ambitious response to problems that are still cheaper to solve on Earth.Please enjoy the show and share it with a curious friend.--Chapters(00:00) The impact of earth based compute(03:09) Data centers in space(08:36) Conquering Latency Challenges in Space(10:32) Modular Space Infrastructure(16:03) How much do space based data centers cost? (19:46) Manufacturing Beyond Earth's Boundaries(26:00) Reusability and space junk(26:15) GPUs in Orbit(28:52) Future Tech Rapid-Fire Questions(29:55) 5 Billion Humanoids(32:35) Addressing Space Skepticism(33:41) Quantum Computing's Orbital AdvantageThe Humanoid Difference(37:20) Where Are All the Aliens? Exploring the Fermi Paradox(38:35) Behind the Scenes-- Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]

Disruptors and Curious Minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper, where we take you the curious behind the scenes of the latest emerging tech. And we unpack it together. Why do we do it? Well, we all want to understand why this technology is going to be important,

how the world's going to change, what it's going to mean to our families, our jobs, our own curiosity, and that's what we're here doing. Listen, all of these episodes won't be extremely easy to listen to, but I tell you what, they're going to be informative, they're going to be fun, and they're going to get you,

using this thing in your head, this jelly that's sitting in your skull, you're going to be thinking a little bit differently, hopefully about this. So Mark, I'm stoked. I'm stoked today because like we're talking about something that I spent a lot of time in. So I'm excited. What do we learn about, Mark? Drumwalt, data centers in space five gigawatt data clusters with solar arrays four kilometers across 400 miles up in the sun synchronous orbit. Now, listeners might be wondering why? Why not just build them here on Earth? And before we get into the how, I want to explain the why with a few quotes from the Star Cloud white paper. So that's a clue to our guest today, Star Cloud. The first is a quote from our good friend of the show, Elon Musk. We have silicon

shortage today, a voltage step down, transformer shortage probably in about a year, and then just electricity shortage in general in about two years. And then there's another quote from Tom Muller. employee number one at space X, the amount of power to run compute by 2045 will be the base power of the planet right now. The drain on resources is so high you need to put that compute in space and use the power of the sun. That's a really good use of space to help save the planet. And that's why data centers in space. Now, Jeremy, I know this is your specialized subject and Philip, it's his specialized subject as well. So I've bought a bell. And if you two get too deep in the weeds about data center tech, I'm going to ring this just to reel you in.

Okay. I love that. I love that. And before we get into this episode, I want to remind everybody that we have our hot buttons that Mark runs. It's going to be really fun. We had our thinking on paper news. We have our carryover question. And we also unpack everything backstage at the very end.

So stick around. Lastly, before we introduce the guest, Mark, I'm going to tee up a quote from one of my favorite books of all time. I'm not going to nerd out on this too much. But there's a guy named Gerard O'Neill that wrote a book in 1976 called The High Frontier. It was about building colonies in manufacturing lower earth orbit. Someone who you know who we referenced last show, Carl Sagan, was quoted in 1976 as he was talking to the U.S. House of Representatives on Gerard O'Neill's work. The engineering aspects of it are perfectly worked out by O'Neill's study group. It is practical.

This was in 1976. all know it's 2025 today without further ado. Let's bring on our guest and talk about it. Philip Johnson, co-founder of StarCloud. Welcome to Thinking on Paper. Great to be here. Thanks so much for helping you, Jeremy and Mark. Pleasure.

I like the reference to O'Neill. Do you guys know what an O'Neill Ring is? It's like the best example of, or what the best design for a orbital colony. Anybody that's interested should Wikipedia the O'Neill Ring concept? Why is it so perfect? So basically it spins so you have artificial gravity, but it's designed in a way that would reflect sunlight. Yes, it looks a bit like, that's a bit like what I'm thinking. There's a bunch of different drawings in here, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's basically a long tube which has the sites opened out to reflect sunlight and generate power. So the whole thing is either permanently in sunlight or permanently in dark, but you have artificial gravity. and it's better than just having a ring spinning, basically. So this is a timely topic. AI is like getting thrown at us, left, right, top and bottom. And I think some of us who are not, you know, in the data center know, are even starting to figure out, well, something's got to power all of this AI.

Data center demand is up. We know we're limited on power in the U.S., you know, in the world. There's a finite amount of that. So you come up with this idea along with your team to actually put data centers in space. So let's simplify it. In your definition, what is a data center? A data center, I mean, actually, in really the simplest terms, we can be thought of as a low-cost energy provider. So you can run data centers on us, but you can run other things too.

But in the simplest terms, a data center is a bunch of chips processing or storing data. I don't know if you have a better definition than that, but works for me. Keep it simple. So I spent about 10 years as a data center consultant helping people design and put their IT equipment into these big facilities, whether they were leased or we build them. So it's more on the mechanical electrical side that supports it. So having this capability in space, let's talk through it. Okay. So let's say I'm a company and I need, I've got an IT compute load that powers my business.

And I'm trying to figure out where to put it and, you know, why and cost benefits. When you have a conversation or will you envision, I know you're still building this and you have the test, the pilot is happening in 1925, but how do you envision talking with somebody to figure out, hey, Jeremy, what's your IT load and then what's your redundancy requirements and then how do we configure that, put it on a rocket and let it spin around in lower Earth orbit? How does that process look to you? Yeah, so I'll try and distinguish between this quite near term and the medium to longer term. So the first few iterations of the satellite, you mentioned the first one's going up in a few months in summer this year. These are designed to offer edge compute workloads for mainly other satellites and also to some degree terrestrial customers who care about data sovereignty and would like to run a workload in space. So for those guys, the design of that satellite is quite similar to the design of most satellites in that critical systems have to be redundancy on critical systems and then over provisioning on systems which will degrade over time, particularly solar panels and chips. So yeah, for those conversations, it's basically if we can provide you this amount of compute on orbit, you know, how valuable is that to you?

And can we provide that at a price point that makes sense? In the longer term, the ambition is that you can think of us a bit like a core weave or Lambda. Crusoe, Armada, these guys. Essentially, we will be renting out GPU time and that whoever the buyer of that GPU time is shouldn't really care whether it's in space or on Earth. We'll be able to say that we can provide you H-100 time for $150 an hour or $2 an hour or whatever. It's going to be. And we do the connectivity, we do the calling, we do the power, and they don't have to have to think about that really. One of the things I kind of think about, too, is we'll talk about how things get up there and where they land and what Lego blocks they end up plugging into.

The one thing I tend to think about is we know we have latency between here in Chicago, between here in London, between Atlanta and London, how does the latency thing work? And how does the things you process in that module come back to Earth? And how is that being optimized to make sure it doesn't take too long? Yeah. So this was basically not solved problem until about two years ago when the megaconstellation started allowing access directly from other satellite customers. So we're going to plug into one of the mega constellations,

be that Starlink Kuiper or Kepler, one of the others, directly with an optical terminal so with a space laser which I mean the data rates on these lasers is extremely high potentially hundreds of gigabits per second per laser and you can have multiple lasers if you want which is about what a current terrestrial

data center there are definitely terrestrial data centers that have an in and out pipe of about a hundred gigabre second so it's not too different in terms of latency flying in low earth orbit is no different really from having a data center terrestrial if you're if you're 400 kilometers up that's not that different from having a data center

in Alaska or in Seattle or wherever. So yeah, I mean, anything that requires sub-20 millisecond latency will need to remain on Earth. But my view is that all other data centers will inevitably move to space once the launch cost is a certain point. What might need sub-20

to remain on Earth? What kind of use case is that? Very few use cases, to be honest. So nothing that is like an internet-based use case needs that. This call we're having now could easily be 100 millisecond latency. And even things which are very latency sensitive, like for example, if you want to arbitrage two exchanges between London and New York, it's very latency sensitive, but it's actually quicker to do it through space than it is to do it through fibre.

It will be very soon if it isn't already much quicker to do it through space. I mean, for one thing, the speed of light is about 50% faster in a vacuum than it is through fiber. So really we're talking about, I mean, very few situations come to mind that requires sub 20 milliseconds. I'll give you a nerdy one just because it's a project that I worked on with some buddies. It's a real-time music performance. So if you have, if all of us are playing musical instruments from different spots, it requires about 10 milliseconds of latency just to keep us all in time and rhythm. I know.

Is that why those Zoom experiments during COVID was so bad? Yeah, well, they weren't using the stuff that we were using it. But I digress. Let's stay focused on data centers. All right. So, Philip, we get this box, right, that we put on, And I'm totally simplifying because the technology that you're building is actually quite brilliant. You put it on the back of a rocket.

We send it up to space. There's some kind of station up there, right, that it will connect them to. Talk me through the Lego blocks and if we can keep it kind of high level. Yeah. So the modular design that we have in the white paper and that's in the concept video, I would say that's about a 10-year time frame. And the reason you might want to modularize is, If you want to, the largest compute cluster you can launch individually is about 40 megawatt

data center. So that's about a hundred tons worth of compute, solar panels and radioses. It's what you can fit on one full Starship payload base, for example. So if you want to build a data center that's internally networked, that's larger than that. And so, for example, for training, you need it to be extremely highly internally networked. You can't have just an obstacle terminal between them. Then you would need to have them all hooked up to the same, on the same spine, basically somewhere in space.

That's what that concept is. I think probably in the more immediate term, we're going to just be launching these individual 40 megawatt blocks and they'll have their own solar panels and radiators attached. So you talk about 10 football fields of solar panels and radiators for one of those 40 megawatt blocks versus like a 4 by 4km from the 5 gigawatt block. So yeah, I would say that's probably the thing to focus on

in the slightly more immediate term is these units of 40 megawatts. And you can use that for all kinds of inference workloads and everything else. It's only really training very large models that you need to cluster these things together. So 40 megawatts, friends and neighbors, is quite a bit of compute load. Just to let everybody know that 40 megawatt data centers terrestrily are massive, like massive acres upon acres upon acres. When you consider 40 megawatts, is that pure IT load or does that include the backup power stuff as well? That includes backup power.

I mean, well, actually, one of the nice things about being in a dawnedust sunsynchronous orbit is that we're always in the sun, and so we'll need less backup power than we'll still have some redundancy, but we'll need less than a terrestrial disenderwood. Is this the Terminator line? Yes, the Terminator line. Yes.

I've got it there, yeah. You're waiting to say that. I'm going waiting to say that. And so, because the sun synchronous orbit, I've heard of lower Earth orbit, but I've never heard of sun synchronous orbit. And is that to keep it on,

the terminator line so it's always on that line between darkness and daylight the solar the solar energy is always there yes exactly it's a bit it's not super easy to explain without oranges and and apples next to me but as the earth processes around if you're if you're in an orbit that maintains the same um they call it el tan like the same position relative to the sun as the earth moves around the sun unless you unless you unless you have this sun synchronous property to you, which you get by having, because it's basically the oblateness of the Earth, like it's slightly fatter on the northern hemisphere than it was on the bottom hemisphere, means if you're at a certain angle about seven degrees off, then as you, as the sun,

the Earth moves around the sun, you move, your whole orbit moves by one 365th of an orbit every day. And so that means that you stay on the Terminator as the Terminator goes as the Earth rotates around the sun. That's what that. Can I just do a shout out for a book. I know about the Terminator line not because I'm a T-1000 because I read Orbital by Samantha Harvey recently and for anyone who's listening

who wants to try to imagine what it's like in orbit check this book out because it's beautiful. I have to buy that myself. It's a very short one about being on the space station for six months. Awesome.

Sounds amazing. I just bought it too, Philip. I haven't gotten into it yet. So check this out. I know you're probably kind of thinking, all right, putting stuff in space that seems pretty cool, pretty interesting, but doesn't it cost a pile of money to send stuff up there, right?

And where we're at, launch cost right now is what, about $8 million-bucks-ish to kind of put some stuff in space just for round numbers? If you want to book your own launch, it's about $8 million. The beautiful thing very recently,

in the last three, four years is these ride-share missions. Our first satellite is a 50-kil of small size, it's about the size of this fridge. That costs us 300 grand. Nice. It's amazing. It's honestly amazing. Because you're hitching a ride, yeah.

Yeah, because we're hitching a ride. Those Falcon 9 ride-share missions will launch about 20 missions at once, each of which is paying about $6,000 a kilo, and you can put pretty small stuff on there. If you want to go down even smaller than us, you can pay like 50 grand and put a cubic, sell on there if you want. I love that. And on the other side of that, we talk about the cost to get up in space,

but based on your white paper and some stuff that we've looked at, I mean, significant cost reduction as far as electricity expenses from the hundreds of millions to the tens of millions. When you start talking in orders of magnitude like that, things start to seem really, really, really compelling. Yeah, I would say it is all highly contingent on the launch cost continuing to fall. So it used to be with the shuttle about, you know, 15, 20 years ago, it was about $60,000 a kilo. Now it's come down to $6,000 a kilo. That's what we're paying for the first launch. We need the launch cost definitely under $500 a kilo. The marginal launch cost with Starship is projected to be $10 a kilo. So that gives you some sense of where we're heading.

Yeah, anything under about $500 a kilo and we're good to go. But if it gets that to $10 a kilo, or even if it's $50 a kilo, which is what they say they're going to try. customers, we will be an absurdly profitable company. Sounds good. Mark, I'm going to try and get this in before you ring the bell on me. But going back to O'Neill's book in High Frontier, he talks about actually setting up manufacturing in space and using these, what do you call them mass loaders, like this magnetic rail system from the moon that fires things out? Like, is that something that is being entertained as we look down the road as an alternative to trying to get exit velocity from Earth?

Yes. I mean actually people are doing these rail guns on Earth there's a company called like it's not slingshot there's a company called something which is doing this rail gun from Earth certainly from the moon is like that is almost certainly the way

you would do it from the moon in the end state you can also actually quite feasibly have space elevators hanging off the moon so yeah that's one way to do it and you can have a space elevator on a track that rotates around so that the space elevator so that it's I don't know anyway

That's a call back to Quantum Supremacy Book Club where we talk about space elevators and material science and the possibilities of what quantum can do. Sounds like a total recall, a mixture of all of our science fiction, science fiction becoming reality, becoming science fiction, becoming reality. I mean, I'm of the view you could build a space elevator on Earth for about $10 billion. The problem with space elevators terrestrily is they're just going to get pummeled with stuff in Leo. So even if you have these like avoidance maneuvers, stuff is going to be colliding with them at about 27,000 kilometers an hour all the time. So yeah, it just doesn't really work as well. A little more disruptive than Nats on a windshield on the highway, right? Like we're talking, yeah.

And Leo, lower Earth orbit, yeah. If they're strong enough to be there, are they not strong enough to withstand almost all impact? No, I mean, they're strong enough basically to, they have to have an anchor out beyond geo. so they have to be about 30,000 kilometres long. So they're strong enough, you know, tension-wise like this. But if you shoot a gun at it, it's like shooting a gun at a taut rope. You know, like it can hold this way. But if you shoot a bullet it, it's just going to rip the whole thing apart.

Good analogy. But just back to your point on the moon and manufacturing space, yeah, very convinced manufacturing in space is going to be a thing as well. The whole, as I say, the whole thing is contingent on low-cost launch. Once you have low-cost launch, it makes no sense to do. lots of things on Earth, manufacturing, data processing, lots of things. The moon is interesting because the lunar regolith is mainly silicon, which is useful for manufacturing solar panels.

And it would take about 20 times less energy to get silicon cells from the surface to the lunar surface to Leo than it does to get silicon cells from Earth to Leo. So it does make a lot more sense to manufacture them on the lunar surface and then transport them to Leo if you want to have low latency. you know, if you want to build big solar farms in Leo, then you probably want to manufacture them on the moon. It's got to be pretty fun to think this big, Philip, and also, like, start to execute on this.

It's very funny. I do like it. It's incredible. Like, how many people are thinking as big as you, you mentioned manufacturing on the moon? Some people might think that these are flights of fancy, but they're not. They're happening.

You said these things are happening. Is it a very small group of you doing this, or is there much more? happening than we are, than we believe, than we know. There's, there's a, I mean, it's, it's growing as Starship becomes, looks like it's going to work more and more, basically. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of people looking at lunar, mining of various lunar resources, I guess you guys, you guys have, just seen the interloon guys. Rob Myason, they're trying to mine helium three on the moon. It's still relatively small now. It's going to be like the capacity,

for Earth to put stuff in orbit is going to go up by about 100,000 X in the next five to 10 years. So we're talking about the very early days of an industry. It's a bit like the first people to arrive in California back in the 1850s or whatever. That's how it feels to me anyway. Well, keep us in mind as you run across these folks, because space is definitely space technology is one of our threads that we explore, along with quantum, along with AI, along with blockchain, you know, a lot of different areas. So I just, just a question on that analogy to the gold rush, then are you selling the shovels or are you digging for the gold? Like it is, because you mentioned that the question. StarCloud isn't just data centers, but we kind of prepped for this that it was just data centers.

But so maybe it is, I mean, it is we've got enough to bite off with data centers to fill out. Then data centers is definitely the first thing you were doing. It's also the biggest market. Like data centers in the end state is, I mean, in my view, data centers in the end state is like 99% of the economy. So like the end state of the end state of any intelligent star system is to build a Dyson sphere hooked up to as much computers you can physically support, which is like a matriosca brain is what they call it. That takes a few million years but that is that is so our cloud is the first company ever that is on a path to building

a Dyson sphere slash Matryosca brain. So for those of you guys just listening and you're not seeing us half of my face just melted in a couple of those thoughts and words. But no, that's awesome. All right, Philip, one quick question. There was a point there I wanted to touch on. What was the start of your... In the, the analogy to the gold, which, are you selling the shovels? Sorry.

Dicking for gold. I like to think we're digging for gold. I know it's very popular in Silicon Valley to be super keen on selling shovels. There are times when you just want to dig for gold. I like to think we're digging for gold. Go bigger, go home. So, all right, here's one question. Then I want to actually unpack this.

this pilot that you're getting ready to put up in the next few months. But I remember about 10 years ago when I was knee-deep in data center world, solar flares was like this big thing. And it was like, oh, we got to prepare for solar flow. Because when they happen, it's going to wreak havoc on all of our systems and all of this. And there were some effects for some big ones. But that being a little bit more applicable when you have these assets in space. Have you guys thought about the solar flare thing?

And what does that mean for you? Yeah. So there was a huge solar flare. in mid-last year and then if you guys saw the Northern Lights around April last year even Seattle was crazy I think it was the biggest running

in maybe 20, 20 years at least not a single Starlink satellite went down and they had 5,000 in orbit yeah so I mean it's not as big of a problem as people I think think if there's like a Carrington event in the 1850s that had this big blackout if there's that scale then yes

we're a bit fucked but so is everybody else everything on Earth is too right yeah it carries their the data centers on Earth are going to have trouble with a Carrington event too right yeah so solar flares aren't unless there is another carrying to event a major concern space junk maintenance cooling this kind of matrix challenging cooling is by far the biggest challenge we're solving I mean people think space is cold and so cooling is easy because there's no atmosphere you don't have

conventional conduction so everything needs to be dissipated with infrared like black body radiation so So that means having very large low-cost, low-mass deployable radiators. So basically, two sheets are metal that you're pumping coolant through. It doesn't need to be expensive, but right now they are very expensive. So that's our biggest engineering challenge is making these large, low-cost, low-mass deployable radiators. I would say that's actually like core technology for energy, for any high-energy use-case in space, also for space manufacturing and anything else.

The others are soluble. Space debris is not as big of a problem as people think. So the way, either you fly very low or you fly very high. So we're flying in Vialo for the first two satellites, it's 350 kilometers. It's like a self-cleaning orbit because everything naturally de-orbits within a month because of the low levels of drag in the upper space. Or when the satellite's larger, you can fly higher. So the problem with flying low is you have you need thrusters to maintain your orbit and the problem with flying high as you're in the Van Allen radiation belt. But luckily as the satellite is larger shielding is naturally taken up.

The satellite structure itself is naturally more shielding. So let's, all right, so let's unpack that a little bit. As you get higher, you have to deal with more radiation. And as you get lower, you require thrust and propulsion to get you to maintain the spot there. And what happens if you don't have that? Does you just kind of fall, what fall back to Earth? Yeah, if you were at 350 kilometers, it'll take you about a month before you burn up in the upper-rapness swim. So how do you have enough fuel to maintain that?

Like, how does that work? You use iron thrusters. So we have these two gridded iron iron. lean thrusters. It's basically like a mini particle accelerator that shoots stuff out the back at 20 kilometers a second and that means that you need very little fuel so it keeps us

up there for about five years. Philip, I love that you referred to a mini particle accelerator like a little PEZ dispenser in your pocket. Just a little mini particle accelerator, it's all good. It starts in a Rubik's Cube and it shoots stuff out of the bag at 20 kilometers a second.

Man, this could be the coolest episode I think I've ever been a part of. Definitely. Why don't you even call that? It shoots Krypton out of the back at 20. Comments to the second. Stop it. Crypton or Zonon, one of the two?

Crypton's real, although Kryptonite. Last week, the handover question was from him, but we had Eubotica on and their AI-powered satellites. And we were speaking about these low Earth orbit where they run out of energy and essentially drop from the sky and burn up. And he was speaking about recycling these satellites, is that something that you're looking at, interested, aware of, or do you think that at the moment that's a secondary thing to solve further down the line? The problem is the chips need to be replaced every four years anyway.

So we might look to reuse some of the structure and in the white paper and in the video, that's what you see is this spine that stays up for longer, which has the solar panels and radiators. But the actual compute module, it's unlikely we would bring it back to do anything with because after five years those chips are not going to generate cash for us anyway. so no we haven't really baked in reusability for now. Reentering satellites is expensive and time consuming and annoying, so I'm not sure exactly how they're meant to do it. If they're meant to reenter, then that's

very, very, very, very annoying to do. A little harder coming down than going up, right? Yeah, yeah. What, um, let's, all right, let's unpack this, this, am I, is it, is a pilot, is it a test? What are you calling this? Demonstrator mission, yeah. So

that's going to have about a hundred times more powerful GPU compute than has ever been operated in space before. And the purpose of that is just to prove that our radiation shielding thermal management solutions allow us to operate terrestrial GPUs in space. So, all right, so talk to me about this mission, right? So what would success look like based on, like, when, after you're done with it, what boxes do you want to have checked to move on to the next experiment? We want to have run at least 100 times more powerful GPU compute in space.

that will be some demonstrated workloads. We want to do some kind of like gimmicky things like training the first modeling space. We're really talking about data center grade terrestrial hardware, like the top of the line. I won't say the name because we're keeping it under wraps, but you can almost certainly guess the chip we're flying. So, yeah, we want to do some things like training and modeling space.

The icing on the cake would be if we could run a customer workload, so we're speaking with a few satellites now where they will send us raw imagery. We will then reference workload on that, and we'll downlink in real time the insight from that. So it might be, for example, they send us all this imagery of California and we identify if there's a wildfire somewhere and we just downlink that location data,

which is, you know, less than a kilobyte. So they send us five gigabytes of data. We send down one kilobyte, which is the insight they actually care about. That would be the pricing of it. You and Fenton should go bowling one day. Yeah. We were speaking about this last week as well with Fintin. Yeah, yeah.

Edge compute is the popular one because it's the main, use case initially. The most important question I have for you for the day, has Red Bull approached you for the rights to operating and maintaining these satellites in space? Red Bull. I'm just thinking of the guy in the space suit, right? That, yeah. Bound guy. If they want to pay us to put a Red Bull sticker on the satellite, we have a camera on the outside. We can get a nice shot of the Earth in the bag, I love it. I love it. I think it's a great time, Mr. Fielding the transition to hot buttons. Philip, are you feeling ready?

You want to stretch it out a little bit, see if we can get through these hot buttons? Can we pay it? We're thinking on paper sticker on the satellite. I'd love that. There's a price for everything. Hot buttons, 30 seconds, 5, yes or no, or one word answers. It's the Daniel Kahneman, thinking fast, thinking slow. You're thinking fast.

You've got the clock, Jeremy. Can I see a clock? Clock is coming. Off you go. Question number one. The most underrated technology breakthrough of the past decade. Humanoids. AGI, when?

12 months. What's the best science fiction movie? I don't have a good one. I don't have a good answer for that. Game one, science fiction movie. I haven't. I actually can't be a science fiction. So much pressure.

So much pressure. I know. Start one. Terminator. Just the other one was the other two. What's the most used app on your phone right now? And what's your favourite country that you have lived in? Singapore.

Or US. Hot buns. Hot buns, there you have. It's too slow on the hot buttons. It's all good. We actually told you there would be this or that questions, but you had to come up with the answer yourself. So I'll give you some extra credit.

I started with the wrong one. What's the most underrated technology of the past decade? That's a thinker. Yeah. So maybe people. You might think humanoids are actually overrated right now. I think they're like mega underrated. Any particular reasoning behind?

I may believe that there'll be like 100 billion humanoid robots within 15 years, 10, 15 years. Have you talked to the folks at Figure yet? No, but I've just backed this incredible YC company called Proception with Jay Lee. People should Google him. There's a team that just left Optimus. They were doing the dexterity in the hand. I put a very small angel check in those guys. they're going through

white combinator now they'll do it they'll do a raise in a month in a week of it sounds like someone we should talk to Mark oh my God

you should get this guy on Jeeley is freaking amazing yeah do it anybody who's the the ideas a hundred

did you say 100 billion humanoids within 15 years I just love that that idea is just a lot of people

would think it was bonkers I think it's amazing and maybe yeah 15 years might be ambitious just on

manufacturing side but like that's where we that's where we Yeah, like 100 billion human rights. Okay, make it give it 20 years. Hey, food delivery robots, self-driving cars. I mean, it's all adjacent, right?

We just got to figure out how to do this, do this thing, right? Well, that's literally, the optimist team that was doing that has left to do their own startup. It's called Proception. And that is J. It's unbelievably good. All right, Jay Lee, let's put them on the list. Mark, do you have top of the list? Yeah, exactly.

Mark, do you have any more questions? I've been thrown a lot at Philip from a data center, from kind of what he's doing technology-wise. Any thoughts before we've given in the news? Well, I like the Mark Zuckerberg quote in the white paper. We would build out bigger clusters than we currently can if we could get the energy to do it. And in my non-data-center brain,

listening to you to talk about it feels that we're wasting our time on Earth. We should just get up there and do it. But obviously... I think it's continuing on a lot of course. I do need to emphasize that. Like we need to be building enormous numbers of starships, which they are building factories to do.

That's why I'm British on it. But for the next five years, we're certainly going to need to continue building data centre than that's like five, 10 years at least. I do have one question. And it's a lot of people who are listening to this. Maybe they're like us,

they've all been reading Nexus and they've all been reading too much tech, heism. And the moment that people start talking about grandiose ambition like this. People get scared, people get nervous. You don't need to go into space. You don't need to be doing this. We've got too many problems on Earth. What do you say to that argument that this is maybe frivolous or not necessary or what's the benefit to humanity? I mean, I can see the argument for things like building cities on Mars, although personally

I'm hugely in favour of building cities on Mars. But what we're doing is actually solving the Earth problem. Like we're providing energy for at least a tenth, cheaper than a tenth of cost. And you don't have to consume enormous amounts of fresh order to keep the data center as cool. And you don't have to burn fossil fuels. And it's just in all dimensions, it makes life or not better. So what we're doing in particular is it doesn't fall under that bucket. Certainly, I can see why people might think that about building a city on Mars. Though, yeah, as I say, I'm very much not in that. Awesome. We're on to the news. All right, Mark, I'm going to buck the system and ask the question that you didn't want me to ask because I'm too compelled to it's been on my brain. So this week,

Oxford University, I'm ignoring your bell. Oxford University, Department of Physics, demonstrated distributed quantum computing together, meaning they've successfully linked to quantum processors together to work together, right? Are you at all thinking about what quantum computing could look like in your footprint? I've been approached by a few quantum people who say that space is a good place to do quantum stuff because it's a vacuum and because it's very cold, but it's not something we've put too much time into thinking about. be honest. Maybe we will, but... Plenty on your plate, Philip.

Plenty on your plate. Yes, indeed. Good stuff. Well, stay tuned for more quantum stuff. We've got another quantum show coming up very soon. Carryover question, Mark, let's fire away. So the carryover question, from Fintin, who will organise a drink with you and him, was...

His question was, what technology do you think will be the next to have as big an impact on society and civilization as the mobile phone has. Easily got to be AI, I presume. If AI counts as a technology in the same way that mobile phones do. If not, then humanoids. Let's call it humanites.

I think humans are like a platform in the same way that iPhone is like a platform. I think you'll be able to download apps for your humanoid, for niche applications. Like, for example, if you want your humanoid to do tango lessons with the elderly, like that's probably not a use case that Tesla is going to build for, but some of you will build it and you'll be able to download that and instead of paying 30 bucks an hour per person

you can pay two bucks an hour for your humanoid to teach the elderly tangoists. I'm going to raise my silly question for my audience because I know that you're out there. What's the difference between a humanoid and a robot? Why do you refer to them as humanoid, not robots? Well, a humanoid is a robot in humanoid form so it's for a long time

I think people have presumed that robots will be just optimized for their specific tasks but it seems to be getting clearer and clearer that actually general purpose robots that fit into the way that the world is built are going to be much more useful and that is a robot in human form

so I'm very British on there being lots of those Well here's another tie-in mark to Michi Okaku and Quantum Supremacy so if we have if these humanoids get developed we can just dump them on the surface of the moon on the surface of Mars and we can actually

could beam our consciousness there according to Michiokaku. Theoretically, we don't even need spaceships anymore. We can just... Well, yeah, I mean, we might. I think it's presumptive to say that our consciousness will be the most advanced in 20 years' time. It could be that humanized a month more conscious than us

in 20 years' time, how you define consciousness. In which case, yeah, you just send them out to the far-flung reaches of the... ...the-gather network of brain stops. I love it. How are we uploading our consciousness? Is this faster than speed of light transfer of our consciousness? if the humanoids are out in the far reaches of interstellar space, are we using wormholes?

I don't know the speed of light. Yeah, that's what I mean. So how are we getting, beaming our consciousness into the far reaches of the universe? No, in the far reaches of the galaxy, it would only take about, you know, it takes a few million years to colonize galaxy. Even if you're going at the speed of a head of a push bike,

it takes about 10,000 years to get to the nearest star. So it really would not take that long to colonize galaxy in terms of galaxy timeframes, which is, see a scary thought. That's what the family paradox is. It's where is it, really? If there was intelligent life at any other star, you would only take them a couple of million years to colonize galaxies. So we should

see them everywhere, but we don't. But technically, Philip, if I was, if my consciousness was in superposition with my humanoid robot somewhere, it could be instantaneous, right? Sorry, Mark, I apologize. I was very rudimentary a ponderance.

Quantum super... Oh man, too much fun. Too much fun. much fun. Is it too late to ask Philip why, where is everybody? Where is everybody? I mean, I think it it seems like it's it seems like there isn't anybody.

I don't know. I watched this incredible YouTube video yesterday explaining the probabilities of extraterrestrial life. And the conclusion was basically we are as rare as we see. Oh, no.

And that's a Cregnant pause, we have a lag. He'll come back. He was about to drop the secrets of the universe. I hope that the NSA haven't suddenly got involved. Oh my goodness. We might be in trouble. Okay. We'll have to finish that question for ourselves, Jeremy, in the after show VIP backstage area. That sounds like a plan. Philip, we'll hang out for another second, see if we can get you refreshing. If not, it was a blast having a conversation with you today. And we will continue the dialogue for sure.

Thanks for joining us. Friends and neighbors, we're backstage. We went all over the place today. We talked about a little bit of quantum. We talked about putting data centers in space and lower Earth orbit. We dispeled some myths. Mark, I'm kind of a nerd on everything we talked about today. What landed for you and why?

The sheer brazen ambition, the sheer will, the sheer determination to do bonkers crazy. what might appear to many is science fiction and making it real. His timelines were short. The ideas were incredible. And in researching the show, we need to have more efficient, quicker data centers. We need more GPUs. And there needs to be a solution.

And listening to Philip speak, the solution is space. You can't help but get excited about, like you said, the ambition of what he's trying to accomplish and what he's actually taken tangible steps to accomplish. And I think I would love to have him back on the show after this test coming up in a few months where they're actually going to put the largest amount of EPUs at work in space.

And they've got some fun ways that they're going to do that. So we'll definitely stay in touch there. But exciting stuff. Yeah, I've got, I know you have to jump, but global data center. capacity is growing at 19.52% annually driven by AI by 2027 NVIDIA's AI servers could consume up to 134 terawatts per hour per year over three times electricity used by London. We've got to, we need to be pretty quick. We don't we really? Because if we're going to keep, we've almost signed our own

future away, haven't we, to AI? So we need to have these data centers. And Phillips back. Hello. Well, outstanding. We were just doing our backstage breakdown, but Philip, you left us with a pregnant pause. Let's have you finished that thought that you had. I cannot remember what it was now. We'll have to remind you after the show because we thought the NSA might have taken you out

because you were about to unleash the secrets of the universe. Well, Philip, thank you. I really enjoy. Go ahead. To talk to people. I'm excited about talking about Elijah. A lot of people just look at me like, I'm insane.

This is what we do. this every week for the review if you want to come again if you want to invite your friends like we'll listen to you and have your grandiose ideas we love it amazing i get some people to come let's catch up after this first demonstration and see how it went and check in and would love to talk to some of the folks that you've been you had mentioned on the show but thanks for joining we'll post a bunch of notes and links and make sure everyone can follow the journey man keep up the great work thanks a lot yes actually thank you and should i drop that see you next see you next week jeremy be curious stay Keep thinking on paper.

Bye bye. Thank you. See you in space. All right. Good day. Hey, www. www.companpaper.xyZ. Come check out what we're doing.

Tell us how we're doing. Is this stuff resonating? Are you guys enjoying hearing about space data centers and quantum computing and learning why the hell all of this stuff matters? I do. I know Mark does. We hope you do tell us how we're doing. That's the sign of a successful podcast, Jeremy.

Is it if the host would do it? If nobody's listening, then it, means that it's good, at least working for them. We've got IONQ coming on. We have David Bianchi, Hollywood actor working in film three. We have World ID coming on, which is very exciting. We have Kevin Kelly. Go to Thinking on Paper.X, Y, Z to learn all of those things. When it's signed copy of his book, join our book club. We're going to be announcing a new book very soon. We've got two more chapters of Nexus, the most depressing book you'll ever read on artificial intelligence. We've nearly finished it. And maybe he's going to end with a big twoply.

And you know what? Flowers and roses and AI's our friend. Butterflies. We'll see. Till next time. Bye bye.