Vinay Gupta (Mattereum): Why space matters and how the blockchain helps

“The great error of the 20th century was putting the plutonium on the wrong end of the rocket.” Mattereum’s CEO Vinay Gupta explained why we must go back to space, how blockchain funding can kick-start a new commercial space race, and how blockchain technology can underpin the operation of markets in space.

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Transcript

Welcome to the fourth Internet of Agreements conference! We’ve done a variety of topics that I knew a fair amount about: we did identity, we did global trade, we did a bit of this, a bit of that. Space is a topic on which my knowledge is, frankly, superficial. Does ionising radiation on Mars make your colonists sterile? I have no idea. Orbital trajectories, I know there’s this kind of orbit where every two years you could get a nice, clean shot out there, and if you do it at the wrong time it’s much, much harder — fine. Something about delta-v and things going around very quickly is much harder than getting things out of the gravity well… It’s very big, very complicated and very mysterious, and it’s not at all easy to learn. So although we’ve got a decent amount of expertise about actual hard engineering space stuff in the room, this is largely going to be a conference about the stuff that we do understand, which is money.

At the end of the day, the space business runs on money, and it runs on a lot of money. The size of the investments necessary to do this kind of work are staggering: tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. The Shuttle program cost on the order of $200 billion, and given that it made something like a hundred flights, you have to say, “Well, what was your cost per flight?” The numbers do not come out looking good. On the other hand, you have small, cheap space stuff like CubeSats which could be thrown into orbit for rounding errors of the typical manned space flight budgets. There’s an enormous range of structures from these enormous civilisational-level cost megastructures, down to things which can be done by overly well-endowed hobbyists, they’re sort of yacht-budget projects.

In the middle of that sits this whole blockchain thing, and the relationship between space and blockchain is more complicated than it appears at first, because some of the things which drive the blockchain into the form that it’s in are the same things that are definitive of a lot of the problems that you have dealing with stuff in space. Namely, space is big. You have light speed delay of… light travels at 300,000 kilometres a second, so if you go all the way around the world, you get about a seventh of a second of delay. This makes it impossible to synchronise the computers, because the seventh of a second delay means that you can do on the order of a million transactions in one place in the world before the folks on the other side of the world have got the first transaction, and this creates enormous problems. When you think about things like high-frequency trading, all the world’s commodities are basically shovelled through a set of data centres on the East Coast in America, rather than being traded where the commodities actually are, as a way of managing the light speed delay. The systems that handle that are called high-frequency trading systems, and they literally crank through a million transactions a second.

This global computer synchronisation problem is the same kind of problem that you use to do things like GPS navigation. The light speed delay between you and the GPS satellite is something that can be measured relative to the delay to the other satellites, and the result gives you a triangulation of your position. We’re constantly working in this relativistic reality on global computer systems. That’s why Skype calls have the lag: it’s not just all the Internet switches; it’s the physical speed of light delay.

So the space thing really, when you get right down to it, is not just a set of technocratic challenges; it’s fundamentally a question of destiny. We have a set of technocratic challenges that we have to solve, and the last time that these challenges were solved was when fish learned how to breathe on land. It’s the conquest of a new medium, and it’s an event which, if we get it right, is significant in evolutionary history. The conquest of a new medium, a new phase of matter for life, is a big deal. Going from the seas to land was a huge jump, going from land to the air was a huge jump — we’ve not even really completed that jump; the birds did it, not us. Going from gravity wells and these matter-dense, energy-dense environments to the big cold dark empty place, if we can make that jump, we’re basically set for the rest of time, because the big cold dark empty place appears to be infinite. The species that figures out how to get out there and make a living out there and survive out there and reproduce out there is a species which will never hit another resource limit as far as we can project. That is a truly astonishing possibility, because it’s life without end.

Right now we’re in a position where we’ve expanded our form of life, the human, to be — including our pets, like cows and dogs and cats and so on — something 90% of all the vertebrate biomass on Earth, we’ve more or less replaced everything with a spine with a cow. We’ve completely caned nature, there’s practically none of this stuff left, and if we don’t figure out some way of putting more resources into our civilisation we’re coming back down again, or we’re going to wind up with some kind of catastrophic collapse of our numbers. There’s no way that we can run the show at the current levels. Resource efficiency, if we had the ability to get it right, would solve the problem, but we lack the political organisation necessary to get resource efficiency to work, and anybody who’s ever worked in a large company knows organisational problems are way harder than building new buildings, organisational problems are way harder than building new technology. Organisational problems involve dealing with messy, complicated, unreliable biological components who all seem to be psychotic, at least the ones in management, present company excepted.

In that sort of setting, the idea that we could solve the kind of resource bottleneck that we’re in by just accepting our organisational problems, continuing to burn resources in a profound and unholy way, and then just going to space and bringing back enormous amounts of new crap and then spreading people around out there is exactly the kind of messy, horrible solution that history is made of. There’s never been a culture that sat down and basically figured it all out and solved all its problems. You could point to some of the Buddhist kingdoms, there are various mythological civilisations that may have gotten closer to those kind of goals, but fundamentally the way that we’ve always solved our problems is expansion, and usually, given that the planet has gotten pretty crowded recently, this has meant killing people and taking their stuff. The infrastructure that we’re standing on top of in London, all this Victorian pipe and wire stuff that they did, all of that was financed by the British Empire, which succeeded in conquering something like 150 countries, something like that, and that’s where they got the plumbing for. The same thing with the Roman Empire. The last time anybody concentrated enough wealth to have interior plumbing was the Romans, and they were pretty good at this empire thing as well.

The standard of living that we have has only historically existed because of resource concentration from imperialism. If you don’t have empires, you can’t concentrate enough resources to do this kind of infrastructure megaproject stuff. What is our alternative? Well, out there there are asteroids which are made mostly of things like platinum. That would come in quite handy, you could do a lot of interesting things with that. There’s enormous amounts of energy: if you look at the numbers for putting solar panels in space, they’re really remarkable, particularly if you don’t bring the energy back down here with an enormous microwave death ray. It’s actually not that hard to imagine that we could solve the resource problems we have with more resources. Some of those problems are messy, biological problems, like the food problem is unlikely to be solved by agriculture in space. It may well be solved by agriculture down here, particularly agriculture in big greenhouses and tanks.

So the perspective shift from we’re in this completely constrained environment and we’ve got no way out of it, to actually we just need to figure out how to basically get over the next sea and there’s an enormous new resource pool to be had, that’s a very disruptive narrative. I mean, space kind of stopped being a human cultural focus in the 1970s when the governments stopped pushing it, and it basically lay in the dirt with not really that much happening right the way through until the sort of West Coast billionaires picked up the thread and started to push the entire process forwards again. There was a long space winter which makes the AI winter look like a rounding error, there was an enormous gap in ambition there, and we’re just beginning to see the early kindling of another round of ambition in space, this time largely financed by private enterprise.

But really, where did we lose the narrative? When did it become a question of “Well, we’re all basically stuck here on this rock, and we’re either going to starve, become super resource efficient, or kill each other.”? The notion that there is a fourth option, which is just go out there and take more stuff, seems to have kind of slipped out of the narrative. I have gotten into enormous fights with people, even people that I thought were smart, over the legitimacy of going into space and taking dead rocks and melting them down and bringing the useful bits back here. The notion that people could, should live out there, they’re like “It’s just another round of colonialism!” but there are no humans there to colonise, it’s literally empty. As far as we know, there’s no life, it’s literally empty. Nothing is being harmed, it’s just rock — we could do this. Getting over those psychological, and to some degree psychographic hurdles, is a huge part of the reason that I thought it was worth doing this conference. The blockchain people are all basically nuts, the space people are all basically nuts, the space people have the ability to make changes to the real, hard economy in a very, very concrete way, and the blockchain people, in theory at least, have the ability to finance those changes. If you were going to go looking for a five-billion-dollar slab to go and do a bunch of really fundamental space research at this point, is it going to be easier to get that money out of the blockchain community or out of the American government?

This brings me to the second point, which is space has been intimately confused and tied up with the question of nationalism. Historically, the Space Race was a race, and it was a race between basically the socialists and the capitalists, to figure out who could get stuff up there first. Because we wound up on that competitive track where being first really mattered, we wound up using a bunch of absolutely terrible technology to get the job done. They basically just took nuclear missiles, took the payload off, strapped some monkeys on top and then fired them, and it was never intended to a sustainable approach. There was work on space planes which would have taken off from runways going back into the 1950s, which would have given you the kind of reusable access to space that would have been necessary to build an industry up there. All of that work got sidelined when we went on the chimps on a bomb kind of approach to doing this thing.

Chimps on a bomb was never anything more than a stunt, there was no way that you could imagine building an industrial civilisation in space with those kind of launch mechanisms. You needed something that was a fundamentally different class of work, which is very much the direction that the modern space industry is going in. All the SpaceX stuff about reusable rockets… Do you know the parallel that Musk talks about? Basically, air travel would be expensive, if you threw away the plane after every trip. That’s why space travel has historically been so expensive: you threw away the plane after every trip. If you use the plane over and over and over again, the prices begin to come down. If you’ve got a ton of infrastructure up there, the prices begin to come down. If you’ve got enormous demand, the prices begin to come down. And if the prices come down low enough, you get to a tipping point, and suddenly you get consumers in space, vacationers in space, weddings in space. I keep suggesting that the first thing that would be really economically viable to do up there that involved a lot of humans would be Paris Fashion Week. You basically take three models up there, who are all cross-trained to do things like run the camera equipment, and you literally just do the runway fashion stuff, Couture Fashion in space. If the dress costs two million dollars, getting it up into orbit only adds another 20% to its cost. How hard can it be?

This stuff kind of sounds like “Really?!” but it’s exactly those kind of stunts that are often necessary to get people from “This is not our department, there’s nothing really going on out there,” to actually “This is the thing that we do,” and that mindset of “This is a thing that we do,” is what I think the kind of 2020 to 2030 period is going to fundamentally be about. To a very substantial degree, the Internet is basically finished, at this point we are knob-twiddling. We have more or less finished the business-to-consumer Internet, the business-to-business Internet needs a ton of work but everybody knows roughly what to do… I’m a little bored with the Internet. I’ve been doing this my entire life, I’m pretty good at it, we’ve got a ton of capability, and in the very long evolutionary cycle, does it matter at all? You could argue that it’s the first time we’ve gotten a species with global networks and all the rest of this kind of stuff, but it’s not nearly as exciting as going to Mars and building colonies, which is why all of the San Francisco billionaires eventually get on the space track. Because when you can do anything you like on Earth but you can’t get what you want in space, this becomes the kind of challenge that gets these people out of bed in the morning. I don’t have exactly that kind of curiosity, my curiosity is a bit like “This is dumb, someone should do something about that,” but that’s enough to get us started.

Once we get substantial stuff in space,, the question becomes how do we organise it. We could take the nation state paradigm, and we could basically have Russian assets and American assets and Japanese assets. We could take the intergovernmental paradigm, and you’ve got things like the International Space Station which has all kinds of bits of it run by different governments. You could take a postnational perspective, where you basically have commercial infrastructure and you basically zone the stuff like ships. Or, you could take some kind of globalist perspective, you could put the corporations, the governments and even individuals, cultural movements, on much the same basis. Given how much of the challenges here are about things like new classes of property rights, the idea that you could basically buy a set of genuinely cross-structural global conventions, figure out what those new property rights are and then use things like blockchain technology to implement them, this stuff becomes genuinely exciting.

If we’re going to build something like a universal registry of who owns what in space and what orbit it’s in, if you’re going to figure out where the resources are so that in an emergency you could go and commandeer somebody else’s spare fuel, if you’re going to build those kind of maps and you were going to do it with any given technology today, odds are you’re going to wind up with something that looks more or less blockchain-like. Probably you’re going to have local synchronisation between the computers which are actually close to each other in space, and then global synchronisation on Earth five or six light minutes away, but those sort of structures… I don’t see how you would build that stuff if you were going to try and organise everything with datacentres that run back on Earth. You need the ability to synchronise state between the things which are close to each other, and the ability to synchronise state with the stuff which is back home as well.

I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to wind up with things which are descendants of blockchains being used to organise the assets of the human race in space, because otherwise how are we going to figure out where everything is? And this becomes quite critical. You could imagine that in a Mars-based environment you’re going to have to be able to account for every gram of matter and every component, because if you wind up with some kind of crisis and it’s all going to come down to whether or not you could find the right spanner, you’re going to have to have a computer to know where the spanners are. Continuous tracking of every material asset is almost certainly a necessity for humans to live in safety-critical, resource-sparse environments, and if you’re going to run these things in some kind of market economy rather than in a military context like you would on a submarine, then it comes down to transparency inside of the market economy rather than command & control for where everything is. If everybody is going to organise their affairs in more or less the way that they want to, you’re going to have to use a computer to keep track of the global state and figure out what the interactions between these systems are. Again, this sounds really, really sort of blockchain-flavoured.

The hardest part of all of this is disaggregating the story of space that we’ve had so far from the technology of space, from the finance of space. So far space has largely been a nationalist project, it’s been about nations demonstrating their might. There has never been a space effort, there’s been plenty of space theory but there’s never been a space effort that was grounded in this notion that human beings have a destiny, if you want to use that word, to go into space. I often talk about the 20th century as having been defined by a single enormous error, which is that we put the plutonium in the wrong end of the rockets. If you use it for motors, if you use it for things like Project Orion, a gigantic, multi-hundred-tonne spaceships, you could get a spaceship of that magnitude into orbit with something like 25-kiloton nuclear explosions. Tiny, tiny tiny little bombs, about the tenth of the size of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, detonated under a several-hundred-tonne cast iron plate with a big spring on top. It sounds nuts, but the numbers work, nobody denies the numbers work, and that was the technology that would have allowed us to throw tens of thousands of tonnes of stuff into orbit, for less emission of radiation into the environment than the nuclear testing programme has emitted.

And at the end of the day, who cares about the nuclear testing programmes? That was a total waste of our radioactive materials. We could have thrown literally ships, actual ships, things the size of cruise liners could have gone up, and all the technology is right there. Instead, because we didn’t expand we went back into the territorial imperative, and all of our energy went into building nuclear missiles, which are basically just ways of arguing about the resources that we have on the ground, in a way that is so laden with side effects that it destroys most of the stuff that you were planning on fighting about. That’s our error, this is basically where human civilisation crashed. That’s the divide by zero error that gave us this kind of rapidly complexifying hell on earth scenario, rather than the kind of Raygun Gothic spaceship utopianism. It’s simply that we didn’t build Project Orion, and we used the nuclear weapons to try and argue over the resources we had, rather than using the same technology, the same plutonium, in the rockets which would have gone up.

Now, I am not suggesting that we go back to building Project Orion and building nuclear rockets. For one thing, that’s going to require heavy involvement of governments, and at this point who would you really trust to run a project like that? It’s not at all clear that any of the world’s governments that have the scale to do something like that are people that you really would want to be doing that kind of re-expansion of nuclear engineering, we’d quite like the nuclear engineering phase to be quietly forgotten, to let everything settle down. However, it does mean that unless you’re going to trust the American billionaire space entrepreneurs with licenses to build their own nuclear bombs… Quick show of hands? Didn’t think so. Okay, one. [laughter] I’m probably 50–50 on that. Unless you’re going to do that, it means we have to use conventional rockets to get into space, until somebody figures out balloons or space elevators or whatever the appropriate technology is. But until that happens, it means rocket ships and it means a lot of them and it means a lot of money, and it means doing things the hard, slow and relatively safe way, rather than doing it the fun way with the nuclear bombs, frankly, as god intended.

In that jam, where do you get the money to build a civilian space industry that has to solve a problem which was so big that back in the day it required the nation state? The answer is you get it from global cooperation. In reality, the technocratic elite of the world… I don’t mean by this only the billionaires, I mean anybody that’s making a comfortable living in the mid-21st century. All of your tech nerds, all of your biotech people, all of your quants who are working in Wall Street or wherever it is, that technocratic elite have a shared set of interests which are completely different to the interests of the governments, and they’re completely different to the interests of the vast mass of humanity. The technocratic elite are the people with the education and the assets, and they’ve got enough breathing room that they are not worried about making rent tomorrow morning, they can have agendas which go beyond basic survival. So while the mass of humanity are stuck hard against the basic survival agenda, the technocratic elite have enough freedom to be able to make decisions about things that do not directly affect them. It is we, it really is we — this is that room.

That global technocratic elite, however you want to think about those people, whether you think about it as a class, whether you think about it as a movement, whether you think of them as being the products of the enlightenment and that they’re all in a sense connected fundamentally to what happened around things like the discovery of science… However you think about that class, they’re not trapped inside of government stuck to the nationalist agenda, they’re not working hand-to-mouth to try and hold their days together and move forward one step at a time. They’re in a position where they have, we, have a little freedom, we have the ability to choose what we’re going to put our time and energy into, we have discretionary income which is not tied to nationalist agendas and which is not tied to our immediate survival, and there are a lot of us, hundreds of millions of us. So you take hundreds of millions of people with disposable income, and you begin to pool that disposable income into gigantic machines which storm space. You need the ability to organise investment from hundreds of millions of people, you need the ability to demonstrate the money is well-spent, you need the ability to build a global movement with accountability and transparency that says, “Look, the nation states are responsible for running the nations. The individuals who are poor are responsible for the survival of them and their kids. But we’ve got the money, we’ve got the freedom and we’ve got the choice, and the choice that we’re making is that we’re going to expand into the universe, and solve the problems of human scarcity by going out and getting more resources. Probably the technologies that we discover on the side of doing that will solve a whole bunch of the terrestrial problems, even before you can rip asteroids to pieces and bring the good bits back here.” Because the microprocessor and many other things came out of the original Space Race; if you think about colonising Mars, imagine the things that we’ll find out on the way.

So my basic proposal is this: we figured out that enough people with enough hubris can operate what amounts to a central bank of the Internet, in fact many central banks of the Internet. The blockchange folks have shown that if you’ve got the right kind of tooling, then civil society using the Internet is capable of solving problems that were beyond the reach of any nation state. Space is clearly a problem which has proven to be beyond the reach of any nation state in a coherent way, so what if we took all this expertise that we’ve got at solving global problems that were resistant to the nation state, using the Internet and a whole bunch of mass collaboration, and we took that approach and we applied that will to space? The blockchain people desperately need something to do. [laughter] The ones that got in early and made an enormous amount of money are basically wandering around, wondering what to do with their lives, and they’re making a dreadful mess because they’re not good at being rich. But many of them are pretty good engineers, and all of these space guys coming out of Silicon Valley could sure use a lot more money and a lot more talent.

I think the folks that kind of graduate from the blockchain university of basically whack the future on the head and stick it in your cooking pot probably ought to be looking at bigger challenges, and if we frame this as the kind of early flexing of the Internet’s muscles as the venue in which global civil society happened… First you make a bank, and then you pull the money out of the bank that you made and you use it to build rocket ships and the rocket ships build an industry, the industry generates a lot of wealth, and then that comes back down the pipe and it turns into more rocket ships, and you start the feedback loop that builds the economic engines that build the capacity to expand into the void… At that point we’ve basically won at life, we’ve solved humanity’s most demanding problem, which is “Why don’t I have the things that I want?”

That’s doable right here, this is the first blockchain in space conference in the world, as far as we know, this is the beginning of the narrative, and I want to set the narrative off at the right tone, which is our job is to conquer the void, we’ve got all the tools that we need, we’ve got the necessary political structures within arm’s reach. We just pull that stuff into reality, we build the necessary structures, we raise the necessary money, we figure out how to fund the engineers who are actually doing the work, and we break out of the deadlock that has trapped us all on the planet since the nation state lost its will to go. We are here to go and we’re going to do it. Thank you. [applause]