 something fascinating, right? Let me just pull up the story. Here's something fascinating that you probably know, I don't know, to me it was new. Space travel is something I think we should be very excited about, supportive of, and excited about in terms of the future. And maybe even think about, well, how do I benefit from this? Financial. So between 1970 and 2000, while the government dominated space travel, the cost of launch a kilogram into space, a kilogram into space was fairly steady from 1972,000. Price did not go down. It was fairly steady. And it averaged about $18,500 per kilo. I don't know how much you weigh, but you can take your body weight and extrapolate what $18,500 is and then figure out how much it would cost to launch you into space. $18,500. The space shuttle that used to take stuff up and down, right? It had a payload of 27,500 kilograms. That cost $1.5 billion. So per kilogram, the shuttle, this great achievements of NASA cost $54,500 per kilogram. So it was actually super expensive, right? Primarily because you had to take humans up and all of that. But to launch satellites, to launch anything into space required on average $18,500 per kilo. And it was fairly static over 40 or 30 years. One of the most important developments in this area, certainly the most important development, or maybe one of the most important developments technologically for the future of mankind, is the fact that basically in the United States, space travel has been privatized. And shockingly, much of this came during the Obama administration. In 2010, Obama was trying to cut NASA's budget. He was trying to cut spending partially pushed into that by ultimately by Republicans in the House. Cutting spending because he wanted to re-prioritize the spending. And Obama basically went to NASA and he was facing two alternatives. One is to increase spending and let NASA dominate space into the future. The other one was to outsource space travel to the private enterprise, where there was Boeing with SpaceX, now Blue Origin from Jeff Bezos. There's also a company called Orbital ATK, which has been purchased by Northrop Grumman. There's United Launch Alliance. So there are a few private enterprises. Boeing, maybe Boeing owns Northrop Grumman. I don't know. But anyway, all these companies have private space programs. And the Trump administration decided that it was not going to give NASA the money. Indeed, it cut NASA's budget dramatically. It was hugely criticized at the time. And it might turn out to be the best thing the Trump administration did for humanity. Because what it did was unleash the private enterprise on space and on sending things out into orbit and ultimately to the moon and to Mars. As I said, there are probably five different companies competing right now to put things into orbit. Satellites, communication satellites, defense satellites, all kinds of stuff like that. Including for foreign countries, not everything is just American. These are going to be international. They will do this for anybody, anywhere. I don't know if anybody, but they will do it for a lot of different people. And you've got all these companies competing. And of course, we know what competition does. We know what the private sector can do. We know what competition does. I wish NASA, instead of being all government-owned in the 1960s, imagine if Kennedy's challenge had not been for the government to develop a program to send man to the moon, but it being the government to maybe even promote the growth in the private sector to send man to the moon. Now, that still would have been non-ideal because the government would have been still involved. But imagine, starting in the 1960s, you would have had six, seven, eight, nine, ten companies competing. You know, Robert Hanline had this great short story where the way you get them incentivized is you give the first company that gets the moon rights over the moon. Mining rights, advertising rights. So I think Coca-Cola gets there and they put a Coca-Cola sign on the moon. I mean, that's a permanent billboard that everybody on the planet can see. And it's pretty spectacular. Anyway, it's the idea of privatization, the idea of competing and using private property rights in order to do it is amazing, right? Imagine if the United States government guaranteed that whoever private companies could get an asteroid to mine it would get all those mining rights and that the government wouldn't just take it. If there was some law in place that said mining, you know, a property rights bill that applied to mining asteroids, then you might actually get private companies starting to really consider it because asteroids are incredibly rich, incredibly rich in minerals. Yeah, the short story by Robert Hanline is called The Man Who Sold the Moon. It's a fabulous story. It was written in the 1950s, I think, before Apollo. And it's just a fun short story that's just fabulous as a lot of Robert Hanline's work is. Anyway, since the 2000, with the growth in SpaceX and over the last decade with the growth in private space travel, the cost to take a kilogram up into space has dropped from an average $18,500, $54,500 for the space shuttle to $2,200 per kilogram, $2,200 per kilogram. So what? Is that 80% or something? It's dropped. Elon Musk's goal with his new rockets, one of those rockets was tested the other day, I think in California. And, you know, was it 100% successful, but probably 80% successful in its test? With these new generation of rockets, Musk's goal is to lower the cost that puts stuff into space into to ultimately $10 a kilogram, $10 a kilogram, down from $18,500 on average. Now imagine what that could do a to our ability to put a base on Mars, on the moon, ultimately to get to Mars, but also just in lower Earth orbit, what we could put in lower Earth orbit. One of the plans that are already being implemented is to put tens of thousands of satellites into lower Earth orbit that will provide internet telecommunication coverage across the entire planet from everywhere on the planet to everywhere on the planet, 24 seven with a high bandwidth. The technology is getting there. The satellites are getting cheap enough and the delivery of the satellites to low Earth orbit is getting cheap enough that we can do that. So we have the capacity or we're going to have the capacity, whether it's bees, whether it's Jeff Bezos in Blue Origin or United Launch or ATK or whoever, or SpaceX, to put satellites into space at a cost of 10 bucks per kilogram, which is just basically unbelievable in terms of the reduction of costs. And then what you have is this telecommunication at basically a cost of zero across the entire planet. Everybody is connected. Now I know some of you fear that and are worried about that. Oh my God, the whole world is going to be connected. People in other countries will be connected to us. I know some people fear that, object to that, worry about that. But as you know, I'm a huge fan of globalization. I believe in the if you have division of labor specialization across eight billion people, then the wealth, our wealth, all of our wealth is going to grow dramatically. If you have eight billion people connected, the ability to solve problems grows dramatically. I mean, we saw this with it with the vaccine. Now I know some of your anti vaccines or whatever, but it's truly astounding. They took a what Pfizer did again, a global effort, the startup company that actually developed the vaccine and the delivery mechanism is a German company. Manufacturing is going to be in Europe and the United States and potentially in Asia. You've got other vaccine makers all over the world working on this sharing information, collaborating, joint ventures. I mean, globalization at its best is what you're seeing right now in terms of what is going on in the world. And it is fabulous. And it is truly amazing. It is truly amazing. And if if the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccines actually are successful, then it's going to be it's truly is going to revolutionize vaccines. It but it might revolutionize other ways in which we deal with disease. Because if we can target disease through these mRNA mechanisms, it's a relatively safe way to do it. It's a very targeted way of doing it with very little possibility of damage of bad, really bad side effects. And it truly could revolutionize a lot of what we do in medicine. So this is this this Moderna Pfizer, this is not trivial. You know, vaccines used to take years and years and years decades to develop. This took nine months, which is truly astounding. And it gives us a sense of what where the science is in terms of our understanding of biology. So not only we privatize space, we can launch stuff into space, we can make it super cheap, we can network the entire world can be on one network can be communicated. Imagine what happens to ideas. Imagine what happens to good ideas like ours, when everybody in the world has access to the to these. Now, suddenly, these ideas only appeal to certain fraction, but that fraction of a bigger and bigger number is fantastic. The numbers astounding. If a network to imagine all the minds working on problems, imagine the breakthrough in education. If now poor kids all over the world don't have to go to a local school where they might not get a great education, they can use YouTube just like you and me. And they have access to it at a cost of zero. They can take courses on Coursera or whatever. English becomes a universal language at that point. And it changes the world in profound ways. Because ideas now become universal, truly universal. They spread throughout the planet. The best people everywhere in the world can work on changing the world for the better, not just a few localized in certain communities, certain places who have the resources. I think what we're seeing in communication is truly stunning and amazing. And it's new. It's new. The world has never seen this. The scope of knowledge, the fact that knowledge is now shared and potentially shared, not shared, but potentially shared across hundreds of millions of people, billions of people across the planet, knowledge, knowledge of science, knowledge of engineering, and knowledge of philosophy is groundbreaking. It will lead hastily to good things. So when I think about that, when I think about the scale, when I think about the amount of knowledge that is available today, when I think about the delivery mechanism and how cheap it is and how easy it is, when I think about the potential for disruption in the field of education on a global scale, I get super optimistic. Somebody says, Oh, I'm talking about Skynet. Yeah, but think about a Skynet that doesn't come alive, a Skynet that has no desire for power. But a Skynet that is used for people to communicate, a Skynet that is used for people to learn to educate themselves, to access, to access the good, to access knowledge and information. I mean, again, think about, I've talked about this in past shows, all the knowledge in the Roman Empire was in a few centers. And when those centers collapsed, knowledge disappeared. Yes, it was preserved in Constantinople a little bit and in Baghdad and ultimately in more Spain. And it came back into the West, but it took 1000 years. Think about the fact that now knowledge is spread across 8 billion people. It's truly, I think, hard for us to imagine. And when we look back, these are revolutions in the making. And part of it is SpaceX reducing the cost of satellites, reducing the cost of putting loads into into orbit and making this ubiquitous. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life, and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show we've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I think at least 100 of you actually like the show. 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