🌎 Fueling humanity
🌎 Fueling humanity
The energy of the future will be mined from the sky.
Hey Freethinkers,
The final chapter of the Industrial Revolution will likely center on the Sun. Solar energy is becoming cheaper every year. Today’s prices not only compete with fossil fuels but are hitting levels that many experts didn’t expect to see for decades.
By 2042, 95% of humanity’s energy usage may be downstream from solar. That’s a prediction from Casey Handmer, founder of Terraform Industries, a startup using sunlight and air to produce synthetic, carbon-neutral natural gas.
In our debut episode of The Freethink Interview, we sit down with Handmer to explore the future of solar power and how carbon-neutral synthetic gas could be the breakthrough we need to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes of climate change.
Onward,
Stephen
The solar revolution turning sunlight into synthetic fuel
with Casey Handmer // @cjhandmer on X
At some point, if electricity is cheap enough, it will cost less to make gas than to dig it out of the ground. That’s the bet made by Casey Handmer and Terraform Industries. Handmer is on a quest to use cheap solar energy to pull CO2 out of the air to make fuel, rather than putting more carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Explore the future of solar power in our very first episode of The Freethink Interview.
10 space stations of the future
The International Space Station is the biggest and oldest space station ever built. It’s already ten years past its planned retirement date, though, and in 2031, it will be brought down into the Pacific Ocean. Here’s what comes next.
IN THE KNOW
Making the case for "founder mode”
by @paulg on X
Paul Graham, a co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, recently published a blog post synthesizing insights from a talk that Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of AirBnB, gave at a YC event during the last week of August. The post outlines the tension between the two modes of running a company: founder mode and manager mode. Think of manager mode as representing those well-known principles taught in business schools. Conversely, founder mode embodies those less understood, potentially more effective, principles that founders discover while running their companies.
Graham's post kicked off a flurry of commentary on X. At Freethink, we've covered startups, their founders, and the challenges they face in our series Challengers. Check out the videos below to hear from founders directly about the challenges of building a successful startup.
MORE ON THIS STORY
“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs
When you feed tons of human-created data to an AI, it learns how to write, speak, draw pictures, and code. When you feed AI-generated data to an AI, it gets… weird.
Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think and a writer at Freethink.