Technology Will Save Us All!

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Somehow, in all of my writing career, I never did any ghostwriting—for better or worse, my name wound up attached to everything I published. Maybe I should have taken a course with today’s advertiser, the Premium Ghostwriting Academy, which aims to teach writers such as me (and maybe you!) how to get gigs writing for people who can’t. These guys seem serious, because for each of you who clicks their ad, I get a whopping $2.40! Don’t ghost these folks!

Here at Trying! HQ, we tend not to be optimists. Whether we’re “advocating” for the “murder” of oligarchs, snarking on AI, or just musing on the possibility that the wonderful sense of community we’ve found in Brooklyn will one day vanish in an orgy of violence, we don’t look at the future with excitement—except when there’s a new season of our favorite show scheduled. In the near term, shit looks pretty bad, even for my paid subscribers.

But! There are a couple of technological developments coming along that could, if they accomplish even 75% of what their boosters claim, really alter not only how we live our day-to-day lives but the economic forces that dominate them. In other words, here’s what gives me—your Sisyphean adjunct, the dude who brings the inevitable prospect of godless death into every conversation, Mr. Debbie Q. Downer—a tiny bit of hope to contemplate.

1. A Really Big Solar Plant—in Space

Once you get outside Earth’s atmosphere, things change. It gets cold. There’s no oxygen. Uber Eats is unreachable. And the sun’s rays are suddenly, against the bleak black background of the universe, extraordinarily clear and powerful. This is where you’d want to put solar panels, if only you could find a way to send the electricity back to the planet’s surface.

The thing is, you can. In June 2023, researchers at Caltech demonstrated a system that can absorb energy from the sun in space, then “beam” it back to Earth via microwaves. I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the science, except to say it makes sense in a sci-fi way: You’re converting one form of highly charged but loosely directed particles into another, more tightly directed stream, and aiming them at a receiver that can then convert them to usable electricity.

Naturally, it’s not Caltech that’s getting set to make this a reality but China, which is apparently making plans to launch a space-based solar plant 36,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. "The energy collected in one year,” says lead scientist Long Lehao, “would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth." Um, that’s a lot of energy? Not to be outdone, LiveScience reports, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, the European Space Agency, and Japan are all working on similar projects.

Look, I love this shit. I love the idea of solar power, and especially the idea of cheap, plentiful, almost limitless solar power. The sooner we get away from the idiocy of “burn thing, make light,” the better for all of us down here on Earth. Miniaturized nuclear plants are neat, and fusion power may someday work out, but the concept here is so cool: Catch a bunch of sun rays up there, and chuck them down here to power everything. Man, I hope it works.

Find out what else I’m excited about after the highly clickable ad…

2. Batteries That Work Real Good

If you’ve seen me in person in the last nine months, you can start groaning, because I talk rant about solid-state batteries all the time. Here’s the deal: The lithium-ion batteries you know so well, because they’re in everything we use and because they occasionally catch fire, are made up of cells encased (sauced? smothered? drowned?) in a gel-like, liquid-esque substance which makes them easier and cheaper to manufacture. But we can also make batteries whose cells are not in a gel but rather in a “solid state,” which gives them great advantages: They hold more juice, they charge faster, they’re lighter, and they don’t spontaneously burst into flames in the cargo hold of an airplane or in your pizza-delivery guy’s moped.

They’re also on the way to a car near you. Honda and Toyota are in a bit of an arms race to debut the first solid-state battery EV (or hybrid?), with the latter claiming already to have a vehicle with a 745-mile range whose battery charges in 10–15 minutes. That’s insane. That’s twice the range of a top-end Tesla—and a damn effective argument against any EV naysayer who worries they’ll somehow run out of battery power and get stuck on a snowy mountain pass amid a horde of zombies. And these things aren’t only destined for cars: Solid-state batteries would get you an iPhone that needs a charge once every few days, rather than every 12 hours. Solid-state batteries could-should-will be in everything,

And we might see solid-state batteries in cars relatively soon: Honda and Toyota say they might have the first vehicles out in 2027, and Stellantis wants to demo a fleet in 2026. By 2030, if the manufacturers have mastered the affordable production of such batteries, and if the human race hasn’t already driven itself to extinction, they might be a truly viable product, the kind of thing that would alter how we get around, and how we use that unlimited solar power, in ways we can’t yet predict. The energy is out there, we have the hypothetical means to harness it, and now we just need to, like, you know, get over ourselves and do it.

Is Any of This Real?

Oh man, I hope so. The craving for energy drives so much misery on this planet: Companies do anything they can to create it, to harvest it. Nations do whatever they can to protect their share. We regular people need it for our homes, our devices, our lives. Its seeming abundance masks its scarcity. Except that it’s not scarce: Solar power, wind power, geothermal power, even nuclear power offer us more energy, more electricity, without—or with less of—the dangerous environmental, economic, and political by-products.

I read about this stuff all the time. I have Google Alerts set up, which tend to bring me variations on the same news over and over again. The science seems clear, the big interests are investing, and yet I can’t figure out if this is serious or just another game. Maybe solid-state batteries are a cold-fusion-esque fantasy. Maybe the solar plant will never make it to space. Maybe we’re stuck with oil and coal, the moldy remains of triceratops, for the rest of our benighted lives.

Or maybe it will, for once, all work out. We’re due for a bit of luck, aren’t we? (Please?) Maybe a decade from now we’ll be beaming solar power via microwaves to our home charging stations, where we’ll live off stored juice since we won’t need to power up our cars more than once a month. Maybe that will have knock-on effects, sapping political power from the fossil-fuel companies and waking certain people to the idea that we can have a better, cleaner world without the bloodthirsty competition for limited resources. Maybe there is a future out there we can all look forward to!

But don’t worry: Even if, a decade or two hence, the Earth is transformed into a ecologically electrified paradise, we’re all still going to die, life will remain meaningless, and nothing will await us on the other side. (I just don’t want you all to think I’ve gone soft.) 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Future Southeast Asia

Okay, this one’s for real nerds: Have you ever wanted a newsletter that would give you all the details on transportation and infrastructure projects across Southeast Asia? Wait, you have? Seriously, I thought I was the only one. Well, I guess I can’t be, because Future Southeast Asia exists. Whether you’re tracking the metro lines in Ho Chi Minh City or wondering how the new Penang airport will connect to Georgetown, Future is on it.

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