By James Pethokoukis, Ramez Naam, and Christie Iacomini

In the 20th century, economic growth powered by technological progress and higher innovation-driven productivity delivered longer, healthier lives with higher living standards. And that kind of progress is just as valuable going forward as it has been in the past. Looking ahead to the year 2050, venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab has put together a “Breakthrough Science Roadmap” of the advances to come. In a recent episode of “Political Economy” I was joined by Ramez Naam and Christie Iacomini from Prime Movers Lab to discuss what continued progress could bring us by 2050.

Ramez is a computer
scientist and Chief Futurist at Prime Movers Lab, while Christie is
an aerospace engineer and Vice President of Engineering.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: Your venture capital firm is focusing on hardware whereas a lot of VC firms invest heavily in software startups. What is the ethos that gives rise to your emphasis on tech that deals with atoms rather than just bits?

Naam: Our motto at Prime Movers
Lab as a venture firm is that we invest in breakthrough science to improve the
lives of billions of people, so we’re talking about fundamental issues of
humanity: clean energy, clean water, growing enough food, providing better
transportation options — and things that are very aspirational: human
augmentation, slowing down the aging process, helping people that are paralyzed
talk and communicate again, venturing out into space. So we’re really, in a
sense, trying to create the Star Trek future. And, from a capitalist return
standpoint, we think that also makes a lot of sense. We think the world’s
greatest problems or humanity’s greatest aspirations are also incredible
investment opportunities if we do it right.

Unlike
most venture funds that are strictly business people, we have a team that
Christie leads full of scientists and engineers. So we have the chops to
actually assess technology and science at a deep level, as well as assess the
founders, the business plan, the market, and so on. And we think we can deploy
capital very effectively, not just in social media, not just in the next app to
find a pet sitter (no offense to anybody that was looking for a pet sitter),
but in things that we think address much more fundamental global challenges and
human aspirations.

Christie, you worked at Blue Origin. Do people just not
know that there’s a lot happening in space?

Iacomini: I think this is one of the
most exciting times in space, right now. The space economy is booming. There
are so many wonderful opportunities to be building out space infrastructure,
not just for the sake of the space geeks and the fellow Trekkies. It’s helping
with national security. It’s helping monitor climate change. It’s building out
a path to resources on the Moon and asteroids. It’s incredibly exciting. And
there’s so much activity going on right now.

I think our job is to make people
see all these opportunities. And it’s our job to identify the ones that really
have promise, where the science has been retired and there’s an opportunity.
It’s a risk, and that’s why we’re excited about helping and providing funding
to these entrepreneurs that can make that really fantastical future happen. And
we intend to accelerate it.

There has been a lot of advance in small, modular reactors
and nuclear fusion. Where might that technology be going?

Naam: That’s an area we’re also
interested in, but current fusion and fission reactors have been getting more
expensive to build instead of cheaper, while solar and wind and batteries have
been getting cheaper. So we need a reset of some sort. So small, modular
fission reactors that you can make in factories and mass manufacture have a
chance to have those learning curves, that ability to get cheaper as you make
more of them. Fusion is through a whole other level. So why is either fission
or fusion important? Because it can be challenging with just renewables to get
to 100 percent clean energy. Maybe you can get to 50, 60, 70 percent, but
you’ve got long periods in winter when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t
shining and it’s just tough, and you’ve got places that are very geographically
compact and don’t have the land area to deploy a lot of solar and wind.

So
some sort of clean, firm, base-load power that you can decide when to produce
and when not, that’s very compact, would be very useful. Fusion is also unique
versus fission in that fusion reactors don’t have any runaway scenarios because
you have to keep putting energy back in to keep pulsing the reaction in most of
these designs in order to have it keep going. So there’s no chain reaction that
can have a runaway event. It’s the thing that captivates us on television and
makes us very afraid of this. So fusion has a chance to reset the conversation
with the public and maybe allay some of these fears and start a whole new
conversation that allows us to actually deploy some of this clean energy.

I don’t naturally think of energy as a sector for
startups. What do these early-stage companies bring to the table?

Naam: Startups, unlike big
government organizations or big corporations, have this way of tapping into
technology that’s getting exponentially cheaper over time. And because the
startup mentality is to fail fast, try something, see if it works, move
forward, experiment, that has a fundamentally different and better likelihood
of producing innovation than do big bang projects.

Iacomini: They have a much higher
risk tolerance than the government projects that have to answer to taxpayers. Government
maybe spawned the original research that made these innovations available to
others, but now entrepreneurs can pick it up and run with it. There are really
great facilities out there where these startup companies can prove out their
initial stuff in a safe environment with good measurements to validate the data
that they’re collecting. And as they then garner more capital, they start to
build out their own facilities, and then that’s where the growth of the private
company starts to really take off.

Christie, what in particular gets you the most excited or what feels like it has the most potential?

Iacomini: That’s so hard because
we are touching on so many exciting things. I guess I could speak to one of our
focuses right now, and that is looking at orbital debris and trying to figure
out if there is a way to accelerate ownership and accountability and clean up.
Because if we don’t, then some of these other wonderful innovations and
infrastructure that we’re able to take advantage of in the space environment
could be destroyed.

It’s definitely getting worse. The numbers are insane. We’re looking at a half a billion little pieces that we aren’t even tracking. And they can take out satellites, which, if you take out a satellite, then that can have a chain reaction and take out an entire system. And I do think that there is a lot more activity, and it’s going to get worse because of the increased activity.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and Chief Futurist at Prime Movers Lab. Christie Iacomini is Vice President of Engineering at Prime Movers Lab.

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