By James Pethokoukis, Ramez Naam, and Christie Iacomini

Fusion energy plants and commercial hypersonic aviation in the 2030s, floating cities in the 2040s, and partial reversal of human aging by 2050 — this isn’t a hypothetical from the pages of science fiction or even the optimistic vision of postwar futurists like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. These are the predictions of Wyoming-based venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab, which funds breakthrough scientific startups. Their roadmap to life in 2050 offers these and other techno-optimistic predictions for the decades to come. In this episode, I’m chatting with Ramez Naam and Christie Iacomini from Prime Movers Lab to find out more about the emerging technologies that could be transforming our lives in the next 30 years.

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

What follows is a lightly edited
transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t
forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: I’m here in Washington and, especially over the past few years, there’s been a constant criticism of — I’m going to say Silicon Valley, but obviously, I mean more than just the Bay Area — the entire tech sector: “Social media is trivial,” the classic, “Where are the flying cars? You gave us Twitter instead.” There’s just been a deep criticism that American technology doesn’t do anything really important. What got me interested in the roadmap was that there seemed to be some important things in this roadmap that might happen, companies are thinking about, companies are working on, that actually could create a cool future. Why don’t you tell me about why you guys are doing it?

Iacomini: To address that
perspective, the reason I joined Prime Movers Lab is because we do have a focus
on hardware, so much so that we aren’t just funding, we’re actually cultivating
and helping grow these companies. As an engineer, I didn’t know anything about
VC funding and whatnot, but I’m super excited about our vision of funding
meaningful technology that is high risk, but man, the payoffs are going to be
fantastic. And that’s one of the things I was excited to explore in our roadmap.

I would guess that it’s hard enough to make money in the world
that investors should just focus on whatever they think is going to be
potentially the most profitable, whatever it is, whether it’s hardware or
software. But what you’re saying here is that your firm is focusing on a
particular kind of technology. So there must be some deep ethos in what you’re doing.

Naam: That’s right. 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.

And
one of our secret weapons, really, is Christie and her team. Unlike most
venture funds that are strictly business people — we have a lot of great
business people; all of us are — but we have a team that Christie leads.
Christie was formerly at Blue Origin, running their lunar landing program, and
her team is 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.

Are people aware that that kind of future is possible? The reason I ask is I recently wrote this piece about a holiday visit that I took at the Smithsonian here in Washington, DC. They have a big, fancy new exhibit called “Futures,” but it seemed to be a vision very much stuck in the 1970s where capitalism was ruining the world, technology was ruining the world, progress was a net negative. I was very disappointed. And so I saw that, and then I came across your roadmap and thought, “This is what should have been at that exhibit.” So there’s a question mark at the end of all this, which is, are people aware that there’s some cool stuff cooking out there that we might actually be able to do?

Naam: Well, I do think the
optimism has been leached out of media and the news. There’s a saying in the
news business, “if it bleeds, it leads.” You get a lot more attention by
engaging the amygdala of the human brain, the part that looks for threats and
anxiety. That gets you clicks. It gets you ad views and so on. And despite
that, the world, overall, has kept getting better for decades. So part of our
goal in publishing the Breakthrough Science Roadmap is to show why we’re
optimistic about the future.

And
we also find, remarkably, that works extremely well when talking to investors.
So we have to get investors into our fund to have the capital to deploy to
startups, and we find that we have a very unique proposition. Very few of the
investors that are looking to invest in venture funds see something that is
looking at deep science and fundamental breakthroughs that can improve humanity
and is optimistic about not just making more money off of ad clicks but
fundamentally improving the world. And we find that people love that and
actually would love to be part of that.

Christie, you worked at Blue Origin. Do people just not
know that there’s a lot happening in a way that hasn’t happened in a half
century in this country? I mean, given your background, I think people should
be pretty optimistic about what we’re doing and should be excited by space in a
way they haven’t been, at least since the space shuttle, but further back than
that.

Iacomini: Yeah. 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.

It makes me sad if the event that you went to didn’t do a better job highlighting that. Maybe they kept their focus not as far into the future, as we would like to see. I think that’s our job: 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.

Let’s take a look at this roadmap. It has a variety of
subjects, all of which are super interesting. As we’re doing this, they’re having
a big problem with energy in Europe right now. What is exciting and excites
your firm in the energy sector?

Naam: Jim, that’s a subject near and dear to my heart. And you know from the last time I was here on the podcast that I’m very bullish on what’s happening in clean energy. The cost of solar panels per watt of power is [down] by a factor of 500 since 1975. Ten years ago, clean energy was more expensive than fossil everywhere on Earth. Now it is the cheapest source of new electrons almost everywhere on Earth.

As
I say, now, we’ve got big opportunities and big challenges in solving energy
storage. We haven’t totally cracked that yet, so that’s an area where we’ve got
active investments and we see a lot happening. You can get a certain fraction
of the grid power from solar and wind and storage and so on. Then there’s a
huge opportunity, still, for new technologies, whether it’s advanced geothermal
or even nuclear fusion, where we’ve made investments. And those are the sorts
of things where it is really a venture, where you’ve got to go in and take some
risk. But the opportunities have never been brighter than they are right now
for radical breakthroughs in clean energy that drop the cost while preventing
pollution.

Not to keep coming about this exhibit, but it really drove
me crazy. I think the only mention of nuclear was a button they had from the ‘70s
saying, “Solar employs, nuclear destroys.” Ramez, I know you’ve
written a lot about solar. First of all, how real do you think the nuclear
fusion stuff is? And when most people think of geothermal, I don’t think they
know about some of the big advances happening in that sector and how big that
sector could be.

Naam: Yeah. I’d say nuclear fusion
is still speculative, but whereas in the past we had thought it was always 50
years in the future (and every year it was still 50 years in the future), and
it was only big government projects that took tens of billions of dollars that
had a chance, now there’s a dozen or 15 startups out there that are building
fusion reactors on a smaller scale, that have a fail fast mentality. The
physics looks promising. The cost of computation to model these things has come
down. And so is it right around the corner? No. But it is possible that we will
see net energy gain, where a fusion reactor gets more energy out than put in,
this decade and that we’ll see commercial fusion reactors actually enter the
grid next decade. Is that guaranteed? No. But the upside if that happens is so
enormous that it has drawn billions of dollars of venture capital just into
fusion companies in the last couple years.

Why would fusion be more important than traditional
nuclear reactors? And I know there’s been a lot of advance in small, modular
reactors. 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. We’re talking about nuclear reactors. They’re big; they’re expensive.
I think of that as something being done by big companies that have been around
for a long time: Oil companies are these big utilities; they’re the folks that
do nuclear or do geothermal. What are these startups, these early-stage companies
bringing to the table? What kind of technologies or aspects of these problems
are they working on?

Naam: Yeah, well I’d say first of
all, think of one of the most valuable companies in the world right now is
Tesla. Tesla’s an energy company. Tesla’s a battery plus chip on wheels, more
or less, and software. And that’s something that started off as impossible. But
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: “Give me two
decades, and I’ll produce something at $10 billion.” That’s how government
projects in this space and how big corporate projects happen, as well.

Iacomini: They have a much higher
risk tolerance than the government projects that have to answer to taxpayers. You
asked the question about big government having to own these types of
innovations and big projects, but not only Tesla, but SpaceX is another example
where you don’t have to do that anymore because technology has evolved so much.
And government maybe spawned the original research that made these innovations
available to others, but now entrepreneurs can pick it up and run with it.

I wonder if a lot of people, especially when they think
about the modern tech sector, they’ve heard stories like the Apple story (started
in a garage) or the Facebook story (started in a dorm room). I mean, are you
doing nuclear research in the garage or your dorm room?

Naam: The initial phases are sometimes done in
an academic lab. They often come out of academia and it is government funded,
but often the initial work is computer simulation, and then that can spin off.
And, fortunately, some parts of government, some universities, have great
programs to help spin off IP that’s developed there, where the government and
the university get a piece of it, but venture capitalists can come in and put
more money and take the risk and start from a couple people and then scale up.

Iacomini: And then, of course,
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.

Other sectors in the Roadmap are infrastructure and
transportation. What’s going on there that’s exciting?

Iacomini: We really think that we
are developing tools that will provide us better and more efficient and
healthier buildings. We’re looking into abundant clean water. We’ve been
talking about clean energy, of course, and to augment information exchange. And
when we look at the things that we put on our roadmap, we were pointing to
desalination, seeing that happen by the 2030s. Floating cities and towns by the
2040s. Wireless bandwidth increasing to 90,000 Gbps per device by the 50s. Infrastructure
covers a lot.

Transportation,
obviously, that’s where my background is, with aerospace. We see hypersonic
aviation in the mid-30s. Super excited about that. Near-Earth asteroid mining,
possibly, in the 40s, and lunar helium-3 mining for fusion energy by the 50s.

One of the early visions of the postwar futurists was
taking not rockets to the Moon, but taking rockets to other cities: very, very
fast travel around the world, from New York to Berlin in 90 minutes. Is that
what we’re talking about? Are we talking supersonic? You mentioned hypersonic. Is
this basically rocket travel, but to different places on Earth, as opposed to
the Moon?

Iacomini: Yeah. We would call that
hypersonics, rather than rocket travel, but yeah, getting to the other side of
the Earth in an hour or two. We have one company that we are funding called
Venus Aerospace, and their slogan is “Be home for dinner.”

Naam: We also have a company, Boom
Aerospace, that’s probably shorter term. It’s making a supersonic jet airliner,
the first private one ever. Sort of a much, much better version of the Concord.
It’s more fuel-efficient, quiet, and United has actually put in an order for
multiple of their aircraft.

You mentioned the floating cities, and I was thinking of that because there was a recent New York Times opinion about making Manhattan bigger. Where would we build floating cities, exactly?

Iacomini: There are several very,
very crowded coastal cities, and they’re running out of room to expand into the
surrounding land, so that provides an ability out in a harbor to expand real
estate for their communities.

Naam: Yeah. So one of our
portfolio companies, Oceanix, has signed a deal with the city of Busan in South
Korea that’s very constrained to start actually building floating real estate
to expand the footprint of that city that otherwise can’t grow.

Marc Andreessen wrote this essay, “It’s Time to Build,” and one of the things he wrote in that essay was about completely automated factories — basically no humans. And so we could bring back a lot of this manufacturing from overseas. It could be done in the United States because it could be done so cheaply because it would all be done by robots. Is that the kind of advances you’re talking about in manufacturing?

Iacomini: I don’t know that we
have a conviction around the end all, be all is going to be all robots. I think
there are probably applications where having a partnership between human-tended
spaces and robots is also good.

Naam: One of our startups, is not
fully automated, but it’s somewhat automated. It’s Diamond Age that uses
robotics to accelerate the building of buildings, of homes. In the US, housing
prices are out of control in a lot of places, and there’s a lot of reasons for
that, regulatory as well as technology. But building homes is still very much an
assembly process that happens on site. So one of the places we think is very
exciting is turning that more into a manufacturing process.

How touchy are people about innovations in agriculture? We
remember the controversy about GMOs, the controversy about genetically modified
insects. There seems to be a special concern because people think, “That’s
going to change the environment. It’ll be out of the control of human beings.”
Is that a trickier area to invest in?

Naam: It can be. Upward Farms is
an indoor agriculture company that’s really about managing the microbiome of
soil in a way that you can only do if you have complete control over it. Their
products are sold in Whole Foods. The value prop for them is customers love
local, fresh food that was literally picked that day. And so that’s a huge
opportunity. Now, that really works in leafy greens and fish and maybe a few
other things. It doesn’t probably work in row crops like corn and wheat and soy.

We do see there’s a new raft of
genetic technologies that don’t add any new genes to a plant whatsoever, but
change how often a gene is expressed or maybe silence a gene that’s in there,
and those look like they will not be considered GMOs in the US, at least, and
in some other countries, because it’s not adding any foreign material from any
other species into the plant. It’s just sort of slightly tweaking the activity
of current genes. And so that’s an area we have not invested in yet, but I
think we’re very interested in that. We’ll have to feed more people on planet Earth.
We all, a lot of us, like meat. There’s a human craving for high-density food,
but it’s very damaging to the environment, so I think alternative proteins made
of plants or technology are very interesting to us, as well as just ways to get
more food off of less land.

Iacomini: And to your point, we
are sensitive to the unintended consequences. With our science team, we charge
ourselves to ask those types of questions. And given that we look across many
sectors, we have the skills and backgrounds to be thinking about what those
unintended consequences could be.

I’m curious, what are the backgrounds of the people who
work at the firm? You mentioned you’re an aerospace engineer. What are the
other backgrounds of other folks there?

Iacomini: We have a systems
engineer who also has a lot of aerospace experience. We have a chemical
engineer. We have an electrical engineer. We have a neuroscientist. And we’re
expanding the team to have more folks in bio — anything bio: human
augmentation, longevity — and a mechanical engineer.

You mentioned human augmentation. What might be coming,
and what are your companies working on?

Naam: Well, we bundle everything
as health in that area, and we’ve got multiple companies in that space. We have
a look at neurotech that helps the brain. One of our companies, Paradromics, is
using brain implants to help people that are paralyzed or locked in
communicate, walk again. We’ve got another announcement we made quite recently
of a company that does assistive reality, sort of an augmented reality headset
for people that are paralyzed to help them communicate to the outside world.

We’re looking closely at the area
of psychedelics, of new molecules based off of psychedelics. We’ve seen this
evidence that compounds like psilocybin or ketamine can alleviate depression and
PTSD, and we’re looking at, as many investors are, ways to make derivatives of
those that have lower side effects, but that can address mental health issues
like depression, fear of death, PTSD, that aren’t addressed by current
pharmaceuticals today.

We’re just about at the end, so let me ask each of you the
same question. Given your interests, what you’re working on, what the firms are
working on, what in particular gets each of you the most excited or what feels
like it has the most potential? I’ll let you frame it any way you want.

Iacomini: Oh, my gosh. 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.

Well, I think the concern seems to have broken through
more to the general public. Is that because the problem’s gotten a lot worse,
or just enough high-profile things have happened that it’s gotten through the
filter where the media recognize it?

Iacomini: I think it’s both. 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.

Ramez, basically, that question I just asked Christie, let
me ask you: What gets you interested, or are you focusing a lot? However you
want to frame it.

Naam: I remain really excited
about the whole space of climate tech and things adjacent to that, including
food and water. We have this massive global problem. It’s a problem we don’t
have to despair about, that we can take action on. It’ll probably be a hundred
trillion dollars of global investment that will go into reinventing our energy
system, our transportation system, our industries that invent carbon today. The
world’s already spending more than $500 billion a year on clean energy and
clean transport. We’ve seen the creation of not just unicorns (or whatever you
want to call a trillion-dollar company, dragons) in this space because the
technology is not just required, but it’s so much cheaper and better than old
fossil fuel technologies. And that’s something that I think the world has still
barely scratched the surface of. And as I said, our greatest challenges as a species
are also our greatest investment opportunities.

Christie, Ramez, that was outstanding. Thanks a lot for
coming on the podcast.

Naam: Thanks Jim.

Iacomini: Thanks for having us.

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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