Latest interview of Elon Musk, like, how do you decide what progress the civilization has made?
That's the most objective metric that any alien species, say visiting us, would calibrate how much progress.
We've made as a civilization.
And one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that is any given civilization has been able to harness. And there was a Russian physicist actually I think by the name of Kadashov, who thought about this, and it's I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is.
You can have.
You can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's a type one, and then type two would be how much of the stars power are you honessing? And then type three would be how much of the galaxy's power are you honessing? These are very objective and measurable numbers. So right now we're very low on Na Kadashev one scale, and if you say, like what proportion of our planet's power are we honessing, it's a very very tiny number. And basically we're harnessing
almost nothing of our stars power. So the sun is truly an immense thing. It is it's difficult with words to characterize just how immense the Sun is, but this gives you sort of a sense of scale.
Yeah, it's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.
Very big difficulty jump.
Yes, and level three and we don't even know how to do level three really well.
Get yeah, yeah, exactly a. I'll figure it out. Yeah.
One way to appreciate the size of the Sun is to think about how heavy is the Sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the Solar System. So the Sun is about ninety nine point eighty six percent of all mass in the Solar system, it's everything, and then off the remaining one zero point one four percent, most of that is Jupiter, one planet, So we're.
A sole lightweight.
Yes, the entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miss laneous category, where we're like, Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the Sun.
Well, but how much energy are we talking like coming from the Sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth.
It feels like, Yeah, the incident's solar energy on the cross section of the Earth is roughly a half billionth of the Sun's power output, and the vast majority of that we cannot because you know, seventy percent of Earth is water. We should technically our plan should be called water because that is seventy percent water. And I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like, why are they're calling it Earth when it is mostly water?
Where the greenland's not green? Of the of the gally of the solar system.
Yeah, a bunch of the exactly even, we're seventy percent water, and then of the thirty percent best land, a bunch of it is either Antarctica or you know, Siberia type of thing, very northern Canada type of thing, very difficult to not places people typically.
Want to live.
And you're not going to get a lot of solar power at the polls. So the actual usable area of land that where you can get solar power is quite small. Anyway, in order to ascend the Cordship scale, in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the Sun's energy harnessed, you have to go to space. If you wanted to get to say, a millionth of the power output of the Sun, you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million.
So we currently use much less than a trillionth.
Of the power output of the Sun, and a trillion is a million times a million. So so basically this we're basically practically nowhere on the sort of the Cottagship to scale, practically nowhere.
So in CARDISHIV scale we're all still.
Register We're like not, we're not even yeah, we're so we're not We're not registering not even a microsol.
Yeah no.
And so to actually what microsol would be an epic, epic achievement relative.
To where we are right now, something to aspire to.
Yeah, yeah, that's o gold.
And like this is I think both simultaneously an incredibly adventurous goal relatives where we are and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the Sun's energy to.
Try to achieve.
Powerhunness being one million of what the Sun outputs.
And so to actually start a microstal that actually.
Start getting there though we're not just gonna throw a solar raised in space try to soak up a bunch of the sun. Like there has to be a need, like you want to go up there and do something meaningful, And obviously until this point in human history, like there hasn't really been a need. What has changed to make us think that like, maybe now's the time to start trying to notch a percentage point or two, I mean.
Getting too a percent of the Sun's energy, maybe not a percentity Let's go like, well, well the desci will point back. So you're extremely thick ass civilization if you get one percent of the Sun's energy. And I'm like, wow, that civilizations be vastly more powerful in us, to say the least. So in order to start to make some progress on the Cottashef scale, we need to launch satellites
to to to orbit Earth and capture solar power. And that avoids the need to build massive power plants on Earth and deal with cooling because cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on Earth. You can just radiate to the vacuum. And and so what what we're proposing here and what we intend to do, is to try to claim the Cottagechef scale to be kind
of like a respectable civilization. So when the aliens, hopefully there are aliens out there, and they maybe finally decide to talk to us, you know where we have where where we have some respectable amount of the Sun's energy being used, that's not like totally pathetic, which is the current situation.
And so before we start sending data centers, sending all of this to space, there are some limiting factors that we got to get there that would traditionally make it so like this is almost as possible.
Yeah, what does it take to scale? Yeah? So things it takes to scale are you need to have a large mask to orbit capability, which is what Starship will give us.
That large mask. So you know, you.
Ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond, and you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put one hundred big wettes or ultimately a tarwowat into space from Earth, you need you will at some point need a tarowatt of solar and then you're going to need a tirawot of AI chips. So the three things you need a mask to orbit, a lot of solar power and radiators of course, and a lot of chips.
All right, well let's start ticking down the list. So mass orbit that's where Starship comes in. We just had first flight V three. It's awesome. I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch and like, long time coming. What's kind of what Starship's kind of purpose of being, What is it going to be doing?
Yeah, so Starship is going to it's going to revolutionize space. Really, it's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now, reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multiplanetary as well as to ascend the Cottership scale. You simply cannot ascend the Cottership scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft, and you cannot extend life to the Moon, to Mars and rest the Solar System without a reusable rocket.
The cost is simply prohibitive.
You can't You can't make enough rockets unless you fly, unless you can refly them. Just like any other mode of transport. You can imagine that if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.
You're doing a whole lot more driving.
Yes, every mode of transport is reusable with that which is simply not viable as a transport system. So cars, planes, boats, forces, bicycles.
Are all obviously reusable.
With rockets, it's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere, and these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. And there have been many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket, and they most of those attempts have been abandoned part way through because they didn't think they could succeed. In order to achieve full reusability, everything has got to be perfect, the engines, the structure,
the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got to you've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket instead of putting on landing.
Legs which are heavy. The rocket can s if we be caught by the tower.
And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship.
And then you've got to achieve full reusability. They've also if you got to go step.
Beyond that, which is make it rapidly reuseable, such that the rocket lands, gets caught by the tower, is put back on the launch stand and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious.
Inspection like an aircraft. Yeah, this is incredibly difficult.
This is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible.
That's what makes starships so profound.
It also happen is to be the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest playing object ever made, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship V three is more than double the thrust of it the Saturn five Moon rocket. By version four will be pretty much three times the thrust of a Saturn five Moon rocket, and we expect this, We expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.
One of the fun facts from flight twelve that was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever flown, and that's still just a fraction of what V three can do. So yes, I mean once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly. I mean we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon Do people even really understand what mass or of it becomes one starship is flying.
It's many orders ninety two greater than and what is the case today. So even with Falcon nine, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX levers almost ninety percent of all Earth mass to orbit. I think between eighty five ninety percent right now, and then most of the remaining mass I think is launched by China, and then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US, is the remaining I don't know,
five to seven percent. Now with with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around twenty five hundred tons a year to orbit to millions of tons per year to orbit, and to do so at a pretty short period of time. So we think probably we can get to a million tons to RBOT per year in about three years thereabouts Starship.
Starship is going to take care of the master or a bit limiting factor, yes, and then power generation, So first and A and maybe you can help people probably struggle to visualize a little bit when you say, like data center in space, Like we're not going to slap engines on a building and fly it up there, Like these actually look like pretty different and so kind of walk through how you take something that's in a giant building on the ground and turn it into something that's functional in space.
Yeah, I think it's it's pretty interesting.
A lot of people don't actually know what the inside of a data center.
Even looks like, right, and it's a mythical place where the Internet's in the cloud.
Or yeah, some people in vision wire, some people in vision boxes. But like, effectually it comes down to a set number of chips and the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how to get how do you get the power for it?
And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like star wink technology, the solar rays are what we want to utilize that expertise to to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center into space itself. We like to look at this and say, like what is what is the actual engineering problem here? And and it's it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into
the vacuum of space. As you mentioned, Yeah, uh, Now, the the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a starling satellite. It's a stalling satellite, has has gigantic phase ray antennas. Uh, it's got uh you know, parabolic antennas. It's got uh, you know a lot of laser links. It's a it's it's much more complicated than an AI satellite, and AI satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don't have of the super complex antennas.
That you have on a stalling satellite.
So I mean, given the two, the easier one to design for is the the AI satellite.
Yeah, it's just a little bit bigger. It's bigger.
Just makes stuff bigger.
Yeah.
I was like, so we've got this is our AI one if you guys want to.
Walk us through. Yeah.
So the first thing that we're really looking at here is like, first, you've got to make something compelling, right, And we thought that the right place to start is around one hundred and fifty.
Kilowatt like peak power level.
But as we look at the workloads with our experience with XAI, we get to actually see that we can also support about one hundred and twenty kilowats of average compute.
There's a difference. What we're showing here is kind of a draft version of the.
Version one of the of the SpaceX AI satellite AI one, I guess you could call it, and seems like a reasonable place to start is undred and fifty kilowatts peak power one hundred and twenty kilowatt sustained power. And to give you a sense of what does that actually look like in terms of the size of the.
Radiator size of the solar panels, the assumptions.
Here are two hundred and fifty what's per square meter for the solar array and about fourteen hundred what's per square meter for the radiators. So the radiators, these are double side radiators, are radiating both sides, they're oriented knife edge to the Sun, and it's fourteen hundred washpos square
meter is a very achievable goal. Over time, we think we can probably do above chatter fifty washed post square meter and above fourteen hundred what's per square meter for the solar panels radiators, respectively.
But this gives you like a this is pretty much what the satellite's going to look like. Yeah, it's a lot.
Of solar panels, radiator, and then everything else is pretty small.
Like embarrassy.
And these are like evolutions of things that we have actually already launched in our Starlink constellation to date. Yeah, that's that's really I think the cool part to me is that we're looking at solar technology that we already are going to use on the V three Starlink vehicle. So I'm like really excited to then just take those and make it bigger.
Yeah. Part of what we want to convey here is that there's not some.
Magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for the AI satellites. As I had said, this is a lot of this is technology we've already made for the Starlink B three satellites. So it's basically, don't think this is a super hard problem compared to things we already do.
They would also be probably something on the.
Order of a twer bit of connectivity of laser link connectivity.
From the on the satellite.
One hundred and fifty killawak peak power level is roughly matches Le's ay.
An Nvidio GV three hundred rack would do, so a.
GB three hundred with seventy two GPUs it's peak power I think is around one hundred and forty kilowatts, but it's rarely it's it's almost impossible to get it to be at that pep power. A more reasonable operating envelope would be around one hundred and twenty twenty kilos average power, but it can peak up to one hundred and fifty. So that's it's basically thinking about as a rack of compute in space. And then you can connect these these racks of compute to either each other by the laser
links or directly to the stalling constellations. So you can close the link with the stalling constellation, and then Stalling can then send that data to the ground using the existing KA and KU antennas on the on the vehicle, it also has laser links to the ground as well, so.
And this would not be out of particularly highlight and see it.
You know, we're talking about you know, maybe being around six to eight hundred kilometers above the Earth, and light travels three hundred kilometers per millisecond, so that's it's about, you.
Know, three milliseconds away. It's not not very far.
Won't worry about that too much though somethings.
I think it's gonna be some like high late and sy them like, yeah, no, speed of light.
Moves pretty fast, moves pretty fast. It's all one. Yeah.
I think The cool thing also is the the radiators themselves are about the same size as the existing solar race for a V three vehicle.
Kind of kind of in that that realm where we're flying today.
Yeah, So I mean they got they got about a seventy meter wingspan. So these are fairly large, and we're talking about building a lot of them and putting them up there. But you like to say like spaces in the name, Like there's there's a lot of space up there. And so even when you're talking thousands or even you know, up to a million satellites, you got plenty of room to move around up there.
Yeah, space is really big, So it's like it's not like space is going to get crowded.
Space is enormous.
Like if you're zoom in close to the satellite, looks big, but if you actually look at it relatively relative to the Earth, the satellites are so tiny you can you can't even see them.
So they're very very tiny compared to Earth.
And I mean, we have ten about ten thousand starlinks in orbit right now. We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely.
Now right we are the only operator that has any experience of that scale. It's it's a great thing that you know we have this background, so we know how tightly we can pack the satellites and inside them safely. That's that's a number one goal when we look at the constellation.
We're going to be building a lot of satellites, and we're gonna be building here in Bastra, right, so we've we've got this, which so we're in the building kind of in the middle, which we're sitting in that building right now. This is my first time here. The building is massive, Like you come around the corner, you see it through the trees and you're like, oh wow, but we're about to kind of put this building to shame, aren't we.
Yes, we're gonna. In fact, we're already have the solar manufacturing facility. It's under construction already, and and then we will be building out the a SAT production building soon. And yeah, so we expect to have the the ASAT production, the solo production, and all of that operating at some reasonable volume by the end of next year.
So if anybody wants to work on AI satellite, this is kind of going to become the hub of that. We're also so I mean, like right behind us, the machines are humming and we're still making all of our user terminals for starlink here, that's not going anywhere. In fact, we're turning on new production lines for new units right Yes.
In fact, these are the new stalling terminals, which we made in much high volume than the current terminals, and ultimately we think there's probably going to be a few one.
Hundred million stalling terminals out there.
And then the stalling direct to sell constellation will connect directed to people's cell phones and enable high vanterwith communication directly from your phone to space.
All right, we're two limiting factors down. We've got master orbit, got putting solar, and a few third ones chips.
Yes, so at least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So our current reference design is for in Vidio Reuben chips or could be either GB three hundred or or Ruben schiffs, and we'll also have a reference design for TPUs and essentially you can put up put any any existing shifts into into orbit. But the current industry seems to be it seems like it's gonna I don't get to maybe around one hundred.
Gigawatts a year of AI computed but.
That doesn't answer the question of well, how do you get to a tarrawatt.
That's why you need the terrafab always looking a step bigger. Yeah, yeah, in.
Order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic shift factory to give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the terrafab is going to be around one hundred million square feet, which is ten times the size of the a Tela gig factory Texas.
And what aside from just you know, I'm going to need starship point to point to get from one end to the other. Aside from just the size, what's going to make this unique different from any other chip building operation on the planet.
Well, I think over time there's going to be a lot of technology evolution with the Terrorfab, but fundamentally it's about scale. So even if there.
Were no.
Fundamental technology breakthroughs, yes, and you simply you could simply scale the existing chip making technology with a lot of difficulty.
To a terror watt of chip out per year.
That's if you look at it just from the logic die standpoint, that's that's equivalent. That's like having a billion chips per year with a kilowatt per radical, So so a billion full radical equivalent chips each doing a kilowatt, and then you're going to need a lot of memory to go with that.
A lot of people today even saying orbital data centers were like a decade away.
Yeah, I think we.
Want to try to give people a sense of the timeframe we at least the timeframe we're aiming for. I mean, you know, people should take this with a grain of sult to undergrade, because this is this is just our best guess. So this is not a this is not
a promisable we'll do. This is what we what we are going to try to do and think we probably can do, which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawat per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute, and then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year, so in two and a half years, hitting an annualized rate of ten giga watts a year to space and
two and a half years, maybe one hundred gigawatts. And then depending upon or progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world.
And with the terriff A going beyond that to scale to a terror work.
Per year, which is a thousand gable watts, which is that's wic the current electricity consumption of the United States.
I think there will be appetite for that. But we'll see there's a lot of satellites.
I don't know what it's going to think about, but uh, maybe do a lot of simulations or something.
Yeah.
So after we've you know, working through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step?
Two?
Again try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev level two?
Why stop there? Why I think small here? Because a terror what actually is that's not things small? So there is in order to get to another three ors nine two two thousand x from a terror work per year. The only way that we can really see that you can achieved that is on the Moon with a mass driver essentially where you do local production of photobole takes
and so and radiators on the moon. Maybe you bring the chips from Earth, or you could conceivably make the chips on the moon, and but you need most of the mass to be made on the Moon, so you don't have to transport it to the Moon from Earth. And and then because the Moon has no atmosphere and only one sixth Earth's gravity, you can get you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket, so you can basically shoot them into space using an
electromagnetic gun like a like a rail gun type. I mean just it's basically linear electric motor as the way to think about it.
So I think where you can show people
Thanks for listening, See you in the next episode.