John. How often do you wake up in the morning or I see in the middle of the night and think to yourself, oh, God, I was going in the public sector. There's something, and I know there is something that makes you wish the God that you tried out one of those civil service fast track schemes or even a slow track scheme, or literally anything at this point, because you would have got what would you have got?
The defined benefit pension, the gold plated pension, not just.
A defined benefit pension, a public sector defined benefit.
This is yes, this is the dream. This is the financial Holy greal it exists.
It does. Tell us about it. Tell us about the dream. What do you wake up at night thinking, Oh, indexing, indexing with no cap.
Uncapped indexing, the permanent backing of whatever government is in power, regardless of the flavor of government in our was it can a no investment risk at all. I'd never have to bloody we'll think about whether UK stocks were cheap or not, or if they were ever going to not be cheap anymore. I say, you're right, I'm standing. I'm going to wake up thinking about this tonight that I've started thing about it.
This is terrible joking.
When I said, I thought, you did I do? I do wake up at two o'clock, you know, most nights, and this is just not an age thing. I wake up a two'clock most like thinking, oh God, I wish I had a d be just the idea that the money would come in every single month when there was inflation, it would come a little bigger, a little bigger, little bigger,
little bigger. You never had to send takes that said to yourself, oh God, how do I make that diverse portfolio of global equities produce a little more yield to keep me up with inflation? Never have to think that right now, there is a possibility, is a possibility that come the next government, assuming it's a lab government. Although interesting me I went to a talk yesterday. I'll tell you about another time in which one of the one of the speakers suggested that it wasn't the slam dunk
we all think of it. So that's interesting. But assuming that it is a slam dunk and that we are going to have a labor government, they are talking about reinstating the lifetime allowance on pensions, So most people, and that will definitely include you and me, will have a cap on the amount of money they can have insider pension wrapper tax free.
But there is one group of people, one group of people for whom that will not on current suggestions, one group of people for whom that will not be true.
Who are these lucky people?
I can't imagine. But is it the public sector to find benefit pension receives.
So a really big deal, this idea that you can divide people up and give one group of people very very preferential treatment over another when it comes to retirement income. It's a big deal.
Yeah, No, it's myself, and it would be completely out of order. The one reason that my immediate instinct was, Nah, there's no way. You can't just turn around and say we're going to reimpose the LTA for non public sector workers. We're going to carve out the public sector. But the problem is that so they're already is a group of public sector workers who aren't aren't basically because they were so well paid even when the LTA was first introduced.
So the judges pension is not libel for the lifetime allowance. And because the way this works with the public sector is that obviously final salary, i'd find benefit pensions came is where you get a cetin amount of money each year based on your lifetime salary. And the way that the tax Office, very broadly speaking works out how much that is worth for LTA purposes is multiplying it by twenty.
Now that already means that actually the public sector workers get to earn more before the you know, the company of the LTA because in practice twenty is actually very low multiple compared to work. They can have private sector version would be or the fine contribution version would be. But yeah, so the judges already had a carve out
for this. And the main reason that the lt has become such a big issue in recent years is because obviously it's gone down, whereas can the doctors and surgeons salaries have gotten up over time, you know, with inflation or less inflation whatever, And so they came about this whole streamsh where you know, surgeons were kind of light working, but then they would get hit with can attacks charities based on basically because the the defined benefit pensions had
become so generous that the ports were so high. And the point is that the government shouldn't be pre playing favorites.
Like that, right job, given that given that what's your what's your personal finance tip for the weak? I don't know what mine is. It's a go back, go back saut he is and join the civil service. But you know, maybe you have a better one.
In the absence of time travel.
Yeah.
Basically we talk about diversification by asset class, well you need diversify by financial vehicle as well. In the UK, it's pretty simple. You know, there's the state pension which you may or may not kind of get the full benefit of that depend what age you are now and what happens between now and when you retire. There's a private pension or I to find benefit pension. If you haven't have a private pension or a dB pension that's a corporate one, then again you need to consider diversifying
away from that. And the other thing is the ISA. So basically, if you don't have enough money to fill up your annual pension allowance and your annualize it allowance, then what to do is make sure that you split it between the two of them, rather than necessarily favoring one over the other. Where I would favor the pension is if you haven't maxed out your auto enrollmance game. Make sure you do that because it's free money from
your employer. And also if you're on one of those marginal horrible bits like fifty thousand before the child benefit high income tax kicks in, you want to do salary sacrifice there, and at one hundred thousands you want to do salary sacrifice. Otherwise, I would basically go fifty to fifty because at least the eyes that you can get your money out straight away, So even if they do fiddle with it, which it probably won't, then you can get the money out and move it elsewhere.
Less likely to fill with ices, right, because we will understand ices. Everyone understands ane, simple and straightforward. We love them. You mess around with them, we notice.
And the money's not trapped. I mean, that is the thing about your pension. The money is trapped. It's a good thing. You know, we should be able to saving it with confidence, but you know, you just need to look.
I mean they're talking about the lifetime allowance. It didn't exist until two thousand and six, and when it was introduced it was one point five million, and at one point there was one point eight million, and then they then they reduced it rather than reason it so that it's you just can't trust in stability of regulation.
Welcome to Maron Talks Money the podcast and with people don't know the markets, Explain the Markets. I'm Marenzumzetweb. This week the conversation with author Tim Marshall. You might have heard me mention his name and previous podcasts referencing one of his books. He's written eight fantastic titles, but I am a particular fan of Prisoners of Geography and most
recently The Future of Geography. We focus most of our conversation on this one, The Future of Geography, because it looks at how power and politics in space will change our world, in fact, are already changing our world. Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. Hugely appreciate it.
Thank you. It's an honor, good good, Right.
What I want to talk about is space. My producer says, I'm mildly obsessed with space and people who talk about space, and the truth is that I am. And you've written a phenomenal book on this that opens up the world of space to everybody, and if you haven't read it, listeners, I strongly strongly suggest that you do do so this week, because you really need to know about this. So let's start, Tim, if you could just set the scene for us and tell me. I want to get onto the future of
space and everything that is going to happen interpace. But what's happening right now, what's the relationship between Earth and all that place sixty miles above us?
It's space race two point zero because there is now a rationale to go back. I'll try and be brief, but Apollo eleven brought some rocks back, and sty twelve and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, and then the Americans said enough rocks, and they pulled the plug fifty years ago. And now we're going back, not just to the Moon but near the Moon and geosynchronous orbit and low Earth orbit because it is now well worth it.
We've gone back and are going back in greater numbers because financially, low Earth orbit is hugely profitable for the satellite companies. You know, we've seen this sort of expotential growth. There's eight thousand satellites and now there's going to be more than well over thirty thousand with just in five or six years. Geosynchronous orbit becomes ever more important, and we're going back to the Moon, because we've a found water. When I say we, I mean humans. We've found water,
which means it's potential to put a base there. And we found lugonite and lithium and all sorts of those lovely metals that everybody needs for twenty first century technology. So there is now a Klondike gold rush going on, and just as in Klondike, most people won't make any money out of it.
How we go back too. I really want to come on this gold rush, and I really want to come on for lithium and helium and all these wonderful things. But first I want to nail down the what's going on with satellites, and could you also please quickly explain I think everyone understand is instinctively just in case geosynthesis orbit.
Lower th orbit is where most of the satellites are, around about eight thousand, three hundred or so defunct ones, and they're the ones that spin around the world very very fast. So if you've got one, let's say you a spy, for example, it'll only be over the bit of territory you want to look at for a couple of hours. So you can put a constellation of these things up which connect to each other, and you can try and have a greater amount of the Earth that
you can communicate with or look at. But geosynchronous orbit much higher up. That orbit turns at the same speed that the Earth turns, so if you put a satellite there, it's always over the same piece of territory. So whether it's communications satellite, they can always have direct line of sight if you like, or a spy satellite or your nuclear early warning codes to make sure that they're so far away nobody can hit them. Because we can hit satellites in low earth orbit from the Earth. That's a
very very valuable piece of real estate. And I call it that because it is geography, not in the classic sense, but it's geography, and that is an area, and it's a finite area. And when you put a satellite up there, it needs to have a very wide beam coming down to Earth because it's so high up, and so consequently you can only have so many there, so it's first come, first served. That's geosynchronous orbit.
So we've got around eight thousand satellites up there at the moment in that zone. We're another twenty something thousand coming and what are they all doing At the moment. They pretty much control every aspect of our lives, right these satellites. We don't think about that, but if the satellites disappeared tomorrow, so would what we consider to be normal life.
Is that that I think it's a strong cast to be made for it, and a strong cast to be made that the satellite should be considered untreated as part
of our critical security infrastructure. You know, the way that gas and water electric supplies are because there is a backup plan that we do have deep water undersea cables which could still send Internet signals and you could get your fax machines out of the office dump if the satellites went down, but it would be an almighty blow to the world economy or to the economy of a country whose system went down, massive, massive financial loss. We
just think of the GPS. I mean, how is the delivery driver going to get to the supermarket with the food, et cetera. So I think they should be so a lot of them are doing that. A lot of them are just doing straightforward comms, whether it's telephone communications or TV. So they just are part of the modern world. It's the reason, that's the reason it's such a growth industry. I mean allegedly it'll be in a trillion dollar a
year industry. Now not to Blomberg, that's kind of like loose change, but you know, trillion dollars a year, that's quite a big industry and set to grow.
And it's interesting, isn't it, because that is that's private money. You know, we used to think of space as being a public place. In the old space race was between governments. This was in particular between near the US government and the Soviet Union, and they were battling it out to try and prove that, you know, capitalisms better than communism or that was basically wasn't it, Look we can do this vastrup, we can do this quicker because we're a better society.
Right.
So it was a very public space in the first round, and now it's a very private space. Most of these satellites, these are not military satellites, they're or government satellites. They're owned by private companies. They're launched by private companies from private space station. So it's a very different world up there. So when you talk about it being a geography, it's less a public geography than private geography. And we don't know who belongs.
To Ah, good word belongs to.
You because the infrastructure belongs to who does the infrastructure belong to us?
Us? How well, allegedly it's the commons. It's the out of space Commons, just like we have the global Commons where the ocean waves are for all of us. But I'm glad you've brought this thing up about commercial because that's one of the biggest differences between the previous space race and now in how front and center private enterprise is within it, both in partnership with governments and out
there on their own. And that is also another reason why this concept of the global commons is really frayed. I mean, it's enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty of nineteen sixty seven, which basically says no one country didn't bother putting a company in because in nineteen sixty seven nobody thought there would be companies out there. No one country can have sovereignty over any part of space, whether it's the moon, the planets, or just the area has
been between them. But that's really fraying now, and it's first come, first served in its you know, wear out, they're back off, and there's even something in the Artemis Accords, which is the American led effort to get back to the Moon and then establish a base where you can establish a security zone on the Moon, which sounds to me like sovereignty just you know, the same letter at the beginning, just a different spelling.
And how big can your security zone be?
Well, again, it's the languages.
Big enough to make you feel secure.
Yeah, the language is loose enough for it. And also for how long can you establish the security zone? Also very very loose language. Yeah, they are driving it and they have allowed well, the governments have allowed, especially the Americans, private enterprise in many ways to lead the way. And it's private enterprise and its capacity for risk elon Musk SpaceX being the greatest example where they have risked all that money, for example in the SpaceX rockets and being
able to bring them back and land them. That is revolutionary technology which came out of SpaceX. It didn't come out of NASA. So this is a very new and different time. I mean there's the new different military aspect in which commerce is playing a role as well. So it really is very different to the sixties and seventies. And I would argue more complex and more dangerous. And what existing guidelines because they're not really laws, because international
laws are not always laws. We just call them that they're guidelines. And those guidelines are when they were written, were okay. They're not okay anymore in the twenty first century.
Are you worried about the influent that very wealthy individuals and companies will have over the way our interaction with space develops. Is that going to be a.
Problem, possibly up to a point, I don't know. Worried about what governments do as well. You know, it's always good to keep a bd on both sets. But I mean, it was very fashionable twenty years ago and has been ever since to write off the nation state and have always argued against this. If someone's burgling your house, you're not gonna call meta or TikTok that matter, or if the Russians invade and if I mean, if individual X space X wants to launch a rocket, they have to
have a license. You know, it's like a plane. You can't just take off a land wherever you want. You have to have a license, and that comes from the state. So the state ultimately would retain a degree of control. But yes, in so far as you know, it is not good if one particular person owns too much media. It's not if there's a cartel that's got to get you know, these things do need monitoring. But I do think that the governments will contain most of the licensing control,
and therefore there's a degree of open actual control. By the way, Mosque in the Starlink Internet Terms and Conditions that you sign now in twenty twenty four, it says, in the event in the future that you are using our kit on Mars and you have any legal issues, you will not refer to any earthbound government or legal entity. You will only take your dispute up with the legal entity on Mars, which I read to be elon Musk.
So we have a situation where we've got a total creeper awl up there with private and public with satellites, with no one being entirely sure which part of this geography above us belongs to them or could belong to them, and everyone grappling for space because there's got to be a limited amount of space in space and certainly in orbit, particularly now there's lots of defunct satellites in debris and
or this kind of thing. So there's a limit to how much can be done in this close orbit area, right.
Yes, because I mean, obviously it is an enormous amount of space. I think the distance between low Earth orbit, which is one hundred miles up, and then geosynchronist allbit, which is several hundred miles further higher up. But of course that's in a three hundred and sixty degree circle, and it's something forgive me if I've got the figures wrong, but it's three thousand times bigger than the surface of
the Earth. You know, there's a lot of space in space, but the actual orbits themselves, you know, we've already got as I said, eight thousand, it's going to be thirty thousands. Some people put say fifty sixty thousand. I mean the Chinese are going to launch, the Musk is going to launch ten thousand in the next few years. And so although you of physically could fit even more than that in that big circle, the fact is the closer they are together, not only is the more danger of them
crashing into each other. And then if one crashes into another one, then another one, then another one, you get something called the Kessler syndrome where they all crash so it adds to that danger. But it's also the military aspect to it, where countries get pretty nervous if other satellites are getting very close to theirs, you know you're going to try and crash into it. Satellites some of them now can have grappling arms them, You're going to grapple into my satellite. So this is go back to
this thing about law. There needs to be a new global agreement and one aspect of many many that needs to be now written in the new age is how close can your satellite go to mine? And or how many inspections can we agree that you can inspect my satellite and I can inspect your satellite to make sure you haven't got something areus on it? We just don't have these laws, and so that's why there's this finite
amount of space. And then if you go higher up to geosynchronous, as I said, there's so much boundwidth needed in the sort of pyramid coming down as you're broadcasting downwards that you can only have so many and therefore it's first come, first served, and so if you're not there now or in the near future, you're never going to be there.
Okay, stupid question. When a satellite just defunct, do we remove them with these grappling arms, or when we finished using new satellite, we just let us say up, they're forever going round and around the circles and potentially bumping into other people.
Not a stupid question at all. And in fact, when I was doing the research and interviewing the experts, I thought the thing that they would be most concerned about was war in space, and it's not. It's debris in space, and that includes defunct satellites of which there are hundreds. Now, some of them are on a trajectory where each time they go around the Earth they get slightly lower slight.
I mean, it can take years, but eventually, if they're on that trajectory, they come into the atmosphere and they burn up, flame up, and disintegrate. So there's no more of that in space, but others don't and they're still evolving around there. Then there are literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of metal, you know, some of the size of a tennis ball, some of the size of a grape, some you know, tiny, but there's hundreds of thousands of them,
and they're being removed at an extraordinarily slow rate. You can get hold of a satellite and throw it down into the atmosphere or throw it up into deep space. But the fact is that the more and more stuff are putting there, the more and more debris there's going to be in, the more and more danger there is. So the Japanese and i'd say the Europeans are probably the two world leaders in pioneering new technologies to try
to do something about this. I mean, I know it sounds sci fi, but so much of the stuff that I came across I thought was sci fib that is happening now. As well as grappling armsatellites can have actually like massive fishing nets, and they just throw these fishing nets out and catch hundreds and hundreds of pieces of debris, bring them all down and either throw them into the atmosphere or they can even bring them back. But that's
how all this stuff is happening. But it's not happening fast enough.
Let me take you back to the second biggest worry. Then. If the first biggest is debris, the second biggest is war. Space war. That's just us lasering each other's satellites. It's shooting each other satellites down from the Earth, which you desaid was possible and fascinating, or we're talking about something bigger. We're talking about colonizing the Moon and then having a little ram me up there.
Well, yeah, that's that's coming, and that could I'll try and come back to the artemis. Of course, if I remember right now, four countries have already done this. They have launched a ballistic missile from the surface of the Earth and they've hit one of their own satellites in space and blown it up to test if they can do in case they need to do it against somebody else's satellite, and that is Russia, China, USA and India.
So that technology exists, and of course it would be an act of war to blow someone else's satellite up. So that's the first thing that has already happened, and I'm sure other people are working on it. Secondly, Elon Musk's SpaceX as a side company Staralink and Starlink, provides Internet services via satellite and two years ago, when parts of the Ukrainian Internet went down because of the ground stations were bombed, the comp stations Musk flew by the Russians.
Russian Musk flew in thousands and thousands of dishes which could connect to Stalin, and he got the parts of the Internet back up and running. Great for civilian purposes, but of course the Ukrainian military jumped on it and used it to target Russian soldiers, at which point the Kremlin ordered the Russian anti satellite units to open fire. Is a loose term, but you can dazzle a satellite
from the Earth. I don't think you can yet destroy it with a laser bee because we have clouds atmosphere rain it diffuses the signal.
Hang on, what does that mean to dazzle a satellite?
Sorry, well, you send a beam of light up basically at its lens and dazzle it so it can't see you. Now, you don't destroy the lens because many satellites lenses can blink. You know, they close if there's too much light coming in and or you send you spoof them. Spoofing is sending up packets of information to the satellite, which confuses it and so it doesn't know where to send its signal. And so Musk and Putin have been playing this cat and mouse game for the last couple of years, which
is a brand new thing in warfare. Two sovereign countries at war with a third element in it, which is not a state but a private company, which is inadvertently assisting one side's military, causing the other sized military to take what is essentially military action against it. I mean, this is a new time and it's something we're going to have to get used to it.
That's a second moment, and that when that private company is associated with a third sovereign nation that is not technically involved in.
The war exactly, although is you know, clearly involved, but not directly. And so if it's dazzled, is that an attack a day factor attack also in the United States attacking an American company, So you know, I mean obviously Americans just coughed politely and pretended not to notice too much because you know, they don't want to fight Russia. So third way, you may have seen a couple weeks ago the Brits of god a new laser weapon to take down drones. The Americans pioneered a couple of years ago.
Now nobody's put one of those onto a satellite, because if you did, you could suit shoot down a satellite from a satellite very very easily. Because of course it would be so powerful up there because it wouldn't be diffused through the atmosphere. Now no one has because if you do, you're going to spark an arms race. But the temptation too has got to be great. And then the last bit will be, well, there's this whole spoofing dazzling thing. If there is ever a major war between
major countries, will immediately come into play. I mean, I put a couple of scenarios in the book about China basically falls the United States by dazzling. It's ones that are over the South China Sea looks like they're going to attack Taiwan. They actually don't. They do something else. It doesn't matter. But that's the sort of potential future. Sorry, last bit we mentioned the Artemist Accords, We mentioned these
safety zones. Well, what if Country X, which is an ally of America or America has already got to the moon, found the best place to start drilling for the limited amount of lithium there is there, and another country comes along and says, not your moon, We're gonna dig here as well. And they're going to say, hang on, we spent billions investing in this go away you know. I mean, people say that this is kind of a bit outlandish, but all you've got to do is look at history.
What all you got to do is look at let's say, the British Empire and the companies that went out ahead of them, East India Company being the best example, and then following on from that, it becomes so useful that the British military then follows in and becomes involved. I just think it's very hard to see how that sort
of tension will not be there in the future. As I said, I'm not convinced that the economics of mining the Moon makes sense, but as I've brought that up, I will briefly say why I think it might happen any way. Okay, because I don't think a nation state or even a major energy company can really take the risk that this might be one of the most profitable things in the twenty first century, but we're not going
to take that risk. I think that will even though the economics is not there, I think they'll be investment in it.
I love it that the risk is not going to the moon, but not going to the moon. That's a fascinating datement about our new world.
Yeah, the Chinese, said the chief scientist in their Moon mission, because they intend, like the Americans, to have a base by twenty thirty two, which you know will almost certainly slip. But that's the ambition, he said. If we don't go and it turns out this is where the riches are, our children and grandchildren will never forgive us. I mean that that's the mindset which I think will overcome the
financial risk. And I'll give you an example. There are private companies that have signed up with NASA, and NASA will pay them one dollar for each x pounds of rocks they bring back one dollar. So what's in it for the companies? You get the low license from NASA to do it, to launch to land, You set the precedent that we're the ones operating here, and NASA set the legal precedent that you can get something from the Moon,
bring it back, and sell it. Because that's an important point because if the Outer Space Treaty says you can't have sovereignty, well wouldn't that even apply to a rock. If you can't have sovereignty, how can you own that rock? And if you don't own it, how can you sell it? So that's why just for a dollar people are prepared to and that sort of thing is already happening.
So the fact that you can sell it establishes the fact that it is possible legally to own it.
Yeah, yeah, not according to the out of Space Treaty. But much as I love it and think it needs enforcing, who cares about that? It's the Klondact guld rush.
Okay, So let's move away from the possibility of war, because I think we talk about that in so many different contacts, and you never know that there might not be a war, right, it might at all? And amicable. Let's talk about it. Isn't they usually isn't? Excellent point?
They usually isn't and when but sometimes there is. But let's assume that we're going to work all this out amicably, and there's plenty of everyone for everyone's satellites, and everyone can colonize the Moon without having too much of an argy bargie about it, and possibly even Mars. We can colonize all these things without fighting because there is plenty of space. Let's talk about all the good things that space might do for us, might improve our lives going forward.
So we know at the moment, amazing for communications, amazing, for GPS, amazing, for infrastructure creation, amazing for agriculture, right, I mean absolutely fantastic. Has been huge productivity advances in the agricultural sector as a result being able to use satellites to see what's going on with your land. So these are all brilliant things going forward. How is our extension of the geography of our world into space going to improve our lives?
Let me count the ways, and I'm glad you've counted some of them already, because yeah, you're right. Things like agriculture are hugely important, and the satellites have massively helped, especially small scale farmers you know where to plant and when. But another one that's already happening, and I will come onto the ones that of the future. And again this
is for developing countries. If you've got two or three countries, let's say in Africa, that are trying to combine their economy or link their economies, and the geography the terrain of parts of Africa is very difficult. The satellites are able to tell you exactly where to put the rail or the road links at the cheapest cost, which which which is a boon. It's already helping us measure the temperature of the oceans, which helps us to understand climate change.
I think that what proof of concept has proved last year Caltech, California Technology Institute, have their own little satellite, their own little solar panel, and of course up there the solar rays are much much stronger because they're not diffused, and they're seven because there's no day and night. There was no night. They managed to transfer this energy into a microwave signal and they sent it down to a dish, and then they turned it back into a package of
energy and they lit a light bulb with it. Potentially revolutionary moment because if you could afford and if you could put up fields of these solar panels in space, you can now direct the energy down to where you want twenty four hours a day, unlike the solar panels at the moment, which of course I only work daylight and sun daylight, So twenty four to seven. You know it's coming down at night, and it's coming down to wherever you want to put it. You can beam it
to wherever you want to put it. So this is proof of concept has been proved. Economic modeling of it then that's another thing. But it's the sort of thing that would get a help us get away from fossil fuels. So that's one thing. Another is.
Yeah, and we've talked about that on this podcast before. I want so I want to stick with this energy thing for a moment because we've talked about this on this podcast before with somebody else who talked about this mirroring, mirroring of solar energy down to Earth and how she this is a doc Piper Malgram. She seemed to feel that it was reasonably close and conceivable that within she
didn't put a time frame on that. I should have pushed her on that conceivable that in the not too distant future all of our energy problems could be solved simply with this sort of massive beam of energy from space. And I found that incredibly compelling as an idea, given that all we seemed to do at the moment is is bitch and argue and row about different forms of hopeless energy, when there might be one out there that can just solve reing just like that.
They might, I mean, and perhaps when we have time, we can go on to helium three.
But we're definitely going on to helium three. Can't finish those without helium three.
Life the guess yeah. I mean, look she she knows far more about it than I do. I know that the scale you would need it at would involve a lot of mining down here first and building and then lifting the panels up. You know, we're talking about big, but I mean the Japanese you know how so good they are at ore agami. They are brilliant at folding fairly large solar panels up into very small folds, sticking them in the front of a rocket, taking it up there,
and then unfolding them. I mean, they are brilliant at it. Galactical origami I call it. So you can do that, but to do it at scale, the scale we're talking about enormous, and the tech and the batteries you know, I mean you wouldn't at the batteries would be relevant to this, not as relevant as they are now. I mean, one of the problems we have now is not only that it's only daylight and sundaylight. It's that we can't store any excess energy because we don't have batteries big enough.
We haven't invented them. You wouldn't need them, but it would still help to storm.
Well, are you died that you'd need a massive upgrade?
So I don't know the time for either, but I do know the proof of concept, and it's that sort of forward thinking and revolutionary thinking I think will help us.
Okay, helium three, that's going to change our world if space marrowing doesn't.
All right a legend, No, there is lots on. We have helium and I hope I haven't got this wrong way around. We have helium four down here, lovely stuff from memory. It goes into balloons, you know, children's balloons. Where would we be without them? Very useful and car tires some of them certainly used to be lesson stuff like that. Hope, if you want to talk like Mickey
Mouse or Donald Up, helium very useful. But helium three, a most noble gas, is in large quantities on the Moon because the songs raised there again because of lack of gravity and because of lack of atmosphere, it's very very strong. It's why there's so much radiation. Now. The thing about helium three is that in the event you crack nuclear fusion, and I hope missus Ai does, then you can use helium three, which is in tiny quantities here,
but relatively large quantities on the Moon. And you can fuel the nuclear fusion reactor with cheap ish and clean radiation free fuel. That's the key, the radiation free bit. Again the Chinese reckon there is enough of the stuff on the Moon that if you crack fusion and if you can get it back, ten thousand years worth of energy. So again, these are the big thought that we need to be thinking. Some of them might happen. Oh sorry, you asked about the future and how useful it is.
Yes, other stuff that is good.
Yeah, you might have seen. Don't look up the film with a big meter eye. Last year dart they threw a dart. That was the name of the mission. It was basically they launched a fridge freezer at a comet at an asteroid. There's two little asteroids revolving around each other about three million miles away. We fired a fridge freezer at it. That's shorthand for a piece of metal about the same size, and it hit the smaller of the two and it deflected it off its course. Proof
of concept. And we also, you know, we need that as a backup plan in case we do look up and think, oh do you. So, you know, without all this, without all this leaving to along one side, nonstick frying pans, without the space race, much of the useful tech, and including twenty first century tech would not be with US now. And I think, on balance, despite the negative sides of it, I think it's a positive.
Which countries are going to be the most powerful in space in twenty five years. I mean, we can assume the US, China, Russia.
I mean, you've named the big three and they will remain the Big three. But I believe that the top two will be China and the USA because they will be doing both the military and the commercial aspects. I think the structural problems that Russia has means and it's already doing this, its budget will be focused on the military side of it, so they will slightly drop away on the commercial scientific side.
Okay, But then among the little guys you've got, you know, here in the UK we were talking earlier, I'm terribly excited about the Shetland Space station right which hopefully will have launches relatively soon. And I think we've got another launch station coming in Cornwall, haven't we. And then there are various other countries that are setting up launching stations. Is it Nigeria? Is that my imagination?
They certainly launched satellites, and the African Union has some plans. Let me come back to I mean you said little, and yeah, relative to the States, it's little, But I put it in different tiers. So there's the top three, even though it's sort of two plus one, and you come down to the leading second tier countries, of which the UK is one, and France and Italy and Israel, UAE, Japan who were I put them in a block. I mean, obviously some are bigger than others, and in that block
is India. But India is the one in the second tier that looks like it will accelerate. I cannot see it catching USA China even in the timeframe that you gave, but it can go ahead of that second tier. By the way, also we're talking China in America. It's their companies as well. I mean, there is going to be a Chinese SpaceX. I just don't know which of the many startups in China it will be. So then you move down the third tier, and then you talk about
countries like Nigeria which make their own mini satellites. Keep satellites and send them up into little constellations, and there's a raft of them. So there's eighty countries now have a presence in space. Only a handful of them are space faring, only a handful of players. And then the third tier you have a presence. And then you get the fourth tier, which is the majority of countries in the world who have no presence there at all. And given that it is finite the amount of usable space,
they may never get there. So you know, I'll put into the.
Four tiers, which you need to be there now if you're going to be there long term ideally. Okay, let us talk about the companies. Now, when we talk about space, we always end up talking about SpaceX. But if you were able to look twenty twenty twenty five years out, have you any sense of what the big names commercially
might be out there? It might be interesting to see the big mining companies might suddenly turn up with a presence in space, right, the big energy companies might suddenly and we could suddenly turn around and find that Shell has got a colonizer moon right.
Well, Toyota already, I mean it's only you know, it's only on a computer. But they've already built on the computer massive moon rovers, you know, the sort of size of an articulated truck, and they're in partnership with Jackson, the Japanese Space Agency. Now you know, this truck doesn't exist, it may never exist, but the fact is that Toyota are looking at it existing. Some of the energy companies also, some of the Japanese startups have already been up trying
to get some rocks. The Indians landed at the lunar South Pole, which is where the water is and most of the metals, which is thought are so if you go twenty twenty five years, what we're looking at twenty forty five, let's say, no, that's not true. Twenty fifty nearly. Yes, that's a good date, twenty fifteen, because that's the date that Mosque said he'd have a million people on the Moon, which is absolute fantasy.
Is it possible, I mean, it's not going to happen, But is it conceivable ever than a million people could live on the moon.
Yes, yes, yes, but twenty fifty not a I just do the math, you know, just divide a million by twenty five years. Where are these forty thousand people every year or whatever it is. So twenty fifty, I'm confident we will have we'll be mining on the moon by that point. I'm confident we'll have a moon base. As I said, twenty thirty two is the ambition a man and a woman will walk on the Moon again in twenty twenty six, in two years time, the Americans out
of miss submission. I mean again, these things tend to slip thy six months or a year, but they're saying twenty twenty six walking on the Moon, which would be great for Sting's songwriting royalties. One for the older listeners, there's sorry twenty fifty, probably massive solar panels, almost certainly mine in the moon. Definitely some form of moon base, whether it's scientific, military, commercial, or a combination of the three. We will not only have got to Mars. Well, we've
already got to Mars. There's several rovers roving around it already, but will have come back because they haven't really brought things back from Mars yet. That will have happened.
I reckon within twenty the passion has gone to Mars.
And robotics are going. Robotics are going so quickly that by then we'll probably be able to send spacecraft with robots on which can begin the very beginnings of a base there. They can build it, they can three D print it. You know, they don't need oxygen, water, et cetera, et cetera. So I think all those things are feasible. But the idea that we're going to have a million people or even thousands, even hundreds on Mars in twenty five years, but.
No person on Mars in twenty yes, no person on Mars in twenty fiftet just a robot.
We may have landed. I mean, it's a big ask. We may have landed. I mean, there's enough fantastic Netflix and other paying channels available series about things like that, which are great fun. We may have landed. But it's ambitious. It's ambitious. The thing about Artemis and the Chinese version of it is that they've gone back to the idea because there was a huge debate over the past decade. Do you try and go straight to Mars from here or do you go to the Moon first, make your mistakes,
learn your lessons, and launch from there. The lily pad to hop and that at the moment the Moon has won out because it takes more fuel get from the surface of the Earth to the Moon, far far more fuel than it does to get from the surface of the Moon to Mars, even though Mars is you know, it's millions of miles away, much further because you know, because of escape velocity of getting out of the atmosphere.
And let me ask you a final question. This is also about belief. If I were to say to you that you were going to the moon, I'm going for ten years. It's going to be great. I'm sending enough oxygen going play the moon for ten years, and then you can come back. But before you go, I'm going to let you invest in something. I'm going to give a choice of two things that you can have. One is bitcoin and one is gold. You have to choose
one of these things. Your entire net worth is going into this thing, and you'll be back from the Moon in ten years. What do you think you'd take. I mean, yeah, probably plenty of gold on the moon, right.
I'm not going for that long because I've got a season to get it leg united, which I need to renew. But if I'm forced to, and if you freeze that, I'm freezing in frozen gold. I'm not convinced by bitcoin. I know it's I mean, you talk about belief is just as you know, it's belief. You know, I believe that this piece of paper here is worth that much. I believe this piece of metal is worth it. It's
just a belief system. And I just believe that gold has far more even in the next ten years now, if one of the asteroids crashes on Earth has got more gold in it than has ever been mined, I've made a bad bet. Failing that gold.
Yeah, that asteroid might also take out the Internet across the UK, across the world, which point bitcoin is worthless too.
In which case gold is also far more. Yeah. No gold. Look, I know it's not doing very well at the moment though, is it. But it'll be back.
Jim, thank you, Thank you so much. Absolutely fascinating.
Thank you. That was fun.
John, Well, what did you think about that conversation? I thought it was fascinating.
It really was just so interesting and also understand a lot more stuff that I have to see previously had a somewhat foggy point.
What about like the different kinds of all bit Yeah, that kind of thing, and how far up everything is, and you know, I don't know if you said on the podcast, but maybe I were in the book that we think of space as being so far away, but if you were to just drive upwards, it's only an hour's drive away less if you break the speed limits really very very close. I might have added a bit about the speed limit myself, but you get the general idea.
I thought it was great, and I mean again, it's I can see more clearly why there's a bit of a gold rush now, because any time anyone talks about Lettium Maine and I'm kind of like, you know, can you send a rocket when you can just go to Australia and kind of like, you know, dig around a
bit more kind of thoroughly. But I can see the arguments now, and also the fascinating thing about it's we kind of need a cold war to get us to explore these places, which is a bit depressing, but at least it's an upside.
Yeah, we need to have a bit of a ramy, as we know, we need to have a bit of a ramy to get the technology going so we can see where we're at right.
It's a bit of a it's a bit of a coin test that can virility coin test between nations. And also I can get to the moon faster than you.
Yeah, but that was the interesting thing that the last time around, it was a virility thing. You know, communism is better than capitalism. You know, we're a better society. We can do better things because you know, when we're coherent as the society. Whatever is the Soviet Union versus versus American business. What's interesting now is the fact that
it's not really like that. There's a bit in the background, who gets to colonize the moon first, who gets to put a personal in miles first, etc. But actually the majority of this work has been done by private companies, and so we have this vast amount of private money up there. It's a completely different dynamic. And suddenly, you know, Elon musk Is is making rules which won't hold, but nonetheless making funny rules about what happens on Mars. Yeah,
a totally different dynamic. And I've been really interested in that, thinking, well, you know, space really isn't a public place. It's a private place, and that's very different. But then Tim made this excellent point that even if there are no laws in space, there are still a hell of a lot of laws on Earth, and everyone who wants to go to space has to leave from Earth. So you've got to get someone's permission to send your rockets up, to send your satellites up, to send your spaceships up. So
it's like all things. And he said at the end, which was so interesting, because I keep saying this to people, and you keep saying this to people. Never right off the nation's state. When it comes right down to it, this is where sovereignty lies. It lies within the nation state. Every state makes its own rules. They have the power if you think they don't try breaking their laws.
Oh, I was going to say that really interesting they brought that up because it's it's true. I mean, I'm a big sci fi fan, and one I didn't.
Even know that about you. Well, I didn't know that you kept it secret for decads.
I'm just kind of coming out of the closet to this terrible it was too ashamed to admit it to you.
But no.
But one of the kind of like the key features of sci fi over the last kind of like forty odd years, it's kind of Tim sort of says, is that he's always about big corporations kind of light, you know, dominating and the dystopias are all run by someone probably a bit like Elo and Mascot or something like that, who's got, you know, maybe the best intentions, but they've destroyed the world who their ambition and governments are either enthralled to them or they don't exist, and that is
clearly kind of nonsense, you know, when push comes to shove, as it very much has in the last ten years, you know, because I guess it sort of also came about from the nineties and the end of the First Cold War, because everyone kind of went, oh, that's set that we all agree and basically one big global country though, and obviously that's proved to be complete annoysince and we've seen that a ton of the nation state we have engines over the last kind of five to ten years.
So I thought, yeah, that was a really good point.
But then you get to the point and we talked about this a little bit with him. We talked about which country are going to be most powerful in space in thirty forty years, and then we talked a little bit about well, who's going to which companies are going to be super powerful in space, and he mentioned which I thought was just so interesting. He mentioned Toyota. I
haven't made them yet, but they've designed moon rovers. And so there are going to be so many companies out there who are already working on stuff that we never think about. And they may be household names already, we just don't think of them as space orientated companies. And I'm just fascinated to wait and find out who they are and how that's going to work.
Yeah, And I mean it's also it's more because you know, there's the forum is stuff like, there's an investment in this sort of thing. Is it's the usual story we are okay, it's very exciting the idea, but which companies are actually going to survive in which companies are going to do a based and.
How are you going to invest in that? How are you going to invest in that? And there are a couple, I mean, there are ways to invest in what's going on in space. At the moment I'm in. SpaceX, of course is a most well known company in this space, is not listed, but nonetheless there are there are a lot of funds that you can buy in the UK that will hold SpaceX may mainly a Bailey geffort, I think, yeah, I.
Think Scottish Mortgage has got four percent of its portfolio in SpaceX.
Okay, so you've got about five investment trusts. Bailey Given Investment Trust alone that holds SpaceX and Edinburgh Worldwide is another. They've got nearly six percent of their portfolio in SpaceX
is one of their top holdings. So if you want exposure, a little bit of exposure to what's going on in space in a particular to this well as an amazing company, that's where you go right going to It's not going to move the dial on your investments on yeah, the smallest percent, but nonetheless you'll know you've got a tiny bit of skin in the space game.
Yeah.
The other way to do it, Yeah, And the other way to do it is Seraphim Space, which is a trust that holds only space companies. Now, before you start telling me about your success with freem And, I'm can tell you about my success in that. When they launched a few years back. I looked at it and I was as interested in space then as I am now in this trust, and I thought, well, it was absolutely fascinating.
But but but butter, in the middle of a growth bubble, this stuff is insanely able priced it's a bit silly, and I want to tell you, John, this is one of my rare successes to share prices off forty four percent since that launch, So I'm fairly pleased with that. But you wrote about Seraphim just a few months ago, right, Well, yeah.
All about it as I can. Part of a grab bag at highly discounted investment Truice at the end of the Vember, and it was treating a discount of something mildly seventy percent, and there's pretty good reasons for that. Interestry has gone not privately lest so plavate assets. But yeah,
it's it's up about eighty percent since then. I mean, the one thing I would see is it's treading up a bit sextyps and then now is doing a bout ninety six pence and it's it's still a big descot, but it probably deserves a big descout.
Because the stuff is super. Yeah, even if you do if you're not going to invest in this stuff, you don't want to buy this Drauss or whatever you and you don't want any exposure to it, it is worth going to their website. Go to the website just for the fun of it and spend some time reading about these amazing, exciting, innovative companies that are involved in all the amazing stuff that's going on in space. There's lots of AI on this website. There's lots of satellite stuff,
I mean just just everything, lots of weather stuff. There's even one that I would love to know more about it. I'm going to get it. Click on this insurance powered by Science. How does that make it into a space portfolio? But it does. It is absolutely fascinating. It's worth visiting this website and spending a couple of hours on it, and I can't see a better way to learn about space, apart from listening, of course, to Ted Marshall talking about space.
Thanks for listening for this week's Maren Talks Money. We'll be back next week in the meantime. If you like our show, rate review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast, and also do tell your friends about us. This episode was hosted by me Maren's Sunset Web. It was produced by Summersidi. Additional editing by Blake Maple's Bettel. Thanks to Tim Marshall and to John Steppek and if you want to hear more, by the way, on John's
thoughts on pensions. Sign up to his news letter Money Distilled, which you can see on the website.