00:48:14 · Ty Morse, Saurav Shroff
[00:48:14] S0: There's no demand pricing of people can, you know, only a small number of people can go. [00:48:19] S1: Yeah. I'd I'd say the price probably lands in like sort of $500,000 range in the long term. And at that price, there is there is certainly, like, a pretty high amount of demand. Like, enough demand to create a base, enough demand to fund a a lot of flights. It will not look like United Airlines, but it will look like probably how United Airlines looked when airplanes were brand new. [00:48:44] S0: One of the really interesting things that I'm thinking through in this conversation is you mentioned that there's effectively... Or there's effectively going to be zero limit on the amount of intelligence, I believe, that people want to use, which means that if people... You know, SpaceX can put satellites up in orbit that generate intelligence, it creates this amazing demand pull forward where it's like effectively, is the maximum scaling rate that you can build these starships? That is the thing that you should do. [00:49:16] S1: Or fly the starships. [00:49:17] S0: Yeah. Fly the starships, build the starships, whatever. Build the launch pads, all the stuff. Yeah. Whatever that maximum possible rate is, we should, you know, march down that rate. Yeah. Because there's always going to be demand. Yeah. And this is like not a guarantee with anything other than just GPUs in space. And so, ironically, it's like both bad short term because, you know, there's so much demand for it, and great long [00:49:42] S1: How term is that bad?
00:49:42 · Saurav Shroff, Ty Morse
[00:49:42] S1: How term is that bad? [00:49:43] S0: Bad short term because you aren't able to use it. Oh, Like, you're not building for the customers. They're just literally building themselves. [00:49:49] S1: It's like selfish dynamic where Exactly. You don't wanna be [00:49:52] S0: Then long term, they have such a ridiculous amount of starships built because of And this intelligent explosion. And ability to flash, and they've got like a million tests Yeah. On one starship.
00:50:04 · Saurav Shroff
[00:50:04] S1: Yeah. It's actually it's actually like, so I actually like wasn't... I mean, I'm like clearly AI pilled, but I I wasn't... I didn't enter like the space industry for... Obviously, for that reason. I mean, I didn't have that foresight. But the thing that excites me, probably the second most with superintelligence, the thing that excites me the most is, like, what it will do for humans, obviously. Like, okay, like, if you... Maybe it'll... Work will become optional, which I know, like, socialists think is horrible, but, like, it's very easy to solve, like, just add UBI. So you can do work if you want. Like, that, I think, is amazing. Okay. Like, art will have a resurgence. Maybe we'll have, like, renaissance two or something. Not that, like, that sounds particularly interesting to me, but, I think it's, like, incredible. But the thing that excites me the second most, actually, about the space industry... Excuse me, about the super intelligence is that... Oh, this is what you just said, which is that it will become... It is becoming and it will become, like the ultimate driver for scaling space technology, like cargo and passenger transport was the ultimate driver for scaling passenger and cargo air transport technology. With the caveat that scaling passenger and cargo air transport technology came with barely any benefits. Right? It was just like, we have passenger transport, we have cargo transport, and we have like, I don't know, general aviation where you can like screw around in an airplane as a result. So, like, the side benefits of United Airlines scaling their business are small, and the main benefits, which is that they have passenger transport, you know, are big. But in the case of superintelligence, the side benefits of scaling a rocket are, in my opinion, immense. Because, like, for so many years, you know, nerds like me, I mean, I'm I'm pretty pretty young, but, like, they're older nerds. Right? For a lot... For, like, decades, nerds have been saying, you know, why don't we build based on the moon? Why don't we build based on Mars? And the answer is, like, basically some combination of, like, we can't afford the CapEx to develop the core piece of technology, which is the rocket. Okay? It's undeniable that the rocket is the main piece of technology. And on top of that, you know, like, even if we did, it would take too long.
00:52:16 · Saurav Shroff
But with super intelligence, it's super different because the motivation to put the CapEx into the rocket is completely legitimate economically. Like, it's totally a rational decision because it's like, I spent $5,000,000,000 developing a new rocket. I earned $5,000,000,000 in, you know, in in Anthropics case in two fucking weeks. Like, literally, like like, literally, people for decades were like, why don't we make a rocket and go to Mars? And now it's like, the value of a rocket is two weeks of Anthropics annualized revenue run rate. And so, like, they can quote unquote pay for a rocket in two weeks. Now, obviously, you can't design and... Like, you can't design a rocket that works in two weeks. You can't spend the money that fast. But it's totally rational decision, and then the the the side benefits are now immense, which is that you have, like, this sort of, like, base infrastructure, base technology layer. You've, like, unlocked this level in the tech tree that enables all of these other lower cost levels of the tech tree with respect to the moon and Mars. And so, like, super intelligence lets you have working rockets, a huge amount of revenue associated with them, so they're basically free in the context of other industries that obviously are not free in absolute, and then those other possible industries that could form tourism on the moon, mass driver on the moon, city on Mars, heck, god knows what on Mars, are now now basically have like a free rocket, that all they have to do is pay the operating expenses. So there there actually may be some airline analogies here that make sense, but not really one for analogies. This is the second most exciting thing to me about superintelligence, which is that it will almost certainly be true that we will build a city on Mars after you make, you know, terawatt or even a even a two gigawatt data sack constellation in space will get you to a working rocket. I mean, there it's necessary.
00:54:06 · Ty Morse, Saurav Shroff
[00:54:06] S0: How fast do you think the Mars base is going to get built? Because if you use a Starship for Mars, you get it to use it once every couple years, whereas if you use it for satellites in orbit, it's... [00:54:17] S1: You don't need that many. [00:54:18] S0: It's like multiple times a day. [00:54:19] S1: Yeah, pretty fast. Also like, and it's worth noting that a Mars base is built on on the back of, like, a thousand starships, and a AI dataset constellation is built on the back of, like, a 100,000 starship flights. So while the re... While it while it is true that the reuse factor for satellite deployment is drastically higher, or two orders of magnitude or more higher, it is also true that the the sort of goal density, meaning how much of your goal you achieve per flight, is much higher in the case of Mars. I mean, if I just put 10 starships on Mars, just... If I put 10 starships on Mars, then that will have a profoundly large impact on... Like, a categorical impact on history. There will be a city. Small one, but a city. But if I put 10 starships in in sun synchronous orbit and deploy data sets, you know, that's like it's like not even a, that's like zero. [00:55:19] S0: So, at some point along the line of building a thousand Starships, it just makes sense to take 10 of those, and then just send them off.
00:55:26 · Saurav Shroff
[00:55:26] S1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, the thing about, the thing that's true about super intelligence is that it gives you the technology for free. Like if you are a Mars enthusiast, which I am, the technology for going to Mars becomes free with super intelligence because you get this excuse to build a rocket and get it paid for by the end the end user, the end main user of the rocket, which is the AI customer, and you get to build this like extremely large and mature supply chain, automotive like supply chain for data sets, where importantly, like, if you want to build something that's like an offshoot of an automobile, it's doable with automotive components. Right? Like, the auto... The automotive industry feeds many other minor offshoot things that are automotive like too. And so, like, the infrastructure to build the city on Mars is satellite like. In fact, this is such a full circle irony because the way that we got into the business of selling solar panels to satellite companies is by first making them for Mars. Like, we were first a Mars company, and are now both, and we're like, okay, let's make a great solar panel that works on Mars, and then we're like, oh, it's it's pretty good, let's sell it. And then people people loved it. In fact, the original, sort of like, I guess, like, marketing line or whatever, like the thing that I had listed on the website for Starpath was engineered for Mars flies anywhere. So the thing that you get from superintelligence is the free is the free tech tree unlocks. You don't get the free OPEX. So you still have to buy the rocket. You still have to pay to use it. Obviously, mean, it's not a charity. But, the... You know, if you ask somebody from, like, let's say, you know, some enthusiast person on Twitter ten years ago, like, what does it cost to build a city on Mars? They'd be like, okay, well you have to develop a rocket, and then add up all these costs, and then the the biggest item would be developing a rocket. You ask that same person, you know, not today, but three or four years from today, hey, what does it cost to build a city on Mars?