Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space

0:00Philip Johnston:The problem with doing this build out on Earth is that the marginal cost on every additional data center goes up every time you add one because we're using all the easy places to build energy projects. In space, the marginal cost goes down for every additional unit because you're now manufacturing at rate and the more starships you fly, the cheaper it gets and all the rest of it. And so there comes a crossover point where it just makes zero sense to continue building things on Earth. So I think it will be like close to a trillion dollars per year of capex spend within 10 years being deployed in space.

0:36Philip Johnston:So by far the largest market opportunity ever.

0:55We are thrilled to have with us today Philip Johnston, founder and CEO of StarCloud. You were the first to put up data centers in space. And just a few months ago, your first data center, StarCloud One, sent back the message to Earth. greetings earthlings or as I prefer to think of you a fascinating collection of blue and green what a poetic thing to think about AI in space looking back at us um congratulations on what you've done I'm excited to ask you all about data centers in space for this episode uh maybe first to get started why build data centers in space yeah um so firstly thanks so much for having me

1:28Philip Johnston:it's freaking awesome to be here um so a quick background on myself um I first I mean I've been interested in space my whole life um i actually spent a few years with mckinsey with the space agencies of the different governments around the world and that's where i started to notice that the launch cost was very rapidly coming down um and so three years ago i kind of randomly on a weekend decided to take a trip down to starbase texas where spacex is building the starship launch vehicle and i think it just blew me away the scale of the new sort of gigafactories they're building i think they're planning to build three starships per day or something on that order and so the coming capacity and the potential launch cost is uh you know orders of magnitude off where it is today and so you know i started thinking about okay well what is that going to enable what new businesses will that enable and with my co-founder ezra um and ezra and i go way back we grew up in the same place in the uk um we started looking at the concept of space-based solar which is where you have these huge solar panels in space and then you somehow beam that power down it's not really a new idea i mean people have been looking at this since um i think isaac asimov in the 40s was talking about it um the problem with space-based solar is you lose most of the energy and transmission from space to earth and we very quickly realized okay well once we get that power down you know most new energy projects on earth today are being built to power data centers so either directly or indirectly that power is going to be going into data centers.

2:56Philip Johnston:And so if we can find instead a cheap way to get the data center to space, we don't lose all of that power and transmission. We can consume that power close to the source. And that then became the basis of a white paper that we put out in 2024. And from there, that's how the company got going. Well, let me ask you, so there's a distinction. I heard a lot in there on it is possible to do data centers in space. Why do we need to do data centers in space? Maybe possible? Why do we need to do it? Why do we need to go to space? Yeah, it's a great question. The main reason is we are very quickly running up against constraints on where and how we can build new energy projects terrestrially to power data centers.

3:35Philip Johnston:So for example, if you want to build a new 100 megawatt energy project, you're looking at a five to 10 year lead time just on the permitting, particularly in North America. And so for example, if you want to cover 10 square kilometers of countryside with solar panels, there's a lot of people who are going to be very annoyed about that um and so you just have these you know we're very rapidly plowing towards a a brick wall where it's going to be extremely difficult to build new energy products we've already built in the easy places if we could wave a magic wand and remove the regulatory constraint what's the next constraint we run into um well it is actually just cheaper to build things in space once the launch cost gets below a certain point so for example with uh terrestrial solar which is the cheapest form of energy we have you've got three big costs the first one i mentioned which is the cost of permitted land the second is the cost of battery storage and backup power and then the last is the cost of the solar cells themselves um so in space number one we don't need permitted land number two we don't need batteries and backup power because we're 24 7 in the sun and then lastly we need eight times less solar because one square meter of solar panel in space produces eight times the energy of one square meter of solar panel on earth and so there's a break-even point where the launch cost which is our main additional cost in space where the launch cost comes below the cost of those three factors we see that break even to be around 500 a kilo but as the cost of permitted land goes up which it is going through the roof right now um that break-even point actually comes even closer to a thousand dollars a kilo but but as i say even if you're even if your permitted land cost is zero you still have those other two factors um and so at some point if you're going to build data centers anywhere you know once the launch cost is below a few hundred bucks a kilo you're going to do it in space because it's just cheaper what have you learned about maintenance in space yeah it's a great question as well um so for maintenance we'll be operating very similar to the way that starlink satellites work in the in the initial years we're not going to have robotic maintenance or anything for the first few generations at least and so that means we need to have redundancy on the critical systems and then we over provision things which fail over time like solar panels you lose a few percent per year it's very very important that the chips do not have a higher failure rate in space than they do on earth because the chips are one of the largest costs in this and so a huge amount of our time probably 70 percent of our engineering time is going on to the heat problem and the other 30 percent is going on to making the chips as reliable as possible in space and that means a whole bunch of testing in different particle accelerators there we did two rounds of testing at the cyclotron proton beam accelerator in knoxville one round of testing of the heavy ion particles particle accelerator in brookhaven national lab and we run it in 24 hours we can simulate five years worth of radiation and with that then all of that data then goes into informing our choice on shielding and other you know software for bit bit flip mitigations and things like that um but in terms of what we've learned on the first satellite it's actually the h100 that we have on orbit right now um we've not had a single restart failure yet or or issue that needed a restart from the chip itself there are other areas which we may need to put a bit more attention to for example the power delivery and solid state drives but the actual chip itself is extremely resilient and gpu workloads in general are very resilient and the reason is they're stochastic in nature and so if you for example if you type into chat gpt write me a poem about space it will give you this two different poems the the quality of the perm will be will be the same you know we have the exact same quality of the output but the specific instance will be different and so with a bit flip on any part of that um or on most of the parts of that workload it actually doesn't make a difference to the quality of the output so so it's actually yeah it's it's surprisingly um uh resilient you said you spend the bulk of your engineering time on the heat problem yeah i think most people have this notion that you know space is cold and so therefore it should be an easier problem when sonia says most people i i thought that was the case until a few months ago so can you just talk about you know what exactly is the heat dissipation problem and what are you doing to solve it yeah for sure um so yeah as you mentioned space is cold and in general that's actually once you get far enough down this rabbit hole that ends up being great uh what what's not great is that space is a vacuum and so obviously like a thermos flask is designed that way because a vacuum is an insulator and so the only form of heat dissipation you can have is infrared radiation and so everything in this world glows in infrared if you had a camera on your face your face would be glowing in infrared and the same is true in space and the amount that it glows is proportional to the temperature differential between the temperature away from your faces or away from the satellite versus and it actually scales with the fourth power of the temperature so a very small increase in the temperature increases the heat dissipation by a huge amount and so um what one of the critical things is we need to run these radiators as hot as possible there's a few different ways you can do that either you can run try and run the chips as hot as possible the problem with that is you the chips are you know have a shorter lifetime if you run them hot the other thing you can do is there's a few ways to artificially boost the temperature of the radiator So things like heat pumps, which you can take, for example, 60 degree fluid from the chips, and then you can turn that into 100 degree radiator temperature with heat pumps.

9:08Got it. And so would you say the heat dissipation problem is like a solved problem for you all now? You obviously have one GPU in space. What is it going to take to solve the problem for eventually, hopefully gigawatt scale data centers in space? Yeah. How does it change as you scale?

9:22Philip Johnston:off yeah um so the first one actually has a very different thermal management system and then the next one coming up the first one we submerged the entire motherboard power systems gpu and everything else in this phase change material it's like a material that goes from solid to liquid as it as it heats up the we can't run that continuously though that was merely just to prove out that this works the second one is much closer to the end state which is has got this enormous um low cost and low mass deployable radiator so it has liquid we've got a custom heat sinks next to the gpus runs past this fluid runs past the gpus and then out to this extremely large deployable radiator from that one to the next one just scaling it up it actually is pretty simple um and so yeah we will we've tested this you know in thermal and vacuum chambers and it works we just need to now put it on orbit and make sure it actually works on orbit and that's going to happen later this year Awesome.

10:20And how much, I guess, relatedly, you have one GPU up in space currently. Do you see yourselves launching? Five, actually. Oh, you have five now.

10:28Philip Johnston:No, there's five NVIDIA GPUs on that first one. The H100 is the one that gets the press. I see, I see. How much, I guess, what is the launch capacity, so to speak, of what can you get up in a single payload and how big these, you know, do you think these individual data centers can get? yeah so we're designing for the star cloud three the next one that we're launching is around eight kilowatts um so pretty small still the one after that which we're now designing is the star cloud three it's we can fit um 50 of them per starship and they fit out the pez dispenser form factor that door that starship has that little slip yeah um so each one of those is about 200 kilowatts about three tons and so if you're 200 kilowatts per per star cloud three satellite and it's it's all for inference essentially that means you can fit 50 so it's about 10 megawatts per starship launch and so once starship is flying at rate you know we're expecting to fly hundreds of these per month and so you're talking you know several gigawatts of new capacity per month tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year so you mentioned it's all for inference i was wondering about that because pre-training you on contiguous compute might be tough if you're sending everything up in a space yeah inference you want low latency there's some you know there's a speed of light component getting information to and from space is that a bottleneck at all or is that is it low latency enough that it doesn't matter for inference it's um it's as low latency as starlink so if you can do any inference workload through starlink you know if you were using chat gpt on your phone through starlink for example it would be exactly the same so sub 50 millisecond latency 20 run earth and that means any you know like if you have a zoom call that could easily happen with 200 millisecond latency and you wouldn't notice the the delay there so um basically any inference workload uh you know voice agents for customer service or back office business processing agents or video generation or chat gbt or anything else can be done uh with this constellation and then maybe slightly different question but kind of on this vein if you had a trillion dollars yeah just sitting in a bank account and you you had to use it to build the compute backbone for agi yeah how much of that trillion dollars is going into space 100 okay all right take that picture for us i mean i we really are talking about by far the largest market opportunity ever so we are talking about trillions of dollars per year of capex spend going my best guess is that within five to ten years at least half of all new compute capacity is being deployed in space for the energy so the problem with doing this build out on earth is that every additional cost uh data center you add to the grid like the marginal cost on every additional data center goes up every time you add one because we're using all the easy places to build energy projects yeah in space the marginal cost goes down for every additional unit because you're now you're manufacturing at rate and you're um you know the more starships you fly the cheaper the cheaper it gets and all the rest of it and so there comes a crossover point where it just makes it makes zero sense to continue building things on earth um so i think it will be like close to a trillion dollars per year of capex spend within 10 years being deployed in space so by far the largest market opportunity ever where and when do you think we will first cross over when i say where and when i mean like what geos will become untenable and therefore you'll need to go up into space um as soon as starship is flying frequently it will be cheaper to build data centers in space so my guess for for it looks like the first starlink payloads will be the end of this year early next year starlink v3 um and then as i understand it will be 12 to 18 months after that the first commercial payloads are going up and so that will be um yeah on the order of mid to late 2028 and then once it's flying frequently it becomes way cheaper do you think that there's you know stuff that needs to be solved in terms of data transmission like do we need optical lasers uh sending data back and forth uh up there in order to kind of once we're operating data centers that's at scale in space now those all solved probably mesh network in space that's so yeah it didn't used to be until two or three years ago but um you know starlink has basically solved that and there's a bunch of other constellations coming online amazon leo uh kepler um and also once we have a few of our own satellites we can do our own uh optical backhaul um so that that yeah that problem would have been a big problem until quite recently but and so each pes dispenser will be its own data center do you see them ever you know coming together you you had that yeah that picture that concept photo in your in your first white paper do you see them being able to dock onto each other eventually yeah um it doesn't really make too much sense to do that initially because the only reason you would do that is if you want to train a large model in space and to train a frontier model you need whatever the largest data center on earth is you need at least that in space so right now that might be like 300 megawatts or something um you know it's going to be a long time before we're going to be able to dock together 300 megawatt structure in space and by the by that time the biggest one on earth will probably be three gigawatts so it's like a moving goalpost and the other thing to say about that is training at the end state will be less than one percent of all ai workloads that are being done and so it's just not a very good market to go after anyway um yeah we we showed it in the in the initial video because we didn't want people to come back and say you know you can't do training in space and we're like well you could if you wanted to but it's probably not ideal for it's more of a provocative photo yeah um what about you mentioned at the very beginning robots Like, do you think we'll end up having maintenance robots in space to maintain these data centers?

16:06Philip Johnston:I don't think we'll necessarily be maintaining our small inference nodes, but certainly we'll have fleets of robots building large structures in space. I mean, they'll definitely be on the moon. Like, if you're going to build big manufacturing facilities on the moon, essentially something like Optimus will be doing that. Like, an Optimus robot doesn't require too much modification to work in space. you just essentially put it in a spacesuit and that takes care of thermal and radiation aspects of it so like you don't see optimus going to go maintain your not really because they're too small each one's only 200 kilowatts so we just need to make sure that they're um if we docked it together then yeah you could have optimus maintaining it but you wouldn't fly optimus between each of ours and um well maybe you would i don't know that starts to sound a bit sci-fi what's the what's useful life on them and how do you retire them um it's about so we're designing it to be the same as useful life of the chips so five six years yeah and potentially possibly longer actually in space because our marginal cost of energy once we're launched is zero so there's an argument to be made that we can run them longer um but end of life for now is the same as starlink so deorbit um there is a you know another possibility which is putting them in some kind of um graveyard orbit they call it um but for now it's just the orbit what goes into making a great like you guys have a bunch of mechanical engineers satellite engineers like what goes actually into the engineering of solving this and what are the core competencies you look for yeah so as mentioned the two biggest challenges are the thermal and and uh the high radiation environment of space um so for the thermals we've got for example the guy from nasa's jet propulsion laboratory who designed the radiator or all of the thermal system for the europa clipper mission that was nasa's largest most expensive deep space mission ever he also designed the thermos on the um firefly lunar lander and for three of the nasa payloads and then another guy from amazon kuiper or leo constellation now who's lead thermal engineer there and then a bunch of people from spacex for the thermal side of things and then for the radiation and testing side of things my co-founder Addy has previously launched a bunch of GPUs and did all this kind of testing.

18:21Has anything surprised you from the testing?

18:26Philip Johnston:A few things but this is like our core IP we're a bit tight-lipped about some of the things It's okay, it's a friendly audience You very much seem like a SpaceX Elon Maxi based on some of the things you've said yeah what do you think of some of the alternative uh space launch companies um i'm very you know hopeful and positive about them in general but i mean elon i mean you guys have a massive space exposition so you guys are presumably spacex maxis too um and what a great investment from sean by the way like i think it was sean um um spacex like i think sean said it's the best company ever i do think spacex is the best company ever i think they're like unbelievable what they're pulling off um so they're now they're just so far ahead of everybody else like the other companies that could do you need a reusable upper stage to be anywhere close to cost competitive so you have stoke space relativities potentially going to look at it um i think that new glenn is going to the the blue origin rocket they haven't announced it but they've started hiring for heat shield engineers and you would only do that if you have reusable upstage um and then rocket lab i don't think we're even trying so even if they were to start now you've got a five to ten year long development cycle on a reusable upstage and to that end you guys partner with them uh they are they're your launch partner um how does it feel to to be to be building building something where you know now elon has also stated that his intention is to put a lot of a lot of data center capacity up in space yeah yeah uh i mean so space is an amazing partners like our company definitely wouldn't exist without the writer program and in general they're like extremely um you know they they work hard to foster the whole ecosystem i mean they launch their own competitors they launch uh amazon leo the kuiper constellation they launch one way but should both direct competitors to uh starlink and they open source their patterns and things like that so yeah we love working with spacex um in terms of like the way that i think this plays out because you're right now they're going extremely aggressively into building their own data centers so SpaceX will have a lower cost base than us because they own the launch I think the way that we fit into this is is kind of twofold um number one SpaceX are mainly going to be serving their own workloads so Grok and Tesla and others they may offer a third-party cloud service but as I understand there's no intention to offer a box that people can put their own chips on and then which is the core um offering that we have which is we essentially give people a box and it has power calling and connectivity and then they can put whatever chip architecture they want in there and sell to whichever customers they want so you can think of us more like equinix whilst spacex might be more like a aws or something like that um but um so they will have a lower cost base than us but we will have a lower cost base than all of the hyperscalers so the way i see this playing out if it's true that on a sort of five to ten year time frame most new data center capacity is being deployed in space what's going to happen is in three years once starship is flying frequently all of the hyperscalers are going to realize this and they're going to be like oh shit like if we don't have access to space compute we are screwed because we can't scale anywhere near as fast as those that do and so at that point they have three options i think so one is you know they can um pay elon for his space data center capacity and for sure some of them will do that that would be a good option some of them won't um you know i think lots of um it seems like unlikely that open ai or meta or google or microsoft would do that or they can start building their own satellites again some of them might do that it seems unlikely i mean google for example say they're doing what we're doing what they're actually doing is they're paying planet labs to do a demo in 2027 um which i mean yeah it seems like they're not moving particularly aggressively if they are doing that um or they'll look around and they'll say okay who has the most we need to move quickly on this like who has the most advanced capability in the market and at that point we'll be by far the most advanced in terms of what's deployed on orbit and the engineering team and all the ip that we have um so i think at that point we've become an interesting partner with those guys um and i do mean partner not necessarily just acquisition target you know i think there is a a relation a customer relationship where we provide the infrastructure energy and they they do the uh the cloud providing part of it well yeah and i have the business model question then why choose the equinex business model versus aws or even akamai it's a good question yeah we've been certainly looking at the cloud um like being a cloud provider ourselves in the initial early days we will probably have to do something like that because um nobody's gonna trust us with their chips until we've proved it it works for a few few times um we would much rather be an infrastructure and energy play than a cloud provider and the reason is our core like the core ip of the company and the core skill that we're good at is building satellites that can dissipate heat and protect you from radiation we don't necessarily want to rebuild you know aws has spent 20 years building an incredible application layer on top of aws and customers don't necessarily want you know to not be able to use that functionality um and so the other point of it is the most expensive part of all of this is the chips and we would rather have somebody else finance the chips and you know they can decide whatever chip architecture they want and all the rest of it yeah maybe in the in in much further down the line it uh it will make sense for us to have a cloud offering but um initially i think there's a great business and it's also much higher margin no yeah depending on which way you look at it it can have a much higher margin yeah okay i have a question about real estate yep how does real estate work in space because yeah earlier you were saying one of the issues on on earth is running out of physical real estate to go build data centers on.

24:22Philip Johnston:How does real estate work in space? And as space gets more crowded, how do you think it will work? Yeah. I mean, for now, it's essentially first come, first serve. And so we've just filed for a constellation of 88 ,000. It would allow us to deploy about - Who do you file with? In the US, you file with the FCC. If you're going to interact with US ground stations, you have to. If not, which actually in the state, we won't. You can pick any regulator in the world. And then they are under the ITU, the um the sort of global governing body it's weird that the fcc manages this but like i also think that's weird um i think it's a legacy from the days when the only thing satellites did was communication and rf spectrum and things like that now they're gonna now they're doing much more it's um um it's a bit of a legacy hangover that the fcc is so real estate today is first come first serve how about 10 years from now 10 years from now i expect it will be that certainly the most valuable slots will get filled up and then it will probably be that whoever got them first will have the right to sell them.

25:26Pat's about to figure out how to be our overlord, landlord in space right now. Big time space commercial real estate guy. All right, question about security. How does security work in space? So let's say a bunch of critical workloads are running on your satellites and somebody decides to attack them. How does that work?

25:44Philip Johnston:Yeah. I mean, we have a very good precedent for this, which is the Starlink satellites so um like in ukraine for example the military is using them so if russia it's not that russia hasn't tried or doesn't want to take out starting satellites they definitely do want to it's a lot easier to blow up a data center even if you're russia to blow up a data center in virginia than it is to blow up a data center moving at 27 000 kilometers an hour um in low earth orbit um and so if that were to happen i mean that would be considered an act of war um um where where the starlink satellites are flying right now they're flying much lower than they used to and so there's no sort of real risk of a kessler type uh of like a chain effect destroying low-width orbit um so yeah i mean the u.s that is the primary function of space forces to they're now building a whole bunch of interceptors and things to deter space yeah exactly and i i just have trouble visualizing how big space is so this may be a gigantically dumb question but as we get to this kind of dyson sphere like there's 100 gigawatts more than that in space yeah is it does it get to the point where there's just less light coming through the atmosphere because we have so much up there in ellio that's a great question um not the way that we've designed it um which is we're going to fly in this what they call a dawn dusk sun synchronous orbit and it's actually good for us it's good for astronomy it's good for the fact you don't block stuff out so like let's say this is the earth or let's say like this is the sun and this is the earth it's not like we're flying around like this we fly over the poles and so we never cast a shadow on the earth and we also never in earth's eclipse so we never go behind the shadow of the earth either interesting yeah so and it's great because it means we don't we're only visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk yeah and so we don't then have problems with astronomy and all the rest of it yeah okay there's been some as as data centers in space has become a almost a mimetic thing thanks to you uh there's also been some fierce criticism of it um what do you think is the chief criticism you know what actually resonates to of the criticism and what would you say is unfounded yeah um i think things like the thermal problem is is like pretty easily solvable um sometimes people put a cost equation out where they're still using the falcon 9 launch cost and you know i say to people like if you don't think the launch costs are going to kind of come down then we're like a terrible business if you do then you know we may be the biggest business ever um the one that not many people talk about but there's actually probably the most significant is we need the chips not to have a higher failure rate in space than on earth because the chips are such an expensive part of what we're doing even if they have like a 10 higher failure rate that would basically wipe out all of the savings from the um from the energy speaking of what are the components of the ideal space data center we sort of simplify and just say gpus in space gpus cpus memory cooling like what what all has to go in the box yeah it's much simpler than most satellites okay because most satellites for example the styling satellites a huge portion of mass and the cost is these phased array antennas we don't need any anything like that um so it's pretty simple it's um solar panels radiators the box like the bus the chips and the chips obviously then come with memory uh motherboard power system um although we need very small batteries um you can't send power directly from the solar panels to the chips so you need some are in there but we don't need to have 24 hours of battery storage which you do for most data centers on earth um but that's basically it one reaction wheel because which is extremely unusual most satellites have at least three reaction wheels they're very heavy because they need to turn the satellite so as it spins up it needs to turn the satellite we only need one because the satellite's very long and you have this gravity this like natural stabilization from the gravity gradient between the closest point to the earth and the furthest away point to the earth and so you need to need a reaction wheel in this axis and it's not going to move either this way or this way um and then two lasers for communication and so you can strip out a lot of the stuff that goes into land-based data centers then yeah lots of the stuff i mean chillers cooling towers batteries backup power um ac to dc converters um yeah there's a whole bunch of things we can strip out like that's why so like a huge component of the cost saving that most people don't talk about most people are talking about the fact okay let's say we can do three cents per kilowatt hour on the energy um versus eight cents per kilowatt hour that's one part of it the second part of it is our um infrastructure cost is instead of you know you're looking at 15 to 20 million dollars per megawatt for new infrastructure for a data center on earth so that's all the things like chillers cooling towers batteries backup um for us it's only less than five million dollars per megawatt and that's because it's just literally solar panels radiators there's like nothing else really you said three cents versus eight cents is that roughly where you think the power costs are coming in uh our all-in energy cost in the end state will be much lower than half a cent per kilowatt hour including the launch cost wow yeah the three cents is what we've signed for with one of the uh with one of our like lois yeah okay i see why this is gonna be one of the biggest big businesses all the time um how are you thinking about sequencing out do you have customers already do you have contracts lined up like what do you think will be the first workloads that you're running commercially in space yeah so we've sequenced it where um you know there's a bit of uncertainty about the timeline in starship and so the first few satellites are designed to provide edge and cloud services for other spacecraft particularly military um and government satellites and earth observation satellites and so yeah we'll be running workloads for uh various military customers we already are actually on star cloud one um and you can basically keep the business running for as long as it takes to keep until starship is ready on those types of contracts you know they're on the order of a thousand times more dollars per hour for gpu time than a terrestrial contract would be or if you're competing with terrestrial so that's this one we're launching later this year we're launching another one next year very similar star cloud 2 and star cloud 2.1 um and we can basically just keep doing that so starship would delay two years or three years we can just keep launching these um you know edge nodes for other spacecraft um and then as starship ramps up then we'll be launching the star cloud 3 satellite and that's the first one which is cost competitive with terrestrial data centers they're your space customers is there a reason they're they can't just run their workloads on land-based data centers and beam it up versus yeah yeah the main reason is um we're hugely constrained on the amount of data you can downlink from space to earth so for example like a SAR satellite synthetic aperture radar they might be collecting five gigabytes of data a second then they have to wait for a ground station because they they're only transmitting data through this very slow RF at the moment um when they're above a ground station they might be getting one gigabit a second data rate gigabit not gigabyte so much slower than um you know the amount of data they're collecting and so right now they just throw away 90 of the data they collect or they just or it's just not used um um and so in future if you know any satellite that can connect in with an optical terminal to the transport layer like the sda space development agency has this transport layer will be able to connect to us they can ship enormous amounts of data to us through optical in space and then we can run inference workloads on that in space and that might be for example identifying a vessel in a normal you know they might send us 10 terabytes of data of just ocean we can then identify the location of a vessel in that um at the moment they don't have the processing power on board to do that.

33:31Interesting. So the initial workloads are likely to be data that is collected in space, processed in space.

33:37Philip Johnston:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. You spent a lot of time in space. Aliens. Great topic. I love this. I'm so excited. Great. Let's go. Are there aliens? There almost certainly has been aliens in our galaxy. There's almost certainly aliens alive in the universe. It doesn't look like there's an intelligent life in our galaxy right now um why do you say there almost certainly has been um if you're familiar with the fermi paradox like this like question of why yeah go ahead and explain it though so the fermi paradox is the idea it's we should see more life in our galaxy than we do or we should perhaps see life everywhere in our galaxy if there had been life anywhere on there's sort of 400 billion stars in our planet in our galaxy each with 10 planets so you're talking about 4 trillion planets in our galaxy alone and there's by the way a trillion trillion galaxies but just in our galaxy the milky way um and each one has been habitable for the last 10 billion years so we've got 4 trillion planets potentially habitable for the last um 10 billion years it would seem there's two possibilities either we are staggeringly rare and that is a possibility unbelievably rare we're literally the first to reach this level of complexity in our galaxy's history or intelligent life is somewhat short-lived now my working hypothesis at the moment is that intelligent life is somewhat short-lived and so yeah they call them the fermi great filters if we're extremely rare the first the fermi great filter is probably something like moving from single cellular life to multicellular life like that is extremely hard for life to do let's say um if the fermi great filter is in in front of us which personally i believe it is uh that means let's say once you hit super intelligence you know it wouldn't take very long for a swarm of a million killer ai drones to make mincemeat of both themselves and the planet um and we're building swarms of a million ai killer drones um so like yeah to me it wouldn't be surprising if in the next you know few hundred to a thousand years um we do not pass the great filter um maybe it's a little bit dumerism like the other alternative is we're literally the first and i'm quite happy to continue living life as if we might be the first um you know i think we should send probes out to other stars and i think we should um you know explore expand and explore the galaxy and all the rest of it yeah but but in terms of why do i think um there's been others yeah i just think it seems pretty unlikely if on four trillion planets for 10 billion years were literally the first to have reached this level of complexity all of them would have probably seen they would have all understood the fermi paradox too they would have all looked around i mean like wait because it only takes one million years or two million years to colonize the whole galaxy from the point we're at now you know even with the voyager probe technology you can get to alpha centauri in about 50 000 years which is like the blink of an eye in galactic and evolutionary time scales so you know we could send self-replicating probes to every star in the galaxy within about two million years like we don't see that anywhere any any evidence of dyson spheres or intelligence in our galaxy at all um and so yeah to me it's pretty likely there's been intelligence in our galaxy and it has not survived very long what's your opinion yeah well i don't know if i have an opinion on that but i had a question for you as a follow-up yeah which is um the well by the way on that the other thing that i think is an interesting theory is the you know ants by the side of the road hypothesis which is intelligent life is not short-lived we're just irrelevant to it um so i i like that too but you would see dyson spheres all across our galaxy like it wouldn't be difficult like if you're an ant in the middle of manhattan you're not like where are the humans like you know like the humans are pretty obvious you know yeah yeah um yeah the question i though is you mentioned um earlier talking about uh stick an optimus in a space suit and sending it to moon and so clearly you've thought about kind of the steps to becoming an interplanetary species you know starting with the moon and mars and whatever how do you see that rolling out um i i mean i the only thing i have to really go by is the plans that elon has been putting out it seems like that's by far the most likely um like the artemis programs honestly seem like a bit of a disaster um but elon's roadmap is unbelievably like i think they can actually execute on that so yeah and there's a reason to do it now um like building mass drivers and shooting ai satellites from the moon is like an extremely strong economic incentive for getting to the moon um and then once we've done that we'll go to mars so yeah in my lifetime i think we'll have people on mars i think we'll have you know cities on the moon in my lifetime what do you think are the best business models in space other than data centers definitely data centers are the best one uh there's a whole bunch um i think asteroid mining will be a huge business at some point you know it might take a little while um you know tourism lunar hotels lower four-bit hotels will be a big have you reserved one of the slots from skylar gru uh i don't have 200 grand i think that's how much it cost but no i i think it's probably quite way off and i think spacex is probably very well positioned to do that um and he long even said he was going to enable people to get to the moon so um and then what else i think yeah manufacturing in space will be a big business um there's many more communications businesses that will be built manufacturing what in space well at the moment you know companies like varda are doing um crystal structures particularly for medicine and other things but that's purely because they want to take advantage of the lower of the microgravity i think over time just because you can get access to more energy in space it will be um you can do lots of things if for example if you wanted to do refining of material from the lunar surface or from asteroids you you know you can use the energy in space to do that yeah similar to the alien question uh do you think ai is going to help us understand the universe like the universe conscious things like that i hope so yeah yeah i mean ai will understand the universe a lot better than we do um like what's coming with ai is something that's a trillion trillion times smaller than all of humanity combined um so it will have much better grasp on the the reality of the universe than we do and whether it's able to explain that to our dumb human brains is another question but what are you most excited for it to teach you i would love to understand more about consciousness i think that would be the most interesting thing to me particularly the hard problem of consciousness and why um seemingly robotic you know things like humans have quality or intentionality and uh have sensations and like the yeah just consciousness in general i'd be very interested to understand what about you same answer oh yeah nice how do you have a on that one how do i make how do i maximize multiple money returns multiple money returns for limited partners while helping founders built legendary companies from um no you guys are using ai quite a lot internally right we are yeah so i did this when we went to fundraise i was like okay i'm gonna ask gemini which space data center startup it would invest in if it was like what did it say star cloud i was like yes good gemini maybe it's because it knows that i run stock cloud i don't it's a bit sycopantic but i tried it with different windows and like but if i was a vc i would 100 do the same thing like maybe it's more sophisticated than that we're doing everything so for example there's a lot of signal and uh what kind of infrastructure and tools that the models recommend you to use and those oh that's gonna be so we're reminding that right now as an example there's just so many ways to be creative i think yeah and like our younger people are probably the most token hungry token consumptive and they're each kind of figuring out different creative ways to do things yeah i posted on our slack yesterday i tried to be like slightly this might sound like um this might sound like a weird way to phrase this but i posted like monthly reminder that i'm not going to be happy until every engineer is spending ten thousand dollars a month on tokens yeah yeah and i know they're gonna they're sitting there going that surely it's not the right metric to track but i just don't want them to be like i want to i want to really drum it into them like this is literally what i expect and i will be happy when i'm spending 10 grand a month on tokens so if like sometimes they come to me and say can we spend 300 can we spend 300 bucks a month on grok 4 heavy it's like uh yes in the end state how much of gdp do you think will be spent on inference 99.9 wow so as in i think we're building a dyson sphere and a dyson sphere will be almost all of the physical economy um so yeah you know in sort of 500 to a thousand years um 99.9 percent of the economy will be space compute and almost all of that will be inference unfortunately a thousand years is outside of our investment yeah time frame but i agree in the end i mean it depends on my end state yeah in the next few decades it's going have you seen the percentage the the charts of like percentage of um electricity consumption that goes into compute or anything like this that that graph is not stopping until it gets to 99.9 yeah awesome this was so cool uh philip thank you for joining us today you live in the future and you brought that future to us i think faster than we could have ever hoped and so thank you for joining us today this is an awesome conversation thank you so much for having me thank you thank you

43:57Thank you.