Hey readers, it's the 42nd issue of the White Pill, your favorite newsletter covering developments at the frontier of space, science, engineering, AI, and more.

Also — slight change in this newsletter. Instead of the Space section, we're starting it with a plug for a piece we recently published on the White Pill, Aaron Slodov's Techno-Industrial Manifesto. While detailed and somewhat technical, his piece advocates for the unfortunately rare position that we're pursuing a post-industrial society at our own peril. I view the piece as an extremely important update to the narrative (and, of course, a white pill). Please give it a read.

Also, I was on the Tech Policy Podcast on Wednesday discussing why we publish the White Pill, and the most mind-bending items from some of our past issues. The episode is an hour long — listen here.

OK — now let's get to it.

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"I believe all young people think about how they would like their lives to develop. When I did so I always arrived at the conclusion that life need not be easy provided only that it was not empty." — Lise Meitner, co-discoverer of nuclear fission

The post-industrial society is characterized by an economy primarily based information, services, and knowledge. To make that more concrete, here are example jobs in each of the above sectors:

• A typical job in the information sector is a data scientist

• A typical job in the services sector is a nurse

• A typical job in the knowledge sector is a university professor

It would be fair to characterize our country, for example, as post-industrial — services, finance, healthcare, technology, and education now constitute the largest portion of the U.S. GDP. Can you believe it?

There are also other types of societies, past and present. Of course, there are industrial societies, or those for which manufacturing and e.g., construction make up the majority of the country's GDP. There are also feudal societies, where a king owns all the land, and who divides the land up among his lords in exchange for military service, who themselves divide their portion among vassals, also in exchange for their military service; at the bottom of all this are peasants, who work the land in exchange for protection by their vassals, and the right to live on the land. We should also not forget hunter-gather societies and agricultural societies, though I won't go into any more detail about the types of societies moving forward.

Our model of the future is at best characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, and at worst, completely unknowable. Regardless, it's worth reflecting on the question of whether or not we want to live in an increasingly post-industrial society, which implies more dependence on our ideological adversaries, a higher degree of geopolitical instability, and, perhaps, a future closer to the WEF's "You'll own nothing and be happy" model of what's to come. This week in the White Pill, Aaron Slodov — co-founder of Atomic Industries — explains how this is true with his epic Techno-Industrial Manifesto.

What if, for example, our manufacturing sector was so prolific that nuking us would be the end of the world for everyone else? What if we transformed our industrial base such that making physical products was as easy as making software? What if we could "get to the point where it only takes a few people to operate a factory, just like running a SaaS company, and instead of an over-saturation of apps, we'll have a glut of production capacity waiting to chew through the next job"?

I find the way Aaron is thinking, here, to be extremely important, and alarmingly rare. If you have the time, please give it a read.

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Space

Making history on the moon!! Well, kind of. I'll explain.

Last week we covered Intuitive Machines' lunar lander Odysseus. Launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Valentines Day, Odysseus is part of NASA's CLPS program, an initiative in which private companies bid on lunar payloads NASA wants to get up to the moon in advance of the Artemis missions, which will get American astronauts back on the lunar surface for the first time in over 50 years. More specifically, the purpose of CLPS is, "ahead of humans... to get up as much science, technology, and exploration as possible." Very cool, love it.

Odysseus was scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface around 6pm ET on Thursday after orbiting the moon just a few times. But a few hours before scheduled touchdown, its navigation system failed; some frantic engineering work then allowed the lander to use an on-board demo (previously payload) as the actual landing system (this is crazy). More on this specific part:

[Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing] as a tech demo and as a test, we weren't planning to use it... for the actual mission... but now we are. So, basically, it is the primary system to help provide the velocity and altitude information.

And from my best friend Phil Metzger:

Imagine you built an experimental payload and it is going on a test ride to the Moon. Then the spacecraft engineers ask if they can use your *payload* to *navigate* for *lunar landing*, something never planned for, and they write a software patch in lunar orbit, and it WORKS 🔥

A few hours behind schedule, Odysseus did make a successful landing near the south pole of the moon, we were told... But then on Friday, Intuitive Machines announced that the lander is on its side, much like SLIM, the Japanese's lander that touched down on the lunar surface on January 19. Bummer. (@NASA) (@Int_Machines)

• But also Odysseus snapped some super cool selfies with the earth in the background shortly after reaching LEO (below). (Higher res here)

Remotely controlled surgery test on the ISS. Earth-bound surgeons remotely controlled a small robot aboard the ISS last weekend, successfully conducting the first simulated surgery in orbit. The robot, stored inside a box about the size of a microwave, is equipped with a camera and two arms. The key difficulty with the operation was the time lag between the surgeons back home and the ISS, about 0.85 seconds; the surgeons did work on "simulated tissue... made up of rubber bands." More, from phys.org:

"The experiment tested standard surgical techniques like grasping, manipulating and cutting tissue. The simulated tissue is made up of rubber bands," Virtual Incision said in a statement.

This piece of news reminds me of an item we wrote up a few weeks ago about Airbus' plans to send a 3D metal printer to the ISS, basically because if a tool breaks they can't just go to Lowes to get another. Similarly, as we send more people up to low earth orbit (LEO) and beyond, they won't be able to just pop into the nearest urgent care in the event of a medical emergency.

Water farther out. Last week, we included an item about a possible young ocean under the thick, icy crust of Saturn's moon Mimas.

This week came news that Eris and Makemake, two Kuiper Belt objects roughly the size of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, are showing evidence of geothermal activity. (The Kuiper Belt is located about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, beyond the orbit of Neptune; in fact Pluto is considered to be in the Belt.)

The JWST observed all this, and noted what appears to be relatively recent deposits of methane on their surfaces. The methane's isotope ratio (isotopes are variants of an element that have the same number of protons but differ in the number of neutrons within their atomic nuclei, which effects the element's atomic mass; isotope ratio is the relative abundance of isotopes of a particular element in a given sample — in this case, the sample is on Eris and Makemake) suggests geochemical origin, implying hot cores and active geochemistry beneath the surface of these worlds — possibly even allowing liquid water oceans to exist.

So basically once we reach Mars and get to the work of creating a magnetic field so our terraforming is actually effective, we need to move one of these dwarf planets into orbit around it, giving Mars a large moon to stabilize its tilt, and allowing tides in the newly reformed Martian oceans that we will create (only after terraforming). That's what everyone's saying at least... (Science Daily)

More:

• NASA successfully deployed one quadrant of a huge solar sail on January 30 (on Earth, not in space). In theory, these solar sails might one day propel spacecraft at speeds far greater than chemical rockets can achieve. The full sail will measure 17,780 sq. ft. and has a thickness of 2.5 microns, less than the width of a human hair. You can watch it deploy here.

• Astronomers think that T Coronae Borealis, a binary star system 3,000 light years away in the Northern Star constellation, will erupt in a nova soon; 3,000 light years away, it will be visible to the naked eye for about a week — longer with binoculars. (@NASAUniverse)

• NASA is looking for participants in its second of three planned one year-simulated Mars missions. The deadline for applying is April 2nd. The habitat, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is called Mars Dune Alpha. The mission will include simulating “the challenges of a mission on Mars, including resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors. Crew tasks include simulated spacewalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, exercise, and crop growth.” (NASA)

• A passing airplane caught an amazing angle (image from video above) on Japan’s launch of its new H3 rocket as it rises through the cloud deck on its way to space. So cool. (@Rainmaker1973)

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Energy, Engineering, AI

Small modular reactor in one day. Sheffield Forgemasters — a heavy engineering firm in Sheffield, England — successfully demonstrated a new technique for welding a nuclear reactor vessel that reduces the time it takes to do this from a year DOWN TO A SINGLE DAY. The time nuclear vessel-grade welds consumes is a huge time bottleneck for building nuclear power plants, and reducing it — especially by this much — could make it a lot easier and cheaper to get accelerate our country into a new nuclear era. The welding method here is called electron beam welding; great explainer thread here. (New Atlas)

New Solid Li-ion Conductor Discovered with AI. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Liverpool used AI to discover a synthetic material that has high enough Lithium ion (Li-ion) conductivity to replace the liquid electrolytes in current batteries, promising improvements in both safety and energy capacity.

For context, liquid electrolytes are commonly used in lithium ion batteries, which are widely in use in electric cars. The electrolytes facilitate the movement of lithium ions between anode and cathode, or discharge (energy use) and charge (energy draw); for our purposes, they basically facilitate the batteries' primary functions of giving energy and receiving it. Unfortunately, liquid electrolytes are flammable and less dense than solids, meaning they're suboptimal in terms of safety and capacity.

The fact that the researchers used AI to find the material shouldn't be ignored. One question surrounding the AI hype of the past few years is whether AI is limited to rapidly iterating on what it’s been trained on, or if it can lead to new, breakthrough discoveries. This new material suggests AI will become a key player in the discovery and design of new materials.

Professor Matt Rosseinsky, from the University of Liverpool’s Department of Chemistry said, “The structure of this material changes previous understanding of what a high-performance solid-state electrolyte looks like.” Let's go. (news.liverpool.ac.uk)

New organic battery material out of MIT. Chemists from MIT designed an organic material that could replace cobalt in lithium-ion batteries. The material, which is estimated to cost anywhere from a third to a half of the price of cobalt, is made of materials already commercially available in large quantities. It may even speed up the charging rates for electric vehicles.

In the lithium-ion batteries found in electric vehicles, the battery is recharged when lithium ions flow from a positively charged electrode, called a cathode, to a negatively charged electrode called an anode (of course, see above). Today, most cathodes are made from cobalt, which is stable and energy dense.

Unfortunately, cobalt is a scarce metal, and 73% of it (in 2022) was mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mining carries high environmental and financial costs, and researchers have long searched for an alternative. Lamborghini has already licensed the patent on the technology, while the lab continues to develop more alternative battery materials, including the possible replacement of lithium. Nice. (SciTechDaily)

More:

• Washington State University created the smallest, lightest, and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever (pictured above). Potential use cases: artificial pollination, search and rescue, surgery. (SciTechDaily)

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The White Pill Investment Index tracks investments in companies developing interesting, exciting, forward-thinking products. Deals are sourced using a combination of Pitchbook and reach outs to each company.

• Treating disease with gene editing — CRISPR Therapuetics, a company that uses gene editing technology to treat serious genetic diseases like sickle cell and Type 1 diabetes (the revolutionary approach involves modifying or correcting precise regions of DNA), is in talks to receive $280 million of development capital

• AI for safe space travel — LeoLabs, a company that uses a global radar network, data processing, and an AI-powered event detection algorithm to help customers conduct safe space travel (ie, avoid satellite collisions), raises a $94 million Series B

• Detecting methane leaks using airplanes — Kairos Aerospace, a company that uses aircraft-mounted cameras to monitor methane production facilities and pipelines (they’ve surveyed over 450,000 wells and 200,000 pipelines to-date) raises a $52 million Series D

• Robotic arms for surgeries — SS Innovations, a company that uses modular robotic arms for minimally invasive surgeries (the arm can be equipped with 30 surgical tools, including forceps and dissectors), filed to go public with an offering amount of $50 million

• AI copilot coworker — Magic, a startup that is training their own frontier-scale AI model that focuses on code generation and develops reliable ways to align with human values, raises $117 million of venture funding

• A money-saving satellite bus — K2 Space, a company that deploys highly capable satellites using their next generation satellite bus to reduce costs (less than $15 million per satellite launch compared to over $100 million for traditional large satellites), raises $50 million of venture funding

• Windows that generate energy from the sun — Next Energy Technologies, a company that develops windows capable of harnessing and converting infrared and ultraviolet light from the sun into electricity (while still allowing natural light to pass through), raises $10.6 million through a combination of Series C and Series C-2A venture funding

• Capturing carbon from seawater using sunlight — Banyu Carbon, a company behind an innovative carbon removal system that uses sunlight to drive a chemical reaction releasing CO2 from seawater (since seawater acts as a sponge for much of Earth’s CO2 emissions), raises $8.5 million of seed funding

• Growing meat from animal cells — Simple Planet, a South Korean company that uses cellular technology to grow meat from animal cells, raises KRW 8 billion ($5.9 million USD) of venture funding

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Medicine

Treating liver cancer with microrobots. Every week it seems we get closer to the technology of the sci-fi we grew up reading. This week, it’s a group of researchers using magnet-guided microrobots in an MRI device to treat liver cancer. The biocompatible microrobots are injected via an implantable catheter, then form “particle trains” that are piloted by the magnetic field of the MRI.

Until now, the force of gravity of the microrobots has exceeded the magnetic force, which meant tumors higher than the injection site were difficult to reach. But thanks to the development of a new algorithm, the microrobots were able to travel to the arterial branches which feed the tumor. By varying the direction of the magnetic field, researchers were able to accurately guide them. (Science Daily)

More:

• The first patient with an implant from Neuralink is now successfully able to move a mouse cursor by thinking, according to an announcement by Elon Musk. Next steps are "trying to get as many button presses as possible from thinking. So that's what we're currently working on is: can you get left mouse, right mouse, mouse down, mouse up... We want to have more than just two buttons." (Ars Technica)

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Fun stuff

• Check out this video of two snail shells from different species, living in different oceans, that are the precise inverse shape of one another — allowing them to be threaded together. It’s because of something called Raup’s Model, which describes the growth of gastropod shells, and follows a mathematical model that holds across species. Weirdly satisfying. (@Rainmaker1973)

• Hey bananas are back. Australia and New Zealand will soon be growing Cavendish bananas — the most popular variety in the world — that have been genetically modified to be resistant to a fungus that has been killing them. Score one for science. (QUT)

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Touch grass this weekend, everyone.

— Brandon Gorrell

This issue of the White Pill was written with an enormous amount of help from Owen Lewis and Ryan Kirk.