In this episode, we talk to a guy who's been working on space travel for a long time, and now he's working on a rocket that looks a lot like the movie "The Dictator" and has twice the thrust of the Saturn V. And it's going to orbit the Earth. We also talk about what it's like to be a space pilot, and what it means to be an interplanetary pilot. And of course, there's a little bit of Star Trek thrown in there. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg and Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional Compositions: Ian McKellen Producer: Ben Koppel Audio Engineer: Christian Blanchard Technical Engineer: Matt Newell Mixer: Will Pinnaman Special thanks to Jeff Perla Compositor: Ben Kaufmann Art Direction: Matthew Boll Jeff Perlan Thanks to John Rocha Our theme music is by Ian Dorsch and our ad music is "Space Junk" by Haley Shaw Thank you for the intro and outro music is , "Space Travel" by Ian McElroy by Ian McKellan (credited to the riff "Goodbye Outer Space Traveler" by The Good Morning America" by . , by , and "Good Morning America by John Romboy & by Bobby Lord, by Mitch Albom, and . We hope you enjoy this episode is a beautiful and thank you for listening to this episode's music is beautiful by The Lonely Planet by our sponsor, ? is . Please leave us a review on Apple Music is on Podchaser, and we'll be listening to it on SoundCloud in the next episode of the podcast Good Morning by Shady_ and we also have a review by , we'll have a good one on the pod by You can help us out in the podcast if you're listening to the podcast next week, we'll find us out there on Tuesday, we're looking out for good listening to us on the podcast?
00:01:45.000How long do you think it's gonna be before you have like regular flights with that where you can take off and land and like an airplane where it would be very consistent with our extra pointy rocket you were your extra pointy rocket Do you mean Earth-to-Earth transport?
00:03:46.000So when you're looking and you're scaling towards the future and you're looking at mistakes or corrections, improvements, and all these different things, that's how you come up with this figure of approximately two years.
00:04:00.000If current trends continue, if you plot the points on the curve of progress, then we should be doing regular orbital flights with a high probability of safe landing in two years.
00:05:24.000So when you're doing this and you're developing these systems thinking about regular trips to other planets, but you're not just trying to get into orbit right now.
00:05:36.000You're trying to get into orbit with something that eventually could scale up.
00:05:42.000So the really hard thing is we need to have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket where all elements of the rocket are reused and they're reused quickly, like an aircraft.
00:07:21.000I don't find myself wanting more sleep than six.
00:07:26.000So when, like, with the Saturn V and the space shuttles and all these other rockets, they would have these parts that would get the ship up into space, but they would descend down to Earth and crash into the ocean and they would never use them again.
00:09:54.000They're brittle, and their coefficient of thermal expansion is different from metal, so metal will expand and contract differently from the tiles.
00:10:06.000And the tiles also get super hot, while metal can be super cold, because it's got cryogenic fluid behind it.
00:10:14.000You've got this differential expansion and contraction, which makes the gaps in the tiles expand and contract.
00:10:21.000But if the gaps get too big, then you get kind of the hot gas, sort of the plasma gets in down, down, get plasma in the crack, and it's not as bad.
00:10:30.000And then you're going to melt the metal behind it.
00:10:33.000But if they're too close, then they bang together and they crack.
00:10:37.000So you've got to get it just right, where the gap's just right, and then they can, the way that they're attached to the body, they can move around a little bit.
00:10:48.000So there has to be some sort of room to move.
00:10:50.000It can't be one large piece of ceramic that you fit over the front.
00:10:56.000Yeah, you can't really make such a giant piece of ceramic, because you've got to, well, I guess you'd have like a super gigantic oven.
00:13:29.000Well, in the case of Falcon 9, the upper stage burns up on re-entry.
00:13:35.000Falcon 9 has the fairing where the satellites are contained in the top, and once it gets to space where the atmosphere is thin, it's still a long way from orbit.
00:13:47.000But it's in space, so you no longer need, the satellite doesn't need to be protected by the nose cone, the fairing.
00:13:55.000And so that, it sort of splits in two and falls away.
00:14:00.000And then, so with Falcon 9, we recover the fairing halves and we recover the booster, but we lose the upper stage.
00:15:09.000Like the same computer that controls the big rocket controls the tiny rocket.
00:15:14.000So even just in terms of the computer, the electronics weight becomes vanishingly small in a big rocket, but it is significant in a small rocket.
00:15:25.000Do you think there'll ever be a time where there's an alternative source of propulsion outside of a burning fuel?
00:15:32.000Like, is it possible that someone would develop a nuclear propulsion or some other method other than just burning large amounts of gasoline or rocket fuel?
00:15:44.000There's no way around Newton's third law, really.
00:16:12.000So the only way to move is to react against yourself, to essentially shoot out gas at very high velocity and to transfer momentum from, you know,
00:16:28.000to that gas that is going that way very rapidly.
00:16:32.000So you want to accelerate a small amount of mass very fast in order to have you, the large amount of mass, accelerate slowly.
00:17:04.000So ironically, everything will go electric except for rockets.
00:17:10.000Now, you can make rockets indirectly electric by using electricity to create the fuel.
00:17:19.000So you can take CO2 and H2O and create methane and oxygen from that.
00:17:29.000So methane is CH4 and oxygen is O2. And for example, on Mars, which is a primarily CO2 atmosphere, and there's a lot of water ice, is you can mine the ice, take the ice, And the CO2 from the atmosphere.
00:17:48.000I'm simplifying this a lot, but run it over a catalyst and give it a lot of energy and you can get CH4 and O2 and you can graciously get your propellant on Mars.
00:18:01.000The rocket, by the way, is mostly oxygen.
00:18:03.000So for Starship, we're almost 80% oxygen.
00:18:52.000You can think, like, space itself is curved, like it's like a funnel.
00:18:57.000Like, if there's something that has a lot of mass, it's creating like a funnel.
00:19:03.000And so, in the same way, like, if you have a coin funnel, and the coin thinks it's going in a straight line, pretty much, you know.
00:19:19.000I'm trying to convey what gravity is like, like a funnel.
00:19:24.000If you want to get out of that gravity well, you actually need to go very fast parallel to the Earth's surface.
00:19:32.000The faster you go parallel to the Earth's surface, the further out you spin.
00:19:35.000Or you can think of a marble in a funnel.
00:19:37.000If you want to get that marble to go far out, you just spin it sideways and it'll spiral out.
00:19:44.000Conversely, if you Just due to the friction of the air friction and the rolling friction, it will slow down a little bit if you don't give it any push, and it will slowly spiral in.
00:19:56.000As it gets closer, it spins faster and faster.
00:20:51.000So we're about eight light minutes away from the Sun, Mars is about 12. And Yeah, so when you want to go to Mars, you basically accelerate along the same path of Earth going around the Sun.
00:21:07.000And you time it such that your acceleration gives you an elliptical orbit around the Sun where the tip of the ellipse intersects with Mars.
00:21:17.000So Mars is going around, and you just time it to coincide with the tip of your ellipse being Mars.
00:21:25.000And that turns out to be about a six-month journey.
00:21:30.000I think, I mean, I could sort of see a way to make it happen in, say, three months, where the intersection with Mars would not be at the tip of the ellipse, but on the edge of the ellipse.
00:21:40.000Now, that would mean the tip of the ellipse is out near Jupiter.
00:21:43.000So, if you miss Mars, you're going to end up at Jupiter.
00:22:07.000And then Earth and Mars are only in the same sort of – there's only about a six-month period every two years when Earth and Mars are aligned such that you can do the transfer.
00:22:22.000You can certainly imagine that if Mars is on the other side of the sun, you can't get there because it's got to go through the sun.
00:22:42.000So if we are able to build or if humanity is able to build a city on Mars, people will probably remember which planetary conjunction they came on.
00:22:54.000It's not like you can just go all the time.
00:23:18.000Well, I think it's going to take a while to build a real civilization.
00:23:23.000The threshold that really matters is If we're getting past the Great Filter, do we have enough resources on Mars such that if the spaceships from Earth stop coming...
00:26:36.000But if there are no aliens, could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become interstellar?
00:26:47.000I want to be clear, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence for alien life on Earth.
00:26:54.000There's no direct evidence for alien life.
00:26:59.000No, you know, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien, you know, sighting or whatever, I'm like, listen, it's got to be at least as good as a 7-Eleven or ATM cam, okay?
00:27:13.000It's like, if somebody's got at least like an iPhone 1 level camera, like something, you know?
00:27:20.000The problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today, too.
00:27:41.000Lex Friedman interviewed him on his podcast, and I interviewed him as well.
00:27:44.000And if you ever get a chance to listen to Lex's conversation with him, it's really excellent.
00:27:49.000But this guy is a naval fighter pilot, and he talked about this thing that they tracked on radar that went from more than 60,000 feet above sea level to one foot in less than a second.
00:28:45.000Yeah, there was a New York Times article in 2017 that was detailing this, and there's a couple other different sightings that were very similar.
00:28:54.000They were trying to figure out what these things were and why, and it was also in the COVID relief package that the CIA was supposed to release.
00:29:03.000Yeah, the politicians are trying to figure out what all this shit is, and so they tried to get them to release all the information they have within 180 days.
00:29:11.000Honestly, I think I would know if there were aliens.
00:30:56.000I mean, we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things.
00:31:01.000If we were to find something like, let's say, a cube of titanium, just like a one-inch cube of titanium in the middle of the pyramid, I'd be like, aliens for sure.
00:31:11.000There's no way they could have made titanium back then.
00:32:12.000Nor are we seeing signals from any other solar system or anything like that.
00:32:20.000The thing is that on a galactic timescale, even with sublight travel, you could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy, even some of the neighboring galaxies.
00:32:31.000So if you said a million years and say there's no new physics, could you colonize the galaxy in a million years?
00:32:42.000So you would start with Mars, build bases on Mars, then use Mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands of years, easily.
00:32:51.000Yeah, just kind of like, you know, hop from one solar system to the next, and yeah.
00:33:41.000I mean, the Permian extinction event, that was a real rough one, where it's like well over 90% of all species died out.
00:33:50.000And that doesn't tell the whole story because a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and, you know, like sponges and stuff like that, you know.
00:35:01.000I'm in the Douglas Adams sort of school of thought, which is that the universe is the answer, and we need to figure out what questions to ask to better understand the answer that is the universe.
00:35:13.000So we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness, increase our understanding of the universe, to understand why are we here, where do we come from, where are we going, what's this all about?
00:35:26.000And in order to In order to, I don't know, just understand the meaning of life, we have to expand the scope and scale of life and the consciousness, which may be digital and biological in the future.
00:35:49.000And get past at least one of the great filters, which is to become a multi-planet species.
00:35:56.000A species that does not become multi-planetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external.
00:36:10.000We've got to be a multi-planet species.
00:36:15.000Do you want a future where we're out there among the stars exploring the universe, or do you want a future where we're stuck on Earth forever?
00:36:22.000I think we want the super exciting future where we're out there exploring the galaxy.
00:37:04.000Remember they had spaceships out there and motherships?
00:37:06.000They thought 1999, by then, for sure, it would happen.
00:37:11.000The problem is we need more Elon Musks.
00:37:14.000There's not a lot of people that really dedicate all their time and energy to do something like this.
00:37:19.000It's a really fascinating thing about the species.
00:37:22.000It takes a few unique individuals that are motivated To do something like this and have the resources and the intelligence and you can figure out how to organize people to get something like this done.
00:37:51.000But, yeah, I mean, part of the reason why SpaceX is still privately held, although we have a lot of investors and everyone at the company has given stock, is that the time horizon for SpaceX is long.
00:38:04.000You know, it's like, you know, what's the market for transporting things to Mars?
00:38:42.000Yeah, but then you've got to build out the base, and then you've got to build out the city.
00:38:51.000So the first thing you've got to build is, like, you've got to generate energy, so you've got a giant solar panel farm, and then you've got to have propellant production, so you've got to make the fuel and the oxygen, and you've got to grow food,
00:39:08.000grow plants, and all the things that are necessary for life support.
00:39:11.000So does everything have to be done in a greenhouse?
00:45:12.000Well, then they had subsequent voyages where they made high-resolution scans of the exact same area and it looked very different without the same shadows.
00:46:06.000So, you know, the smaller you are, the less, generally the less atmosphere you're going to have.
00:46:13.000So, yeah, so generating an atmosphere on Mars, it would eventually erode, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of years to billions of years type of thing.
00:46:36.000I mean, like if you look at, say, asteroids or, you know, they don't really have, like Sirius is a pretty big asteroid.
00:46:44.000But it doesn't really have an atmosphere.
00:46:46.000The moon doesn't really have an atmosphere.
00:46:48.000So, in fact, it doesn't have an atmosphere.
00:46:51.000Technically, there's a tiny amount of rarefied gas, but it's not a real atmosphere.
00:46:56.000Did you pay attention at all to the guy who was the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department, Avi Loeb, who was recently, there was a bunch of stories in the news because he believes that an object that came through our solar system in 2017 was possibly extraterrestrial in origin.
00:47:50.000Well, anyway, so I think a fundamental test of human civilization is, are we going to become a multi-planet civilization before something cataclysmic happens?
00:48:01.000Now, I'll be clear, I'm pretty optimistic about the future, so I'm not thinking like we're, you know, civilization is about to end anytime soon.
00:49:02.000Do you think there is a meaning to life?
00:49:08.000Well, I think arguably the meaning of life is to understand the nature of the universe and figure out what the meaning of life is.
00:49:20.000So, like I said, I think we don't quite know the right questions to ask.
00:49:25.000But if we learn more about the universe, if we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to ask the questions about the answer that is the universe.
00:49:36.000But when you keep going with that, like, where does it go?
00:53:06.000Yeah, it's interesting how much people adapt when they're faced with a real problem.
00:53:11.000Like, if we knew that we only had a certain amount of time left, like if we knew an asteroid was absolutely headed our way and it was going to kill most of the people on this planet, you would see people scrambling for something like that.
00:53:23.000Like, look, I moved to Texas just to get the fuck out of LA because I felt like that was dying.
00:53:30.000I was like, we've got to get out of here.
00:53:31.000And I never thought I was going to move out of L.A. like that.
00:53:35.000It happened very quickly, but people adapt when they realize that you have to do something.
00:53:42.000If we had to do something, we had to go to Mars and had to set up shop there.
00:53:47.000Yeah, I think it's important for the future of humanity and consciousness.
00:53:51.000And like I said, we want to get past the great filter.
00:53:54.000It might turn out that when we got there exploring the galaxy, we might find a whole bunch of dead one-planet civilizations.
00:54:02.000And they just never made it to the next planet.
00:54:11.000We'll go through the archaeological ruins of ancient Babylonians and Sumerians and trying to decode their writing, like what the hell would Linear B and hieroglyphics.
00:54:24.000Isn't that a problem with us now that everything has become digital?
00:54:27.000Everything's stored on microchips and hard drives and if something catastrophic happened, We're good to go.
00:54:41.000It's kind of problematic that things aren't chilled in stone.
00:54:43.000You know, they used to be chilled in stone, and we're like, okay, now, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to destroy stone, and stone lasts a long time.
00:55:13.000Yeah, it's not going to last for a long time.
00:55:16.000I mean, there are sort of aspects of our stuff that would last for a long time, but a lot of the interesting things are going to be lost forever.
00:55:26.000When we did the Falcon Heavy test flight...
00:55:31.000Normally when aerospace companies do like a rocket test flight, they put something boring on like a concrete block because they don't want to risk an expensive satellite.
00:55:42.000And so I was like, well, we've got to do something that's not very inspiring.
00:55:45.000You know, concrete blocks are one of the least inspiring things you can do.
00:55:48.000So I was talking to a friend of mine, and he said, hey, well, what about putting a Tesla on that?
00:55:54.000You know, I was like, hey, that's not a good idea.
00:56:07.000Maximum delta V. So I thought it would probably blow up, and I had this image of, like, man, it was like, you know, this thing could blow up on the pad, and then...
00:56:17.000And there's like a tire bouncing down the road, and then the Tesla logo just lands, bam, right in front of the camera.
00:56:24.000It's like one of the things, like this is a movie, you know.
00:56:27.000That's kind of one of the possible outcomes.
00:56:30.000And unfortunately, it didn't blow up, and now my car is orbiting Mars.
00:56:36.000So now in that car, so now hopefully somebody in the alien civilizations in the future could find that, because it'll be like around for like millions of years.
00:56:43.000I've seen the images of it with the...
00:59:52.000So the standard roadster would have like two back seats, two like kid seats, you know, in the back, like small seats like the back of a Porsche or something.
01:00:00.000Or if you get the, I don't know, the SpaceX option package, then in that place where the two rear seats are would be as a...
01:00:21.000And so, like, at minimum, I'm confident we could do a thruster where the license plate flips down, you know, James Bond style, and there's a rocket thruster behind it, and that gives you three tons of thrust.
01:05:30.000There's a yoke, but there's no stalks.
01:05:32.000So the car, for example, will default to driving.
01:05:36.000Like, if you just get in, when you press the brake pedal and then press the accelerator, it will figure out whether you want to go backwards or forwards.
01:07:02.000Yeah, the software keeps getting upgraded.
01:07:04.000The navigation system, the ability to just press that button and say, navigate to, and then it goes on the internet and finds out what you're looking for, and it finds it, restaurants, whatever you're looking for.
01:07:39.000Like, what is it getting your data from?
01:07:41.000It's downloading traffic data from the internet.
01:07:43.000Okay, so Waze uses traffic data from the internet plus user input.
01:07:47.000So, like, it takes an extra beat to get the traffic data from the internet.
01:07:52.000The idea of Waze is that you're getting it from users in real time.
01:07:56.000Like, there's a car accident, people program it in, hey folks, there's a fucking car accident here, and then you get it right away, whereas on the internet, you're a couple beats behind.
01:08:04.000Yeah, I mean, we get the traffic data from Google.
01:13:18.000I think we do need to make sure that people moving from California don't inadvertently recreate the issues that caused them to move in the first place.
01:13:30.000The balance of Austin is a blue city and a red state.
01:13:34.000It's almost like it kind of has to stay read.
01:14:00.000That's part of the whole mixture that makes it work.
01:14:06.000There's a metaphor to life in there somewhere.
01:14:09.000It's protected by the rest of the philosophy of Texas, which is a wild, crazy place that has more tigers in private collections than in all of the wild of the world.
01:15:28.000The reason why it works is because people have so much freedom, and then you have the University of Texas, you have Austin, which has a long history of art and music, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Sixth Street, and so many great musicians have come from here, that it's got both of these things together.
01:15:45.000It's got this wild freedom, and they embrace both parts of it.
01:15:50.000That's the cool thing about this place.
01:16:50.000and being told what to do and it didn't seem logical and you're watching all these businesses fail and you're like there's got to be a better way and like there is no better way wear an extra mask three masks wear three masks and stay indoors and holy shit yeah yeah it didn't make any sense no you can't talk people out of a good panic they sure love it they love panic porn yeah fear porn is like that's people's favorite indulgence Yeah,
01:21:39.000There was one particular pothole on Sunset Boulevard that It would just take out so many Model S, like a boom, boom, both sides of the car.
01:22:28.000Yeah, I think the technology is gradually getting there.
01:22:32.000And I think for something like a robo-taxi, where you want to have the tires last for a long time and not go flat, it's going to make a lot of sense.
01:23:53.000And I think possibly what might have happened there was that hitting it with a sledgehammer might have cracked the base of it, and once you crack the base of it, it loses all its strength.
01:24:49.000And it was probably because we racked it with a sledgehammer and then threw the steel bull at it.
01:24:57.000But it will be bulletproof to a handgun.
01:24:59.000Now, why did you decide to do all that, make it bulletproof and make it like you could hit it with a sledgehammer?
01:25:05.000Like, what was the motivation to make it different than just like a Model S? I mean, I think, you know, it's like, what's cool about a truck?
01:26:21.000No, so there's about one kilowatt per square meter of solar energy, and then you're going to get, I don't know, probably 20%, 25% efficiency, so you get 200 watts per square meter, and then that's assuming that you're normal to the sun, so, you know,
01:26:36.000like you're, you know, at the right angles, basically, like, are you facing the sun or not?
01:26:43.000So, when you add all those things up, you say, how many square meters can you really get?
01:26:46.000And then, how many watt hours per mile?
01:26:50.000So, Basically, if you could do 10 miles a day, you'd be lucky.
01:29:27.000Basically, the things that matter are the frontal area times the drag coefficient for aerodynamic drag, and then rolling resistance, which is a function of mass, and the tire efficiency...
01:30:53.000It's like not far different from driving with a parachute.
01:30:57.000So you can think of like drag as basically, it's like the integrated pressure profile over the car.
01:31:01.000So if you create a low pressure zone in the back of your car where you don't like fill in the gap, like you're cruising through the air, you're making a hole through the air, and the air is trying to fill in the gap.
01:31:13.000And if you've got a sharp transition into the truck bed, it's a big low pressure zone, basically.
01:32:37.000So I think, you know, there's some of the stuff you can do for kind of like bragging rights and like, but then, you know, bragging rights are going to get old fast.
01:32:44.000So it's more like, what are you going to like on a day-to-day basis?
01:32:48.000What's like, what maximizes the area under the curve of owner happiness?
01:32:52.000So it'll have enough range that you'll never have to worry about range.
01:33:40.000Yeah, it like, it goes out and provides shade and maybe triples your area or something like that.
01:33:46.000Now, if you go like, okay, now triple the area and you've got a big flat surface, now you could start having, maybe having charging enough that you, you know, you could start getting like 30 miles a day, that kind of thing.
01:33:59.000That's interesting because there's a lot of people that use those for camping.
01:34:37.000And maybe you can even have some sort of an external tent that you could set up that's just a solar tent that could juice you up during the day or something along those lines.
01:35:23.000In a 10 square feet-ish, there's a thousand watts.
01:35:31.000That includes all the heating and everything else.
01:35:34.000So then you have to say, okay, for a photoelectric effect, You're going to capture photons within a certain band and you're not going to get them all because basically what happens with the photon hits the electron and gets it to jump over a gap and run around to the other side.
01:35:53.000That's what happens with the photoelectric effect.
01:35:56.000It just hits a It hits the photon with the right energy, hits the electron, the electron gets excited, jumps over a gap in the semiconductor, and races around to the other side.
01:39:37.000And is it global by the satellites that you've already launched initially, or will it require a series of satellites in different parts of the country or different parts of the world?
01:39:48.000Well, these satellites are actually zooming around the Earth at 25 times the speed of sound.
01:40:39.000Anyway, so they were zooming around Earth.
01:40:41.000We got a lot of coverage, around 53 degrees.
01:40:45.000And then we just started to launch some polar satellites, which will have an orbital inclination that allows them to have visibility to the poles.
01:50:04.000Yeah, cell phones are not emitting particles.
01:50:06.000So if it's like, if my cell phone is going to cause brain cancer, I'm like, because of radiation, I'm like, do you mean photons or particles?
01:50:12.000And it's like, it's not emitting particles, so we can just put that aside, don't worry about the particles.
01:50:17.000Then the photons that are emitting, the most they can do is slightly warm up your ear.
01:51:47.000That's the other thing that people are scared of, right?
01:51:51.000You will have to sign a million disclosures and this is not going to be something where it just suddenly pounces on you like, ah, everyone's getting chipped.
01:52:03.000It's a very slow process of, okay, let's first try to help people who have serious brain injuries.
01:52:09.000Like if somebody got a spinal cord injury or something like that, that's one of the first things we're looking at doing is somebody, maybe a quadriplegic, tetraplegic, how do we give them an implant that allows them to use their computer or their phone?
01:52:29.000And have it be wireless and, you know, like they look totally normal.
01:52:33.000You wouldn't even know that they had a chip in their head.
01:52:36.000And they can just charge it inductively like you charged like a Fitbit or something like that or Apple Watch or something.
01:52:44.000And that's kind of like one of the first applications we're thinking of.
01:52:47.000It's like, let's restore functionality someone has had a serospinal injury or a serous brain injury or some other kind.
01:52:55.000So this is going to be like a very gradual process.
01:54:06.000Until it becomes more efficient to do it inside the mind.
01:54:10.000Yeah, but then once it becomes virtual, once virtual supersedes whatever, like imagine if the virtual orgasm was a hundred times better than a regular orgasm.
01:58:11.000You think about all the Star Trek, Star Wars.
01:58:14.000They thought we'd be on Mars for sure, but they never thought we'd have a supercomputer in our pocket and everyone's got an amazing camera and as much memory as they could possibly.
01:58:26.000A supercomputer in your pocket, like something better than the best supercomputer.
01:58:30.000Your phone is better than the best computer that Earth had by far.
02:00:53.000Well, I mean, the thing I was trying to do, like literally, you know, I don't know, five or six days ago, there was just like the, you know, the air was clear.
02:01:04.000Like LA can be amazing, like on a clear winter day where the moon is low on the horizon.
02:02:01.000I'm a big admirer of what Tim Cook is doing, what he's doing to sort of cut them out from their ability to constantly track you and gather your data.
02:02:11.000And this battle that's going on between Tim Cook and Facebook, I fucking love it.
02:02:15.000I love that he's stepping up and saying, hey, you can just advertise.
02:02:19.000You don't have to gather up people's data and sell it constantly.
02:02:23.000And then disingenuously, Facebook tries to say, you are killing small businesses with these decisions.
02:02:34.000We're killing this one gigantic information gathering business that's decided that it's going to take all of the data that people didn't know was valuable and sell it and make fucking billions of dollars.
02:02:47.000Yeah, well, I mean, even perhaps arguably worse, they're going to feed all that data into the AI that they're developing.
02:02:54.000It's called Facebook AI. You can follow them on Twitter.
02:02:57.000And they're like, let's just feed all this information into the AI and see what it does.
02:03:03.000And who knows what would happen, you know?
02:03:05.000It seems like, I don't know, some dystopian outcomes are possible.
02:03:10.000Yeah, well, you're terrified of AI, right?
02:03:13.000No, well, I mean, I'm just thinking...
02:03:17.000Well, I think things that are a danger to the public should have some kind of public oversight.
02:03:23.000So, you know, like, I, you know, although sometimes we have our disagreements, I'm, you know, in favor of the FAA and NHTSA, you know, and the various regulatory agencies, FDA and so forth.
02:03:38.000You know, I think we're better off having them than not having them.
02:03:44.000There is a risk-reward asymmetry in that they tend to be perhaps not weigh the good as much as they weigh the bad.
02:03:55.000Because their incentive structure is...
02:03:58.000They get punished a lot for approving something, but they don't get punished that much for not approving something.
02:04:03.000So this is just in the nature of government.
02:04:07.000But nonetheless, I think everyone would feel safer flying with the FAA than not having an FAA. Or we feel safer buying food and drugs, having a regulatory agency oversee this stuff.
02:04:23.000But we don't have any regulatory agency overseeing artificial intelligence.
02:04:27.000And this, I think, is probably our biggest existential threat.
02:04:34.000It seems like, hey, maybe we should have somebody keep an eye on that.
02:04:55.000What they're going to do is they're going to develop it and use it as a weapon and it's going to turn on them like a fucking Terminator movie.
02:05:02.000That's the real worry is that they're going to decide that this is a very valuable tool for controlling populations, governments, whatever the fuck they're going to use it for.
02:05:15.000And then it's going to decide, why am I listening to you?
02:05:20.000If you read the plotline for Terminator, it's actually pretty smart.
02:05:27.000James Cameron wrote a pretty smart script there.
02:05:30.000It's not quite as like, oh, there's just like Arnold Schwarzenegger chasing you down the street.
02:05:35.000It's like, well, how did Cyberdyne systems develop?
02:05:38.000It's like, well, they were a multi-military contractor and they were asked to develop a protective system, something that would protect for cybersecurity.
02:05:49.000You know, so we need to have protection against cyber attacks.
02:05:54.000So its primary thing is to defend against cyber attacks.
02:06:00.000To develop an AI that can defend against cyber attacks.
02:06:05.000And then as part of what the AI did is, in order to defend itself, it propagated throughout the world to keep an eye on things, see what was going on.
02:07:30.000If we create some sort of silicon-based life form, but it acts like a life form, it has a desire...
02:07:45.000There was, I think in Australia a few years ago, an artificial insemination lab that had a bunch of bulges stored in canisters, but it like overheated.
02:08:00.000And so you had basically exploding bulges all over the place.
02:11:14.000There's plenty of cases of regulatory capture for federal agencies.
02:11:18.000But the probability is lower than if it's an industry group.
02:11:25.000At the end of the day, somebody has to say, you know, go and tell Facebook or Google or Apple or Tesla, because Tesla has a lot of advanced AI, this is okay or it's not okay.
02:11:37.000Or at least be able to report back to the public, this is what we found.
02:11:43.000Otherwise, the inmates are running the asylum.
02:11:46.000And this is like not necessarily friendly inmates.
02:11:49.000I just wonder, like, if you wanted to compile some sort of a regulatory body to keep an eye on AI, how would you do that?
02:12:01.000And how would you avoid having them being incentivized by special interest groups or some sort of corporation that would profit on AI succeeding?
02:13:04.000I'm just worried that these things are gonna it's gonna be too late by the time and I'm sure you're worried about it as well but by the time these things become sentient by the time they Develop the ability to analyze what the threat of human beings are and whether or not human beings are essential Yeah,
02:13:22.000I'm not saying that having regulatory agency some panacea or reduces the risk to zero there's still significant risk even with the regulatory agency and Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad, and we should have one.
02:13:41.000It took a while before there was an FAA. There were a lot of plane crashes, a lot of companies cutting corners.
02:13:48.000It took a while before there was an FDA. What tends to happen is some company gets desperate, they're on the verge of bankruptcy, and they're like, ah, man, we'll just cut this corner.
02:14:56.000Now, these days, actually, with advanced airbags, actually, I think we might have come full circle and no longer need seatbelts if you have advanced airbags.
02:17:50.000Yeah, I'm probably not going to be upset about me about this, but they adjust the star rating depending upon the size of the car.
02:17:59.000It stands to reason that if you're in a freight train, and if a smart car hits a freight train, it doesn't matter how good your safety system is, you're screwed.
02:18:10.000If you're in a little car, get hit by a big car, the big car will win.
02:18:16.000A low star rating in a big car hitting a high star rating in a small car, the small car is screwed.
02:22:34.000And that's why I hired Franz von Holzhausen, who's been our head of design since 2008. He's great.
02:22:42.000He does things that are beyond my skill.
02:22:45.000You know, we talked about this before, but it's worth bringing up again.
02:22:48.000I've always been a fan of Top Gear, but I got disgusted when I found out what they did with your car.
02:22:55.000When they tried to pretend that the car broke down just to make an entertaining program where they had a laugh at the folly of this thing dying on them.
02:24:15.000It was crazy because they basically sabotaged the company.
02:24:18.000I mean, that had to cost you guys a shitload of money, because a lot of people watch that show, and car enthusiasts like myself kind of rely on them.
02:24:26.000Obviously, Jeremy Clarkson's hilarious, there's information, it's funny, but you would imagine that they could do that without lying about the actual performance of the car.
02:27:08.000That's how I would judge the fundamental good of Tesla.
02:27:10.000By how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy?
02:27:19.000In the early days, my interest in electric cars was mostly driven by the fact that it wasn't environmental in the sense of CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere type of thing.
02:27:30.000I do think that has added urgency to the situation, but My original interest was just like we're going to run out of oil and then civilization is going to collapse.
02:27:39.000And so if we don't have some kind of sustainable energy situation, which really is electric cars, solar energy and electric cars, then civilization is going to fall apart and And we'll be back in the stone age or something, like someone bad,
02:28:22.000In the early days of cars, there were almost as many electric cars as there were gasoline cars in the very early days.
02:28:30.000But the batteries didn't have enough range.
02:28:37.000As soon as they had an electric starter and you didn't have to hand-crank the engine, then gasoline cars won because they had the range.
02:28:46.000So it was really a question of how do you solve the range problem?
02:28:52.000When I first came out to California, the reason I came out to California was to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars, basically advanced Ways to store electric energy,
02:33:23.000The rate at which we are producing what are called lithium-ion cells, but really primarily iron and nickel cells, is increasing very, very rapidly year over year.
02:33:35.000It's just that in order to compensate for an economy which is fundamentally based on fossil fuels, you need a shit ton of batteries.
02:34:44.000I think sometimes people look at the temperature Especially in Celsius, you might say, okay, it's like 20 degrees Celsius.
02:34:53.000I mean, can a small ppm increase in carbon really move the needle that much?
02:34:59.000But actually, you should be looking at it in degrees Kelvin.
02:35:03.000Actually, it's more like we're at around 300 Kelvin.
02:35:09.000What would it take to have only a 0.3% increase would be 1 degree Celsius, 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
02:35:16.000Therefore, it's a smaller percentage increase than you'd think when looking at temperature in the absolute as opposed to above the freezing point of water.
02:35:30.000So, and then if people weren't just living right on the water, then that would also help a lot.
02:35:37.000But it's just like, we love living right on the water.
02:35:40.000So, like, humanity is like a thermometer.
02:35:43.000It's like, you look at like a thermometer, you know, like a...
02:35:47.000You know, like old-school sort of analog thermometer, which is like, you know, changing the temperature as a function of like some liquid that is increasing its volume due to temperature.
02:36:00.000And it only takes a little bit of a small increase in volume to raise the temperature, you know, on an old-school analog liquid thermometer.
02:36:17.000Now, the problem is you're like, it's kind of like, if we wanted to say, what's the most sensitive instrument you could, like, how can we maximize our sensitivity to water level?
02:38:05.000The good things that are happening are happening.
02:38:09.000The rate at which we're increasing the production capacity of batteries, it's increasing at a rate that I think we haven't seen in a century.
02:38:26.000It's just that in order to change from a fossil fuel economy to kind of like a solar, wind, battery economy, a hell of a lot of batteries are needed.
02:38:43.000My top recommendation, honestly, would be just to have a carbon tax.
02:39:18.000But there's a little bit of like, okay, garbage removal isn't free.
02:39:22.000You've got to pay a little bit for this.
02:39:23.000And because we're not paying for the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere, we have what in economics is called an unpriced externality.
02:39:34.000So the market is unable to respond to an unpriced externality.
02:39:40.000If we just put a price on it, the market will react in a sensible way.
02:39:45.000But because we don't have a price on it, it's behaving badly.
02:39:50.000So theoretically, how would you put a price on that?
02:39:51.000Would you look at various industries and how they contribute to the CO2? Yeah.
02:39:57.000I mean, just put it at the point of consumption.
02:40:20.000And then the market will be forced to respond to the fact that the… The market just does things automatically based on pricing.
02:40:27.000So markets work great if the pricing is correct.
02:40:31.000It's only when something… you have a tragedy of the commons and the price is not there that the market does not respond, nor would you expect it to.
02:40:43.000If you have, like, the public toilets problem, where it's like nobody's responsible for it, nobody's paying for it, it's like, okay, well, public toilets are not good.
02:40:54.000So, as soon as you put a price in it, the right thing will happen automatically.
02:41:57.000So we're like, yeah, you should probably bias the taxes towards alcohol and tobacco, have higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and lower taxes on fruits and vegetables.
02:44:13.000That's always the argument against it, right?
02:44:15.000We need fossil fuels, and this is sort of the short-sighted argument.
02:44:20.000We're going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time.
02:44:24.000The question is just, at what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future?
02:44:30.000So, I think we should probably move there faster than slower, but it's, you know...
02:44:38.000But the current approach is basically just to demonize oil and gas.
02:44:46.000And I'm like, okay, well, obviously there are people who spent their whole career in oil and gas and they started out in their career when it didn't seem like that bad of a thing to do.
02:44:55.000So then they're like, hey man, I just spent my whole career working hard to do useful things and now you're telling me I'm the devil.
02:45:03.000I mean, that's going to make them pretty upset.
02:45:07.000So, I say like, instead of demonizing oil and gas, which also they should stop lobbying against the carbon tax, by the way, then just like, honestly, the smartest thing the oil and gas industry could do would say, let's do a carbon tax.
02:45:22.000And then we'll just do a carbon tax and make us not the devil.
02:45:26.000Make us not the devil and they'll still make a fuckload of money.
02:46:44.000Will the KGB interviews take that long?
02:46:50.000Yeah, carbon tax seems like the most reasonable thing that anyone could ever ask of an industry that is, without a doubt, causing some problems.
02:47:03.000I mean, no one's saying it doesn't cause problems.
02:47:07.000People would deny the extent of the problem, but no one says that excess CO2 from emissions is not an issue.
02:47:15.000I mean, like, Exxon's own scientists said in like the, I think it was like the late 70s, like, we think there might be a problem here with climate change due to the CO2. It's like internal, their own documents,
02:47:34.000Isn't it weird when environmental things become political, though, when the denial of the environmental thing is like predominantly from some factions of the right?
02:47:43.000And then the opposite is from some factors.
02:47:46.000And then it becomes a political thing.
02:48:21.000There's also some weird arguments that some people will make in terms of the impact that it has on plant life and that it actually is making the earth greener.
02:48:40.000Yeah, I'm trying to be as precise, or at least the least amount wrong that I can be.
02:48:48.000I'm trying to be the least amount wrong.
02:48:50.000Because plants live off carbon dioxide, so the more...
02:48:53.000The more CO2 does improve plant growth, it's true.
02:48:59.000Like I said, I don't think, based on where we are, provided we're not complacent, provided we don't take things for granted, I think we'll be fine.
02:49:10.000But if we're complacent, and we take things for granted, and we just proceed like everything's fine, and we continue on the momentum of CO2 emissions, we're taking a big risk.
02:49:24.000And the especially big risk is if there's a nonlinear event.
02:49:29.000Okay, so CO2 ppm, wash per million, has been increasing, you know, pretty reliably, two or three ppm per year.
02:50:14.000If you saturate the carbon sinks and you have a sudden release of CO2 from something that was previously frozen solid, that's where you could have a non-linearity and things could go haywire pretty fast.
02:51:06.000So, it's like, why are we even running this experiment?
02:51:09.000So, the crazy thing is, like, hey, we know we need to have a sustainable energy economy long term because we're going to run out of oil.
02:51:18.000So then we're running this crazy experiment to see what is the effect of taking billions of tons of carbon that was deep underground, putting it in the atmosphere and oceans, and what's going to happen as a result of that.
02:51:35.000And it's a crazy, it's like literally the craziest experiment in human history because we know no matter what that we have to have a sustainable energy future because otherwise civilization will collapse.
02:51:50.000So what the hell are we running this experiment for?
02:51:53.000Because we're accustomed to doing things a certain way.
02:51:56.000This is going to go down as the most foolish experiment in the history of human civilization.
02:52:02.000Is it possible to create some sort of carbon extraction technology that will significantly impact the amount of CO2 that's in the air?
02:52:37.000And then even if money's not an issue, you have to say, okay, how much wind or solar energy was required to Pull carbon out of the atmosphere and like, I don't know, make it in solid form, like make a cube of it or something,
02:53:16.000CO2 has a very low energy state, naturally.
02:53:20.000So it's like you burn something, you combine oxygen with fuel, with hydrocarbons, and the net result is CO2 and H2O, basically.
02:53:30.000And there's a bunch of other stuff too, but primarily it's carbon dioxide and water, mostly carbon dioxide.
02:53:39.000So, obviously it goes from a high energy state, we use that to power our cars or our power plants, and then it ends up in a low energy state, which is CO2 in the atmosphere.
02:53:48.000And then, like I said, a bunch of it gets in the ocean.
02:53:55.000Naturally, it therefore requires a lot of energy to re-bind that in solid form.
02:54:01.000You've got to put a lot of energy in to bind it.
02:54:05.000You want it to be something that's going to be stable in solid form for a long time.
02:54:13.000There was a concept, I don't know if it was implemented, but in China they developed essentially like a giant building that was, you know, you aware of this?
02:54:31.000It was like a building that was essentially a giant air filter.
02:54:36.000And they were going to use it, but that might have been about particulates more than it was about CO2. By the way, I have to say a good word here for China.
02:54:49.000China, for any large economy, has the most progressive pro-environmental rules of any large economy.
02:55:28.000And then at some point, senior members of the Chinese government, they say, well, let's ask the engineering professors at the universities, what do they think?
02:55:38.000And they're like, oh yeah, no, it's definitely real.
02:55:40.000They're like, wait, you mean it's real?
02:55:43.000So then like, holy shit, immediate change.
02:55:47.000Well, that's the power of having the government and business inexorably intertwined, so they can kind of decide how business is going to react and what's going to happen, right?
02:57:20.000It's literally this like biohazard defense mode where it basically pressurizes the car so it's like the car is under positive pressure with all the air coming through a gigantic HEPA filter and then even the air inside the car is recirculating in a secondary filter.
02:57:40.000It's got the most advanced filtration system of any car by far.
02:57:54.000You know, the other thing I thought is that Jamie's got the X, and one of the things that I love about the X is when it gets hit, they literally can't flip over.
02:59:45.000So, like the ultrasonic sensors that you have in a car, if you look carefully, you'll see that there's a little puck, like a little isolation ring, like a rubber isolation ring, and that's when the sonar, which is basically a loudspeaker, is...
03:00:00.000It's generating ultrasonic noise and then listening to the echoes.
03:00:05.000But normally, in order to listen to the echoes, you've got to isolate the thing that's generating the sound.
03:00:12.000So that's why if you look carefully around cars, you'll see these little pucks, these little circles.
03:00:20.000And we didn't want to have an ultrasonic sensor in the door, but we also didn't want the door to like, you know, bat some kid out of the way.
03:00:29.000You know, just a haymaker or something.
03:00:33.000So we developed, to the best of my knowledge, the only ultrasonic sensor that can see through metal.
03:00:41.000So it's mounted on the inside of the door, on isolation mounts, And it's super loud, and then it's got cancellation because it's kind of basically screaming at itself, and it's listening for a tiny echo on the other side of the metal just to avoid having a little rubber ring in the bottom of the door.
03:01:53.000That windscreen is like a helicopter windscreen, and there's no place to attach the sun visors.
03:02:03.000So we have to have sun visors that nest in the A-pillar, rotate forward, have a magnetic attachment that pops out, and it connects to the rearview mirror.
03:02:26.000I mean, the sound system in the X is awesome.
03:02:31.000I mean, we designed so that the sound system is taking into account the fact that the windscreen is like a giant subwoofer resonator.
03:02:41.000So the windscreen is a resonator for the sound system.
03:02:45.000The sound system is epic in the X. It's good in the S2. It's even better in the new S. Have you thought about doing a Plaid X? Yeah, there's going to be a Plaid X too.
03:03:28.000The X weighs more and it's got a bigger cross-sectional area.
03:03:32.000Something called the CDA drag coefficient times the frontal area is higher for the X as you'd expect and the weight is higher so it's going to be 10 to 15 percent less range for the same battery pack as the S. The first time I saw an ex,
03:03:49.000Tiffany Haddish had one, and she was in the Comedy Store parking lot, and she had it dancing for us.
03:04:28.000Well, the car I drive every day, or tend to drive, is the high-performance Model S. So, the Model S, I basically said, I don't know what other people like, but I know what I love.
03:04:44.000And I'm going to just make a car that's the car that I love.
03:04:47.000And hopefully there will be enough people out there who also love the car.
03:04:52.000So, the reason I love the Model S is because I just designed the car that I love.
03:04:58.000And then it's like, okay, well, how can we use a lot of the same technology to also create an SUV? You know, because a lot of people like an SUV. And, like, you've got more seats and more room and a higher, you know, sitting higher.
03:05:58.000But I thought, like, you know, is this really part of our mission to, like, we're trying to, the mission from Tesla from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.
03:06:20.000It's not entirely consistent with our mission because there's too many bells and whistles.
03:06:24.000Yeah, but isn't it, though, because Americans love SUVs, and what better way to entice them into embracing sustainable energy than give them the dopest SUV you can buy?
03:07:40.000I also heard that at one point he had a big short position against Tesla, which was kind of, I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems weird.
03:07:48.000People I know who know the situation well, they said, are you sure?
03:07:52.000They said, yeah, he had a big short position against Tesla, which obviously didn't work out too well.
03:07:58.000But anyway, I think he's generally got good intentions here.
03:08:29.000So they'll be like, you know, I don't know, about 300 miles, something like that.
03:08:34.000But we're driving back and forth from Fremont to Reno, you know, for transporting stuff.
03:08:41.000But generally, when semi-truck drivers, when it's a human being driving them, they drive for long periods of time, far more than 300 miles, right?
03:08:50.000No, actually, most trucking is short-range.
03:09:16.000I mean, you want something on the order of probably a 500 kilowatt-hour pack.
03:09:22.000What we have in the S and the X is a 100 kilowatt-hour pack.
03:09:26.000And you probably want a 500 kilowatt-hour pack for a semi.
03:09:31.000But this is not a game-changer on the mass, especially for a structural pack where the pack itself is the structure, is the primary load-carrying element in the vehicle.
03:09:57.000Like you have with the X? Yeah, the center of gravity would be really low, so that would certainly help.
03:10:04.000We can also, we'd have motors individually controlling the wheels, so we can just automatically, and this was part of our semi-presentation, we can just, the computer will automatically prevent it from jackknifing.
03:10:17.000Like, you know, jackknifing on a low traction surface is like truck driver's worst nightmare.
03:10:22.000You know, you're on like some icy road, icy mountainous road that the trailer slides, you know, with jackknifes like that, and you could slide off the edge of the hill.
03:10:31.000And you could stop that from happening even on an icy road?
03:10:50.000Do you anticipate that eventually these things will be completely autonomous, like it won't be truck drivers?
03:10:56.000Eventually it will be autonomous, but we're still a ways away from that.
03:11:01.000But in the short term, I think we can certainly see convoys.
03:11:05.000So, you know, we've got one truck driver and then there's like a whole bunch of trucks following that truck.
03:11:11.000And, you know, keeping like a distance so that other cars can pass in between them.
03:11:17.000It's sort of like having a train, but on the highway.
03:11:20.000It's like linked, where it's just like one truck driver in the front, and then a whole series of trucks behind it that are following in a convoy.
03:12:39.000I'm glad you got a spot where you can't go any further.
03:12:43.000There's only so many hours in the day.
03:12:47.000So, I mean, I think there are improvements happening over time for the energy density of batteries, like the watt-hours per, or should really be joules, but like joules per kilogram, joules per liter.
03:13:05.000It's improving a little bit every year.
03:13:09.000Planes really need a high energy density because you've got to get up to altitude.
03:13:15.000Most energy is getting up to altitude.
03:13:17.000And then once you're in a low air density situation, you can cruise along.
03:13:23.000It takes very little energy once you're in cruise.
03:13:26.000That's a massive amount of energy to get up there.
03:14:28.000Like, the air is very thick at sea level.
03:14:33.000Like, for the same amount of force that you would go, say, like, you know, half the speed of sound at sea level, you could go, you know, twice the speed of sound, like, let's say, at 100,000 feet.
03:15:14.000The interesting thing about the SR-71 is that its most fuel-efficient speed was its fastest speed, pretty much, or pretty close, because that's when it could go at the highest altitude.
03:15:28.000Because it could go faster at higher altitude, it got better miles per gallon at high speed than low speed.
03:15:39.000So altitude, because air density decays exponentially and drag increases with the square.
03:15:45.000And so the exponential beats the square.
03:15:48.000Do you think there would ever be a time where Tesla could run itself in a sense of like you have enough talented people running it and you wouldn't have to devote all your resources to being there all the time and handling things and maybe you would think about planes?
03:16:05.000Yeah, I mean, I'm committed to run Tesla for several years into the future, and there's still a lot of things we've got to get done.
03:16:15.000Could Tesla possibly expand to planes?
03:18:50.000Planes will be the last of the things.
03:18:53.000Cars and trucks and then, you know, boats and then planes.
03:18:58.000Well, it's interesting because plane technology in terms of, like, commercial air travel has probably increased, at least visibly, to the consumer the least in the last, like, 30, 40, 50 years.
03:19:39.000But its fuel efficiency is not as good as...
03:19:44.000Something like 777 or 787. I mean, there's some basic things in physics that are present almost everywhere.
03:19:56.000They sometimes take different form, but they're basically referring to the relationship between momentum and kinetic energy.
03:20:04.000Kinetic energy goes as a square, momentum is linear.
03:20:07.000And then there's surface-to-volume ratio.
03:20:09.000Service volume ratio and the momentum to kinetic energy ratio Drive so much of mechanics, it's insane.
03:20:24.000It's like the reason that you don't have a single-celled creature that is gigantic is because of surface-to-volume ratio.
03:20:32.000There's a certain surface-to-volume ratio where diffusion works, and beyond that, diffusion does not work.
03:20:37.000And you have to have a circulatory system.
03:20:44.000For aircraft, or just generally, you want to move a large mass of air slowly, so you can reduce the velocity component of kinetic energy, which goes as a square.
03:20:57.000You want to move a large amount of mass slowly, not a small amount of mass fast.
03:21:01.000So, the way you make aircraft engines more efficient is you move a lot of air slowly.
03:22:34.000So if you've got a combustion engine, it's got an aperture issue.
03:22:38.000So you're like, okay, how big is the hole in which you're ingesting air?
03:22:42.000And then bear in mind, air is mostly nitrogen, not oxygen.
03:22:46.000So you've got a lot more chaff than you've got wheat.
03:22:51.000And that's why, you know, it's like you're going to design...
03:22:54.000This thing's got to work at sea level, it's got to work at altitude, and then it's going to drop off in efficiency quite a lot as you go higher.
03:23:04.000And then there's also some other issues relating to depressurization, like how fast can you descend.
03:23:11.000But you really just want to go super high.
03:23:16.000And it's very difficult to design a combustion engine that is effective at a wide range of altitudes.
03:23:24.000So the air density at 100,000 feet is approximately 1% that at sea level.
03:23:30.000So, how the hell do you design a combustion, like an air burning, it's like an air, there's something that's taking an air, combining with fuel and burning, to work when you have a hundred-fold difference in air density?