Unlimited Energy and The (Enhanced) Olympics

🌅 Today’s Topics

Good Morning, today we’re delving into:

• A sports event where athletes are encouraged to take drugs

• An unlimited energy source

• How much money do you need to be in the top 0.1%?

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The Enhanced Olympics

What’s happened?

A sporting event where humans are encouraged to take Performance-Enhancing-Drugs (PEDs, think Lance Armstrong) and become the best possible version of what a human can be. 

This sounds like one of those ideas you hear down the pub, and everyone agrees would be cool, but nothing ever happens. Well until now. The Enhanced Games is an event that has just been launched with this exact aim.

Why does this matter?

As we all know, sporting events are highly regulated affairs, where anti-doping measures are taken very seriously and many athletes have been banned for extensive periods, even life, for taking drugs to boost their performance. It wasn’t long ago that the entire state of Russia was banned from being in the Olympics for state-sponsored drug programs (quite an interesting story in itself, read more here).

Athletes have to go through extensive testing programs, and of course, it’s likely a lot get away with cheating by somehow hiding what they’ve taken - Lance Armstrong used to get litres of saline (salty water) pumped into him before a test to dilute the illegal drug in his bloodstream.

So the problem is that sport is supposed to be ‘clean’ but is often far from that and those with the deepest pockets and most capable scientific teams get away with it.

And this is where the Enhanced Games comes in:

The premise is a multi-discipline sporting event that allows people of any ability to participate. They brand it as the “most-inclusive” event of its kind. Whether you have a rocket-powered prosthetic, take enough steroids to turn into the Hulk or take enough Red Bull to maybe give you wings you are allowed to participate. 

The Maverick founders are not the only people who find this a compelling idea. One of the world's most famous investors, Peter Thiel, who was the first investor in Facebook and the founder of Paypal and Palantir, is one of their largest investors. 

I kinda love the idea. Unlike lots of sporting series that claim to be completely pure, the Enhanced Games are completely transparent to what they really are.

Why not see what humans are really capable of achieving?

To some extent, most humans take performance-enhancement drugs, but are just called medicine, and an arbitrary line is drawn as to what is allowed and what is not. I say let’s take the guardrails off and see what we can achieve, while under full medical supervision.

A sub 9 second 100m? A 3-meter high jump? A 1000km nonstop bike race? Why not. I’ll be tuning in, and I imagine a lot of others will as well.

If you want to find out more find their website here

Building a second sun

Last week it was announced that in the last 12 months, the Earth surpassed the infamous 1.5 degrees of global warming. The event horizon had been passed, 6 years before what was expected. 

People were losing their minds about this; there is nothing we can do to stop climate change now. Someone probably threw some more paint at another priceless painting. Well it’s easy to point at the building on fire, it’s much harder to run in and put the fire out. 

One such group of people dousing the flames of climate change are those building a future of infinite nuclear energy. But whilst I tip my hat to those fighting the climate change fire, I care less about that, because in a nuclear-powered future, solving climate change is the cherry on the cake. Today I will explain why.

Building the future of energy

This week, a team in the UK, ran a nuclear fusion reactor that outputted the most energy ever in a test. Nuclear fusion happens when you smash two hydrogen atoms into each other under extreme pressure and heat to produce helium. 

It is the same reaction that happens at the center of the sun. The amount of energy that hits the earth from the sun, according to Nasa “is 44 quadrillion watts of power to be exact. “

There would need to be 44 million power plants on Earth to equal the energy coming from the fusion reactions in the Sun.

So what happens when you build a mini-sun on Earth? The final test of a nuclear fusion facility in Oxfordshire output 69 megajoules of energy in 5.2 seconds and using 0.2 milligrams of fuel. In 5 seconds, using a grain of sugar worth of fuel, it produced enough energy to power 12,000 homes. 

Why does nuclear fusion matter? 

Nuclear fusion is in the category of technologies that are so long-term that some people ask “What is the point?” It gleams the same reaction as “Why is Elon going to Mars? Earth has enough problems.” 

It matters, not because it solves climate change, but because it makes energy ubiquitous or in other words, energy will cost 0. That sounds great for expensive heating bills but why does that matter more broadly?

Another way of thinking about this is to imagine every major breakthrough and problem the world has seen in the last 12 months. To summarise a few, AI, wars in Europe, gene-editing, climate change, cost of living crisis, inflation, robots, etc. 

Energy is an elemental input of all of these and as a result, influences all of their outcomes. The most costly part of AI is powering computers, drug discovery processes are run on huge computers, and wars in Europe are funded by other nations buying Russian oil, rather than having their energy sources at home.

As the cost of energy asymptotes (moves towards 0), the world gets better. Despite being corollaries, the below provides some interesting data:

If the promise of fusion is fulfilled, you could put a desalination plant in every country in Africa, providing clean water to an entire continent and powering it with less than a teaspoon of hydrogen. 

Nuclear fusion will bring forward a world where energy costs nothing. This means that every problem we care about, every injustice that burdens us, and every start-up we want to launch, becomes easier to solve, equalize and build.

Yes, it will put a stop to climate change, but it will go far beyond that. Last week marked a small step in that direction. 

Graph of the week