Ramez Naam
speaker
373 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Ramez Naam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the flip side of that, here's a way to look at that.
If you think demand for compute is basically infinite, if you think it's unlimited, eventually you just run into limitations on the ground.
And so even if it's more expensive to go to space, if that's the only place from a regulatory standpoint that you can go, it might make sense.
Now, I don't actually buy that argument.
I think there's a lot of other places we can figure out to put compute.
But that's part of the bet Elon's making.
I'll make one more argument, flip side of this.
Elon's wanted to go to Mars.
There's no business model for going to Mars.
He wants to get Starship down to these incredibly low launch costs, a tenth of what it costs today.
That only works if you're launching, again, 1,000 Starship flights a year or more.
There is no demand.
There's not enough demand for launch, for telecoms, for Starlink-type services to actually scale Starship to the fleet size and launch cadence that he wants.
So in a way, this is a godsend to Elon.
It's really smart.
Elon originally wanted to go to Mars.
He didn't want to build satellite telecoms.
network, he built Starlink because it was the business model that worked for launch.
And so now orbital data is a business model that can actually justify enough mass to make Starship make sense.
Flip side is we've got a whole lot of desert.
Showing 81–100 of 373 · page 5 of 19
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