Travis Beals

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103 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Travis Beals’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

But with AI, maybe we actually have a really important and useful way to use that power in space.

The thing that's different about AI versus some other applications you can imagine, like, I don't know, running a

steel mill or something like that, you're not moving a lot of atoms around, right?

Like you just need to send data up and down to these satellites.

You don't need to send, I don't know, iron ore if you were going to imagine a steel mill in space.

I'm not going to try to real-time check your math on that one here.

But yeah, it's a lot of area.

Here's the thing.

There's a lot of space in space.

Space is just mind-bogglingly big.

The first time I really got a sense of that actually was I was in high school and I was taking a computer animation class and I decided I wanted to do a fly through of the solar system, but to scale.

And when you try to do it to scale, it's so hard to make anything visible because everything is so small, like the planets are so small compared to the vastness, even just of our solar system.

And so you talk about these enormous areas of solar panels that you would need.

And yes, it's true.

And it would be smaller than what you would need if you're trying to generate the same amount of power down on Earth.

But then if you compare that area versus the amount of area that you could, in principle, build in low Earth orbit, in this dawn-dusk, sun-synchronous low Earth orbit, it's nothing.

It's like a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket.

We tried to build visualization of what it would look like if you sort of

Zoomed back from Earth and you're looking at Earth and you're looking at this seemingly enormous amount of satellites there.

And it looks like nothing.

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