Love this article Nicolas. I think its a fascinating debate but I continue to feel that Zeihan's foundations for this are shaky. AI, personalised medicine and agriculture are not technologies. they are bundles of various tech, some will be great some will not. Of the others, my academic contacts tell me the space idea is massively oversold and we are just going to end up with a whole lot of vanity hardware up there.
Fracking is different and proven but it has been around since the 1860s so perhaps a more interesting question is why this took off when it did?
I have a different question on nuclear which I have never seen anyone discuss so I genuinely don't know the answer. We already have very small nuclear reactors. They power submarines for example. Would there be a better answer if we scaled these up slightly and built thousands of them rather than scaling down nuclear power technology?
There's also a small but often unknown twist to this nuclear / shale oil saga : the french nuclear tests in the Sahara back in the 1960's were also done for fracking purposes. Cf. in the Annales from the "Corps des Mines" https://www.annales.org/re/2023/re111/2023-07-02.pdf
Thanks Nicolas for sharing this.
I didn't know about that Innovation classification from or Clayton Christensen.
It's also an interesting framework to think of the impact you want to have in the World as an entrepreneur
Love this article Nicolas. I think its a fascinating debate but I continue to feel that Zeihan's foundations for this are shaky. AI, personalised medicine and agriculture are not technologies. they are bundles of various tech, some will be great some will not. Of the others, my academic contacts tell me the space idea is massively oversold and we are just going to end up with a whole lot of vanity hardware up there.
Fracking is different and proven but it has been around since the 1860s so perhaps a more interesting question is why this took off when it did?
I have a different question on nuclear which I have never seen anyone discuss so I genuinely don't know the answer. We already have very small nuclear reactors. They power submarines for example. Would there be a better answer if we scaled these up slightly and built thousands of them rather than scaling down nuclear power technology?
There's also a small but often unknown twist to this nuclear / shale oil saga : the french nuclear tests in the Sahara back in the 1960's were also done for fracking purposes. Cf. in the Annales from the "Corps des Mines" https://www.annales.org/re/2023/re111/2023-07-02.pdf