[caffeine]

What excites me at the moment is space - and specifically the advent of space as an accessible, valuable, but dangerous place to be - a perfect place for robots.

I think there is a massively exciting amount of development to be done in space robotics, planning, simulation, hardware, etc.

The other exciting venue I see is bioinformatics. The advent of mRNA as a usable technology combined with AlphaFold is a new development that I see unlocking a lot of possibilities.

[nautilius]

I love space, and get excited about seeing BlueOrigin/ SpaceX/ Virgin now flying tourists - but I think I am still missing the actual business case.

Where do you see the value beyond novelty? What's the killer application? Settlements on Mars, or something more short-term? I think I'm still stuck in a 'a computer on every desk - yeah, but why would anyone need a computer!?' stage, and it bugs me to no end! ;-)

[caffeine]

SpaceX is Moore’s Law for space - as cost per ton to orbit keeps getting lower, qualitatively different tech starts getting relevant.

- Space tourism: luxury zero G hotels, etc.

- Space construction: robots and materials for building large structures in space

- Mining operations

- Zero G manufacturing (I’m not expert but I understand it makes creating certain materials, semiconductors, biopolymers, etc much easier)

- Communications (every country wants to build their own Starlink now)

- Edge compute (once a billion people are serviced by Starlink-type comms, they need low latency access to stuff which should be colocated in space)

- Base building: moon base, Mars base. Every advanced country wants one, soon large corporates will want them too.

- Military operations (refuelling, cargo, surveillance, etc) - every advanced country needs lower cost access to this

- Next generations of existing tech - as cost per ton to orbit goes down, the appropriate tech for building stuff in space will change. Sort of like software radically changed as CPUs got faster. So eg satellites can start using heavier but cheaper or more performant materials.

[dkobia]

The first trillionaire will likely be a result of space. I can see a time when robots mine asteroids and process material on the moon.