What comes next

Back when I was studying for my bachelor's in marketing, my interest in history had me thinking about Western civilization and what drives its progress.

I kept coming back to one thought: when the math no longer works, something has to change. Either a hard reset, often through war, or access to new resources that makes further growth possible. Historically, I was thinking mostly about land.

That is too simple to explain all of history. Technology and changes in how we organize society can change the math too. But the idea of finding room to grow makes even more sense to me today.

I find it hard to see a large war over resources as a sensible path forward when commercial companies can often provide access to them. Buying something does not give you control over its supply, and trade does not remove political conflict. Still, fighting over the existing world seems more like trying to preserve the current order than creating what comes next.

Which leaves me looking up.

I expect available compute to keep growing rapidly, and AI to automate more of the work we can do with it. More designs explored, more simulations run, more ideas tested. Things that seem impossible today will turn out to be possible. We will still have to build them and see whether reality agrees with the simulation.

There are already small pieces of this future. NASA's MOXIE experiment produced oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. That is a long way from running an industry on Mars, but it is a physical example of using what is already there.

I think the bigger change comes when we can use resources in space to build more things in space. Equipment that helps build the next equipment. Each step making the next one easier to afford. The math has to work there too, of course.

That is my prediction: the race for the solar system will provide the next reset that saves the world as we know it. AI and compute will help us turn more of what is out there into something we can actually use.