The 2020s could see the true birth of true 21st Century Technology.
Fully Reusable Rockets Instead of Planes
Fully reusable SpaceX Starships will lower the cost to access space by ten to one hundred times. There will be thousands of Starships built by 2030. Each can cost less then $20 million which is ten times less than a 767 cargo plane. The Starship would move 100 tons at mach 20 while the 767 moves at 0.8 mach and moves about 50 tons. The 767 costs $200 million.
Millions of Satellites for Multi-gigabit Internet and Super GPS Everywhere
SpaceX already has over 1300 Starlink satellites in orbit and they are providing download speeds up to 400 megabits per second with 20 second latency. Super Heavy Starship drops the per Starlink launch cost by fifty to one hundred times. The launch cost drops ten to twenty times and the payload increases by five times. SpaceX already launched 240 Starlink satellites in one month. SpaceX could increase to launching 24,000 Starlink satellites in a month. This would mean ten gigabit per second download speeds everywhere on Earth with a capacity to replace all cellular and internet communication. This would also mean centimeter-accurate GPS for global robots and not just in warehouses.
Self-Driving Cars, Self Driving Trucks and Robotaxis
Ten cents per mile Robotaxi’s and level 5 full self-driving could arrive in the 2022-2025 timeframe. Cars built with the hardware for these systems are already on the road. There should be 4 million such cars in 2022 and over 20 million full self-driving cars could be built by 2025. Ten million robo-taxis could give rides equal to 100 million human-driven cars.
AI Conquers Self-Driving and Ready to Automate Robots and Everything Else That Moves
Tesla has created their own chips for the Dojo self-driving training supercomputer. Tesla will be using NPU chips (Neural Processing Unit). Currently, it takes 3 days to do a training session for self-driving. The deployment of Dojo will allow for larger training sets and reduce the training time to 7 hours. This would allow three training sessions per day instead of two per week. The new hardware and software will enable unlabeled and more unsupervised training. Parts of Dojo were already online in August-October 2020. More parts of Dojo have been released or are being released with the new FSD betas. Self-driving training and improvement will scale up by ten times and then accelerate even more with additional training software and process improvements and being able to leverage more data.
The self-driving car and truck system will be applicable for self-driving of drones, airplanes and automation of robots.
Hyper Integration of Cities for Massive Economic Boosts and a Post Pandemic Boom Greater Than Post WW2 Boom
There are about 60 million people in the North-Eastern USA (Boston, New York, DC regions). Instead of this being a loosely connected cluster of 4 metro-areas self-driving trucks could integrate the region. This would be a quadrupling of connected people and potentially provide a 25-30% boost in per capita productivity.
The top 29 global megaregions generate $29 trillion in GDP. If connectedness was boosted with self-driving vehicles for a 25-30% boost in productivity for all megaregions this would be a global boost of $8-10 trillion.
Solar and Battery Future Could go to 50% by 2030
Antiging Warp Speed Project Well Underway and Delivering Results
The biggest thing could be a multi-trillion dollar warp speed program to deliver radical antiaging by 2035. This could get started by 2025. There could be initial treatments that provide some antiaging benefits which will make everyone realize comprehensive, combination antiaging treatments is a realistic and urgent goal.
An interesting result is that Elon Musk could become a multi-trillionaire, make our species multi-planetary but he would be historically rated behind the heroes who conquer aging for humanity.
SOURCES- Tesla, SpaceX, Wikipedia, Visual Capitalist
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.