Tag: #IntergenerationalEquity
#150 Orbit on Credit: Why Three Powers Are Betting on the Same Forecast
One number now appears in nearly every strategy paper on space. By 2035, the space economy is said to be worth 1.8 trillion dollars. It comes from a study by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey published in April 2024, which started from 630 billion dollars in 2023 and assumed growth at close to twice the rate of the global economy. Goldman Sachs adopted it this year. It sits in ministerial briefings, in fund prospectuses, in hearing transcripts. People read it the way they read an exchange rate.
#145 The Earth: The Thermostat Changes Hands
If you measure this planet not by its age but by the time it has left for complex life, it stands late rather than in the middle. It is roughly four and a half billion years old, and the window for multicellular life closes in about eight hundred million to one billion years. The reason is the sun. It grows about ten percent brighter every billion years, silicate rock weathering therefore pulls ever more CO2 out of the air, and at some point the concentration falls below the threshold at which plants can still perform photosynthesis. Oxygen follows, probably within a geologically short span. Around eighty percent of the time in which this Earth could carry anything like us is already behind us.