China and Exotic Animals.

Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming admiral Zheng He led seven massive expeditions spanning Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa. They brought back exotic animals like giraffes, zebras, ostriches and other animals as pets to the emperor, along side other trinkets.

The voyages were also a tribute system enforcement project: showing the flag, installing friendly rulers, suppressing piracy, and demonstrating that the Ming was the center of the civilized world.

After the Yongle Emperor died, a faction of Confucian scholar-officials at court argued the voyages were ruinously expensive vanity project. Resources were redirected to rebuilding the Great Wall to combat the threat of the Mongols.

Later Ming emperors went further and banned private overseas trade and oceangoing shipbuilding entirely.

Portugal for-profit?

The Portuguese had a different approach. They built small merchant flotillas building trading outposts.

The Portuguese model was the feitoria (factory/trading post) + fortress, strung along coastlines from West Africa, India and Macau. They didn’t try to conquer territorial empires inland. They controlled chokepoints and harbors.

This is the lens that many people in tech proclaim as the mechanism to bring us to space. But this misses two things: military and religon.

The Reconquista had just ended in Portugal. The 1415 capture of Ceuta in Morocco, often called the starting gun of Portuguese expansion, was framed as a crusade.

The naval expansion of Portugal had an economic engine, but it had a Religious and Military bent to it which, when it comes to talking about Space Exploration, it is often over looked.

A lot of people are going to die.

When we send people to space, people will die. No way around it. We should try to mitigate it, but there’s no way we can completely avoid it.

Creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars will require a large group of people living there, risking their lives. What would they be willing to do that for?

I can see 3 main unique buildings to build in Space: A Space Casino, A Research University, and a Cathedral. Which one would people be willing to die for?

MVP

Simple game play:

• Squared arena, with one inner ring.

• There’s a pilot with one drone on each corner.

• Human inside the arena needs to survive two rounds of thirty seconds.

• First round: Human, without any weapon moves inside the bigger ring and tries to not get hit. Every hit is –1 point. (players wear ski goggles for eye protection)

(In this video, we are at the Boston Dynamics office in Mountain View).

• Second round: He’s in the smaller ring, but has a spear. Every time he hits a drone, he wins +1 points back.

The fighter at the end of the night with the best score wins.

Improvements:

Drones

I found that I need better drones. Current drones I’ve been using are just the cheapest I could buy in Amazon ($40 each). For each event I would bring 30 drones, but I would lose about half the drones. These were not dangerous – they hurt like a medium slap.

I need to use a version of racing drones that are well encased. Main priority is to protect the motors and the battery. And the drones need to be WAY faster.

I’ve been talking with drone manufacturers and have some interesting ideas on the drawing board. I want to name the drone models after butterflies: Monarch, Viceroy, Emperor, Menelaus and Jezebel.

Clothing and protection

By enhancing the drones, I need to take protection seriously. My thinking is that it should be a hybrid between fencing and moto-cross:

It should look something like this, (but with a helmet).

Scoring

Some of the fighters would get great scores, but looked goofy during their fights. I need to introduce some judge-based scoring to mitigate rewarding that – much like figure skating.

I want the sport to feel very regal and elegant. If the techbros are to become the new aristocracy, they should have a sport that is at the level of F1, Bullfighting, Polo, Sailing. I do not want it to feel “cyber-punk”.

Fighters

Need to recruit people that practice martial arts, dancers, fencers – maybe even bullfighters. Need people that move with grace.

Venue

I need to find a warehouse in San Francisco. People were driving one hour all the way down to Mountain View for the events. Warehouse has to have double ceilings.

In the future I want the arena to have a “Greco-futuristic” style like this, with the arena delineated with lights.

Why now

Some great combat sports came to existence as an abstraction out of current modes of warfare:

Kendo in Japan, is an abstraction out of the Samurai

Jousting in Europe was an abstraction out of the Crusades

Now, war has changed into drone warfare. But “drone racing” hasn’t taken over as a sport, for the same reason people don’t watch livestreams of “the mars rover.”

People care about people, not robots. That’s why everyone wants to watch the moon landing.

Why make a sport?

A while back Curtis Yarvin got me into this book by Gaetano Mosca called “The Ruling Class.” One of the main ideas is that every society in history has had 4 groups of people:

1. Merchants

2. Priests

3. Warriors

4. Peasants

Mosca’s theory is that there’s always one group that is at the top, and at least another one that is “supporting.” In the best societies, everyone is supporting, because everyone is happy in their place.

• Renaissance Italy - Merchants at the top

• Athens - Priests at the top

• Sparta - Warriors at the top

This is what we have today:

• Ruling Class: Priest (NGO, New York Times, Human Rights Foundations, Media)

• Supporting:

  • Merchant (Tech, Pharma, Wallstreet, etc)

  • Peasant (Common people)

• Oppressed class:

  • Warrior

In Mosca’s theory, a new ruling class can only come from the Supporting Class. Hopefully today we have a good candidate: the new tech elite (a faction of the Merchants).

The techbros have cultivated a new “priestly” class of their own: Effective Altruism, Rationalist, Palladium Magazine, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Curtis Yarvin, Samo Burja – all these people have opposing views, but they are the “priests” of the techbros. They are concerned with ideas. The only problem is that these priests only preach to the techbros, not to the broader public.

My guess is that a new “warrior” class – even if it’s just “theatrical” and not for war, could be a good supporting class. Rallying the common folk behind exceptional champions, who pickup the ancient weapon of their forefather from the ground – the spear, and as a dangerous technology is hurtling towards they stand their ground and without blinking, pierce forward. It’s a dangerous dance between man and machine – which is exactly the metaphysical situation in which humanity is in right now.

And the spear/lance is a very important metaphysical and symbolic element to give this activity depth:

Saint George slaying the dragon

The Holy Lance piercing Jesus

Odin with Gungnir

Achille’s Spear

The Spear of Lugh

Poseidon's Trident

Therefore, the vehicle to create this would be a new sport - one that is “tech-coded” and makes everyone look up to the culture the techbros are building with a sport like this (after all, the Romans knew of the importance of having Gladiatorial fights as “circus”).

How to fund the sport

This is not a regular company – specially since the sport itself is not widespread. So the plan is to bootstrap the sport as much as possible. Make it a grassroots movement, and later commercialize.

1. Work with sponsors (tech companies / VC funds)

I think events like these would attract great technologists, which would be good for deal flow for funds and engineering talent for tech companies (I’ve seen some evidence of that at the current MVP events, but some could say I’m biased and that I already have a good network, and those were the people that showed up).

Also I think it would increase the brand of any organization that sponsors and puts their logo on the uniforms.

After this stage and the events are more mature, it makes to start making products at scale – specially the “combat drones.”

2. Find anchor investor

The UFC main funders were the Fertitta brothers, who made their fortune in casinos in Las Vegas (they invested an estimated $46 million over 4 years to support and grow the organization, but the UFC was still not profitable. Then put $10M to do a reality TV show as a last Hail Mary to save the business – the TV show worked).

Effective Altruism went from an underground movement to a well funded ecosystem because of Dustin Moskovitz.

What Drone Slaying might need is one billionaire who believes in the sport, and after that, get more institutional investors.

Roman Gladiatorial fights were first hosted inside the homes of Roman patricians as religious rituals, and then opened up to the public.

Autonomous Swarms

No one has cracked the problem of making autonomous swarms. There are multiple scenarios in which different autonomous swarms would have to operate in different ways. Having a one-size fits all approach seems hard to me. But having autonomous swarms in an arena, tracking one person and avoiding by-standards, could be achieved by scaling up this sport, sell drone kits for people to practice at home and collect training-data on people practicing the sport.

But until then, I’ll just keep hosting the events and iterating little by little.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

You might think that based on this, it follows that Republicans have Silver, right?

Wrong, they have bronze - maybe even copper. But they definitely don’t have silver.

And they most certainly don’t have gold.

But you don’t want gold.

Gold is for boomers.

You want Platinum, Silicon, Palladium or Bitcoin.

Maybe even Helium-3,

But you certainly don’t want gold.

For those starting new countries, you have to think to yourself: what am I protecting my people from?

Here are some options to choose from:

Protection from violence

This is the original protection that regular states provide (some poorly).

Protection from disease

One of the offers a new city-state could have is to say: living here, you’ll be able to escape the seed oils, blue light, paper receipts, and microplastics in the water. All of it.

This is usually impossible for individuals to avoid. Even if you are very careful with what you eat. You need specialized water treatment, regulated farming, and supply chains.

But I think there is a market for people who want to move to a city, knowing that they’re going to be protected from xenoestrogens.

Protection from one-self

This is protection mostly from addiction: porn, gambling, sex, drinking and more.

This is the monastery version of a charter city. In some ways, Alcoholics Anonymous is a proto Network State (but it doesn’t seek sovereignty from current states.)

This less morbid version would be something closer to a military bootcamp or boarding school. You lose many freedoms when you enroll because you trust the process you are putting yourself through and have expectations of certain outcomes at the end of the six months you’ll be inside.

Would you move to a city that its main offering is that all the food in the jurisdiction is going to be healthy and the water always pure?

Subscribe now

But besides people having a Barrys / Orange Theory to go to all together while they are living a in a remote location - you’ll also need a mechanism of cohesion that is works across borders and achieves something greater than “starting a country” — starting a people.

To have a regime, you need a regimen. Rules your people believe in. Things they do, that no one else does. Things they don’t do, despite everyone doing them.

Food

Are you a vegan? No? that’s fine – but if you realize, vegans are their own type of people. They have a distinct identity from everyone else’s. Creating a people requires approaching something like starting a new branch of veganism, or a new type of kosher diet. You need a set of rules, that the people that are part of the City State or Network State follow - the trick is that they need to believe in why they follow that diet. The person who is closest to achieving this recently is Bryan Johnson with BluePrint.

Calendar

A people need their own holidays. Network States need to establish their own festivities that are marked in their citizens’ calendars. Do they work on Saturdays? Are there parties during solstice? Do they celebrate the Bitcoin halving?

Language

This is probably the hardest one. Do your people speak something that no one else does? You could try to come up with a new language, pick up a language from a fictional book, or revive a dead language.

“But reviving a language is extremely hard, no??”

There’s this tiny island in the UK called Isle of Man. It’s a separate country from England. It had a language called “Manx” that went extinct - and then it was revived. How many people do you think speak it natively today (Jan 2024) that is still considered a living language? Stop and guess a number (scroll down for the answer).

The answer is 23 native speakers.

The bar is really low. If you can get 23 people to speak your language as a first language, that language is formally alive and spoken by “a people.”

Subscribe now

An Ardnassac, (inverse Cassandra) is someone cursed with always having wrong predictions - while at the same time, everyone around them believing them.

(Doomsday Clock 2023)

In 2009, Al Gore cited researchers to suggest a 75% chance that Arctic ice could be gone during some summer months within five to seven years (2016).

Any how… on a totally unrelated note, here’s a link to the Effective Altruist forum on their “art and science” of how they accurately predict the future.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/forecasting

“You are my war club, my weapon for battle — with you, I shatter nations; with you, I destroy kingdoms.”

– Jeremiah 51:20

There are international space treaties that prohibit nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons from being placed or used from Earth’s orbit - bummer. Nevertheless, we could still use something nicknamed “Rods from God,” a bundle of telephone-pole-sized (20 feet long, one foot in diameter. 6 meters long and 0.3 meters in diameter) tungsten rods that can be dropped from orbit, reaching a speed of up to 30 times the speed of sound (24,545 miles per hour. 39,501 km per hour ) and with the power of intercontinental ballistic missiles, delivered anywhere around the world under 15 min, it can destroy target 30 meters underground (98 feet), - with no nuclear fallout.

For comparison, MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) also known as Mother Of All Bombs - is one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives on Earth. When it detonated, it released about 11 tons of TNT. A “Rod from God” would have the same energy.

The Kinetic energy of an object is directly proportional to its mass, and its velocity squared.

KE = (1/2)mv^2

Increasing the mass 10 times, increases the kinetic energy 10 times.

If you increase the velocity by a factor of 10, you increase KE by 100. This is why small light objects can carry lots of kinetic energy.

This is a block of aluminum after it was hit by a 14-gram piece of plastic that was traveling 24,000 feet per second (26,000 kmph/16,000 mph) in space.

This is a serious problem for space stations and satellites. This makes even a spec of paint a dangerous weapon.

This is a picture of the window in the ISS, that was cracked by a flake of paint floating in orbit.

This is a picture of how a tiny object punctured a hole in the robotic arm of the ISS.

Now imagine an object that weighs 10 tons, traveling at that speed. Imagine the damage it could cause. Here is a rendering of what the machine could look like.

This puppy is still theoretical, since the main drawback is the cost of getting the rods to Near-Earth orbit. It would cost around $60 million per rod, $2,500 per pound to put anything in space, with 20 cubic feet of dense tungsten weighing in at just over 24,000 pounds.

But I’ll show you how to get this baby running for cheap cheap. I’m not saying I’ll tell you how to dramatically reduce the cost of getting payloads into space. I’m saying the material is already in Near-Earth orbit… Space debris.

You see, dear reader, I’m a strong ESG advocate. We should invest heavily in recycling technology, you know… for the environment! The amount of space debris is increasing, flying around our planet at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour). This will become a huge problem for humanity, like a growing cancer, or rather a syndrome - the Kessler syndrome.

Kessler Syndrome

First proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, it describes a scenario where the density of objects in low Earth orbit is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade effect, leading to an exponential increase in space debris. This space debris poses a significant risk to satellites, space stations, and any future space missions, potentially isolating Earth by creating an impenetrable barrier of fast-moving debris.

The implications of Kessler Syndrome are dire. The most immediate impact would be on global communications. Everything from GPS navigation to international phone calls. And then you have the second-order effects of those things going down. It would make both life on Earth and space travel extremely difficult.

So, in order to avoid the disruption of all our logistics on Earth that use GPS, communications shutdowns, and being trapped in a cage of space trash, one of the solutions is to collect that trash. You save the world while building the most powerful weapon - two birds, one stone.

But can a garbage man do all these things?

As of June 2023, there are over 37,000 known objects larger than 10 cm in low-earth orbit. This should be enough for around two rods. In 2019 there were 34,000; in four years, we got 3,000 more pieces of trash. It’s a growth opportunity!

“But the rods have to be made of tungsten!” Yeah, maybe. Think of it this way. The temperature of re-entry through the atmosphere is as high as 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re a garbage collection company, right? maybe we only need the trash can to be resistant to the heat.

The Trash Can

We have different solutions for the outer layer of the trash can that we could look at.

1. Refractory Metals: Tungsten and molybdenum, for instance, have very high melting points (3422°C and 2623°C respectively) making them suitable for high-temperature applications.

2. Ceramics: Materials like zirconium carbide and silicon carbide are used in high-temperature applications due to their high melting points and ability to withstand thermal shock.

3. Carbon-based Materials: Graphite and carbon composites are used for their excellent thermal stability and strength at high temperatures. For instance, reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) was used in the Space Shuttle's nose and wing leading edges.

4. Ablative Materials: These are designed to absorb heat while undergoing a controlled erosion. They are often used in heat shields for spacecraft. Phenolic-impregnated carbon ablator (PICA) is an example known for its lightweight and effective heat dissipation properties.

5. Heat-Resistant Alloys: Nickel-based superalloys, such as Inconel, can maintain strength at high temperatures, making them suitable for components like jet engines and re-entry vehicles.

6. Thermal Barrier Coatings: These coatings, such as yttria-stabilized zirconia, are applied over a substrate material to insulate it from extreme temperatures.

Once we have a trash can that can withstand re-entry, we work on garbage collection.

Garbage Collection

There are different approaches to removing debris, but the one that seems the most effective is from a program that uses a net, called RemoveDEBRIS.

After having the trash can, we need to ensure the trash we put inside won’t damage it. For that, we could use some sort of insulating spray foam, to consolidate all the pieces of trash together into one. Sprayed aerogel with some non-flammable binder or other resins should do the trick. The other option would be to use a compactor.

Once you have your ESG-leading environmentally-friendly company going, collecting trash around orbit to save the world, you put all the trash together in the big trash can, and one day… “Whoops, I dropped the trash can.”

Melting the trash

We don’t need the insulating foam to keep all the trash “cool” from the heat of re-entry. What we want is a controlled melt of the trash inside the can as it re-enters the atmosphere. Too much heat and the trash will evaporate before impact. If the trash doesn’t melt enough, the pieces will move around, and course correction of the projectile becomes impossible - and the whole point of this device should be its surgical precision. To fix that, you can use some metallic foam, such as silicon carbide.

Expansion

Space debris collection is a growing industry, as the amount of trash is increasing. But besides that, the next steps would be to redirect asteroids and to build the lunar mass driver, an electromagnetic catapult.

In the meantime, we can collect some broken pieces of pottery floating in space.

"To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations — And he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as the vessels of the potter are broken to pieces, as I also have received authority from My Father."

– Revelation 2:26-27

“The objective must be to transform all states into peaceful service companies.”

It is not only a better business model but also a moral imperative. The ruler serves the people.

This is actually a very old concept. The head of the state is there to serve the people.
In his old coat of arms, Prince Charles of England has the phrase “ich dien”, I serve.

This is the animating spirit of the techbro - “I’m starting a startup to democratize x” is skeuomorphic thinking. If you read Curtis Yarvin, you can break from this way of thinking. He makes the clear point that when someone says “we should democratize x”, that has a good connotation; if someone says “we should politize x” it has a bad connotation. This is one of the most subtle ways of doing Russell Conjugation.

Techbros need to realize that to democratize is the animating spirit of the boomers. Our animating spirit is what Prince Hans-Adam II talks about - to transform all states into peaceful service companies. This is our moral imperative.

Society as a Service - the new SaaS.

The only point in which I differ from Prince Hans-Adam II is that I think the best state is not run like a hotel but like a GYM.

Salus populi suprema lex.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

It is common in a Christian and post-Christian society to pray for the Eschaton - the end times, only because we think this would bring relief from the current pain.

“You think we will see collapse? Ha! that is very optimistic. The decline can continue for much longer than you think.” Curtis Yarvin told me. “If you want to see a picture of the future to which we are on track, look at the third world,” he continued - “Venezuela just keeps getting worse, Haiti just keeps getting worse. Where is the collapse?”

This criticism was made against the argument that Balaji Srinivasan was making - that we’re going to see a collapse of the dollar within our lifetimes. This could be true, as Balaji has been right in other stuff other people thought it was impossible to happen.

But this “logical fallacy” or “religious thinking” that Curtis points out is interesting to think about - “Doomer Optimism”. You are incentivized to think the end is near because, on the other side, there is heaven.

On the other hand, you have “Optimist Doomerism”. This can be seen in the people around “e/acc”. We should accelerate! Even if we go extinct, the predecessor AIs will carry on the torch of civilization.

Both of these seem to have holes in reasoning, mainly driven by incentives. the Dommer Optimist thinks that after the collapse of the dollar, his Bitcoin is going to pump and become the world's reserve currency. On the other hand, people who work in AI fall for Optimist Dommerism - they think that with accelerated advanced AI development, they’ll become rich while their tools help millions of people - and in the slim chance that AI destroys humanity then that’s okay - since we would be replaced by superior beings.

Now, keep in mind that my startup is in the AI field and that I’m a Bitcoiner. Balaji might be right about the collapse of the dollar, and AI might replace us at the top of the pyramid. But Curtis might have an interesting point by pointing out this hole in that type of thinking.

Subscribe now