It’s a beautiful summer day. The sky is clear, the temperature is warm, but not hot, and the birds are chirping. For a moment, you’re filled with regret. Instead of enjoying this day and all of its magnificence, you must get dressed and report to work. Then, a realization engulfs you like a warm blanket; you don’t need to do that anymore. In this era, work is optional. You are free to do as you please. Many have feared the day when machines take our jobs, a day that never came; innovation has always birthed far more new jobs than it has eliminated. Perhaps, until now. Artificial intelligence may represent a rupture unlike any before. We must confront this possibility head-on: not with panic, but with pragmatism. Rather than clinging to 20th-century solutions or futilely resisting progress, we must redesign our economic and social systems to embrace a future of radical abundance and human flourishing. Here’s how.

The Jobless World

Fears of mass unemployment at the hands of our machines have historically proven very wrong. Sure, innovations do indeed eliminate the demand for certain kinds of jobs. Technology eliminated, for instance, the need for telephone operators to route calls. Alarm clocks replaced “knocker uppers,” people literally hired to wake you up in the morning, by knocking on windows. Even the profession of the “computer” was absorbed by the very machine that now bears its name. Yet, paradoxically, there are more jobs for humans to do than ever before; technology has always created far more jobs and opportunities than it has eliminated. With this understanding in mind, as loath as I am to say it, this time might, in fact, be different.

Artificial intelligence, especially when embodied in physical machines, doesn’t just augment human capabilities; it can conceivably do everything that a human can, and more. AIs can take phone calls, work on spreadsheets, drive trucks and taxis, work on assembly lines, clean homes, and even build buildings. There is no reason to think that machines cannot replace all manner of human physical and cognitive labor. Furthermore, unlike humans, machines don’t require workers’ compensation insurance, a pension, or a wage, and can work in extreme conditions with no lunch break, no holidays, rest, or complaints. Machines will be the perfect employee, far preferable to humans in almost every conceivable way.

Even if, however, our machines cannot replace all human jobs and tasks, AI will still change the nature of employment, unlike anything humanity has thus far experienced. As notes, prior technological employment displacements were sectoral, hitting one or two sectors at a time. AI, on the other hand, will transform virtually all industries, more or less, at once. The speed of automation will far outpace individuals' ability to adapt. Retraining humans to switch careers takes months or years at a minimum; AIs will acquire new skills within weeks, and as their capabilities expand, human labor will be continually pushed to the fringes. Many will be in a constant state of retraining for jobs that probably will not exist by the time they are ready to take them, and even if it does, the pay will be low, as demand far exceeds supply.

In a sense, machine-driven mass unemployment is already well underway. As technology advanced in the 20th century, many nations built an ever-growing patchwork of welfare programs to provide aid, either in cash or benefits, to people who were unable to work. These beneficiaries now include low- and no-income groups, the disabled, and the elderly. I have been a vocal critic of these programs because they lack clear objectives and function more like populist vote-buying mechanisms than genuine efforts to help a changing economy weather change. This messy patchwork of welfare programs is also easily gamed by free riders or otherwise creates a series of systemic perverse incentives, trapping people in the very circumstances they are ostensibly intended to address. Welfarism is a 20th-century mistake we best not repeat.

Alternative options for dealing with technological unemployment aren’t great either. If and when mass unemployment arrives, the knee-jerk populist reaction of most politicians will be to outlaw machine labor in a foolish effort to protect and preserve jobs for humans. We can expect legislators, for instance, to prohibit fully autonomous vehicles under specious claims of “safety.” Others will prohibit AIs from practicing law by ensuring mandatory licensing, which can only be obtained by natural-born humans. Let me be clear: Efforts to stifle automation, to swim against the current of progress, are bad responses and will only cause more net pain and harm. Instead of resisting unemployment, we should embrace it.

The Jobfree World

This requires a paradigm shift, a cultural realignment. We have long been conditioned to associate idleness and joblessness with failure. After all, if the market isn’t paying you for your time, the thinking goes, your time must not be very valuable. In a future where labor is mechanized, most of us will not be worth hiring. Yet, we never really needed the job; only the income. For many of us, the job is a shackle preventing us from living life to the fullest. There is nothing inherently human or dignified about standing on an assembly line and bolting together a door assembly, or sitting in a cubicle, writing up reports. Sure, some of us may enjoy our jobs, but most of us would rather do something else with our time. If AI allows us to devote more of our time to our true interests and desires, it’s a liberating force, not an oppressive force. It’s something to be welcomed, not feared.

Harnessing this opportunity, however, requires rethinking our economy from the ground up. It means taking bold, but calculated action. First and foremost, however, the government should abolish income and corporate/business income taxes. These taxes are not only fundamentally unfair, forcing humans into a kind of fractional slavery, but they also disincentivize employees from working and companies from hiring. When we remove these harmful taxes on production, employers will have less incentive to let go of their human staff, and their employees can keep more of their rightfully earned income. Lost revenue can be replaced by taxes on land, resources, and consumption.

In this brave new world, some might be tempted to double down on the minimum wage to ensure that even as technology reduces the value of our labor, we are paid well. This would be counterproductive. Wages are set by the supply and demand for labor. A minimum wage is a price control that forces trade-offs and would generally encourage faster automation and human displacement. A wage floor is only helpful when there is a monopsony of labor. Monopsony is the opposite of a monopoly; instead of one entity controlling the supply of something, it controls the demand, in this case, the demand for labor. Monopsony is common in small towns where there might be one or two dominant employers that control the wage “market price.” In this limited circumstance, a wage floor can beneficially correct the monopsony.

Lucky for us, however, in this job-free world, we will need a lot less money to begin with. If and when machines do take our jobs, it will be because they can do them better and cheaper. To the extent that we are concerned about falling incomes, however, we could consider adopting a “wage subsidy,” or, as of calls it, “a publicly funded top-up to low hourly wages.” Glasner proposes a subsidy equal to 80 percent of the difference between the employer-paid wage and a “target wage”, which he sets at 80 percent of the national median. This policy proposal provides all the right incentives. A wage subsidy doesn’t discourage hiring because the state, not the firm, bears the additional cost. Further, because the subsidy phases out gradually as an employee's earnings approach the target wage, it doesn’t discourage earning either. Every raise, every promotion, is still beneficial. Lastly, it mitigates the aforementioned monopsony problem by compressing the wage distribution immediately under the “target wage” and enhancing competition between employers.

A wage subsidy, in fact, is conceptually similar to another approach to the same problem: the Negative Income Tax, or NIT. NIT is most often associated with Libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who championed the idea as a more straightforward replacement for traditional welfare. An NIT is an income tax system that reverses the direction of tax payments for incomes under a specified target level. Again, it does this gradually, phasing out as employee incomes rise to the target rate. In that sense, it functions exactly like a wage subsidy for low-income workers, but it goes one step further; an NIT doesn’t require employment to receive the benefit. The wage subsidy, therefore, could be seen as more “pro-work” than an NIT. Depending on our goals, this could be seen as a feature or a bug.

Going one step further brings us to the best-known contender for dealing with technological mass unemployment: Universal Basic Income, or UBI. Which gained prominence during the 2020 presidential campaign of . Yang planned to levy a VAT tax on the goods and services Americans buy, using the revenue to send monthly checks of $1,000 to every American, no questions asked. This “Freedom Dividend,” as he called it, would ease the pain of technologically-driven unemployment. Critics of the plan, of course, noted its extreme price tag: at over $3 trillion a year, or 3/5th of the total Federal budget at that time, they argued that the cost was not worth the benefit. For many Americans, it would only hand back money already taken from them as taxes, yielding no net benefit and deadweight loss to boot.

It’s an indisputable fact that all of these proposals are expensive. However, because wage subsidies and NIT gradually phase out as incomes rise, they are comparatively more affordable than UBI. Still, the sticker prices are misleading; these programs are intended to replace, not supplement, the existing welfare infrastructure, which already costs hundreds of billions annually. They would also save on administration. The current welfare industrial complex requires armies of staffers, offices, equipment, etc, which add ~5-10 percent in administrative cost. A wage subsidy/NIT/UBI that runs directly through the tax code could trim this to under 2 percent, saving tens of billions annually. Direct cash assistance is also likely to be more effective than the patchwork of in-kind benefits the welfare system currently provides. The research finds that cash transfers generally outperform in-kind transfers in reducing monetary poverty, improving health/nutrition, and increasing food security. This is, in part, because cash transfer programs like NIT or UBI eliminate a hard “benefits cliff,” the income threshold at which benefits are cut off, which perversely punishes subscribers for raising their incomes.

To the extent that a true UBI or NIT may prove unaffordable, however, we might consider limiting payments only to minor children and their parents, a “Minor Universal Basic Income,” or MUBI, if you will. If we view children, more nodes on the “social supercomputer,” as a positive externality, then an MUBI makes sense; effectively subsidizing more humans by compensating parents for the cost and labor of raising children. Further, if we split these payments, half to parents and half to children, with the latter held in an index fund accessible at age 18 or 21, compounding interest and capital gains work their magic. A $500-a-month MUBI, held in a conservative index fund for 18 years, allows a young adult to begin their adult life with ~$175,000 of assets. Assets that could be used to buy a home, a car, start a business, or just be kept in the fund until retirement. Indeed, without adding a single dollar, the capital gains alone could grow to $2 million by the time that child retires.

Conclusion

The arrival of truly capable AI does not spell the end of human meaning or dignity; it offers the first real chance in history to decouple survival from drudgery. By abolishing punitive taxes on work and production, replacing broken welfare traps with smarter mechanisms like wage subsidies, NIT, or a focused MUBI, we can ensure that the productivity gains flow back to everyone. Humanity could finally be liberated to explore, create, invent, care for one another, and reach for the stars, not because we must labor to eat, but because we choose to build, dream, and wonder. Instead of a jobless dystopia, the jobfree world could be the most inspiring opportunity our species has ever been handed. The only question left is whether we will have the courage and wisdom to seize it.

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We have now traversed a sweeping yet concise history of the universe, from its first moments to the formation of a young, fortuitous Earth, a planet uniquely suited for life. Along the way, we touched on the concept of entropy and how living organisms create pockets of order that raise net disorder. What we have not yet explored, however, is what "life" actually is in the first place. Everything alive is made of atoms, so how can one clump of atoms be alive while another is not? Surprisingly, the answer is far more elusive than it first appears. As physicist Chet Raymo aptly observed, “We recognize life when we see it, but it is devilishly hard to say what it is.” Here, we explore dissipation-driven adaptation and assembly theory; the final pieces of the puzzle that is life.

Life is what it does…

If one were to ask a biologist to define “life,” he or she would probably list the key characteristics of living organisms: they can grow, respire, excrete, reproduce, move, metabolize, and respond to the environment. Simple enough, right? The problem is that a characteristics-based approach always leaves us with troublesome outliers. A mule, for example, cannot reproduce, yet nobody would doubt that it’s alive. A virus, on the other hand, can reproduce, but most biologists don’t consider it to be alive because it needs another species to do so. Nobody argues that a crystal is alive, yet it still grows. Meanwhile, some bacteria enter dormant periods during which they don’t grow or metabolize, yet they are clearly living organisms. The more we attempt to tighten our grasp around a succinct definition of “life,” the more organisms slip through our fingers.

In physics, scientists approach this question differently. Instead of trying to list characteristics of life, they ask what it does on a more fundamental level. MIT physicist Jeremy England's ‘dissipation-driven adaptation’ theory, for instance, posits that the key differentiator between what is living and what is non-living is that the former is better at dissipating energy per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Life, as I mentioned earlier, is an “open” system that captures energy, uses it to create pockets of low entropy, thereby increasing the entropy of the universe. Life accelerates entropy, and what better way to accelerate it further than by replicating (reproducing) itself over and over again? Darwinian evolution tells us that life’s ultimate goal is reproduction; the survival of the species depends on its ability to adapt to changing conditions. Biology tells us how (natural selection), physics tells us why (entropy).

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As global fertility rates plummet and our population ages, healthcare has become one of the defining and most daunting challenges of the 21st century. If we are serious about preparing humanity for a thriving 22nd century, we cannot afford to ignore it. In the 20th century, we discovered that healthcare embodies a cruel “impossible trinity”: high-quality care, universal access, and affordable cost. History shows we can reliably achieve only two of these three at any given time. In this essay, I examine some of the world’s most prominent healthcare systems, uncover what they get right and where they fall short, and then propose a bolder, more radical approach, one that may finally break this century-old trade-off and better serve humanity in the decades ahead.

Why Healthcare is Difficult

Policymakers have long struggled to deliver high-quality, affordable healthcare, largely due to structural imbalances in the market. Chief among them is the asymmetry of bargaining power between patients and providers. Unlike purchasing a television or smartphone, where consumers can compare options, assess value, and walk away, many critical medical services are “offers we cannot refuse.” In the midst of a heart attack, for instance, a patient cannot comparison-shop cardiologists or emergency rooms, nor negotiate prices. Most people also lack the specialized knowledge needed to determine which procedures are truly necessary, which are optimal, which may be superfluous, or whether they are being overcharged. As a result, patients must rely heavily on intermediaries, primarily insurance companies, to navigate the system on their behalf.

Insurers act as our agents by negotiating prices with medical providers and scrutinizing claims to prevent unnecessary treatments and diagnostics, thereby protecting both their bottom line and ours. You may be rolling your eyes at this point, thinking, “They’re just protecting their own profits, not mine.” That reaction is understandable, but it rests on a common misconception: that doctors are selfless healers driven solely by patient welfare, while insurers are motivated purely by greed. In reality, the opposite dynamic often plays out. It is not uncommon for providers to recommend superfluous tests, procedures, or to inflate billing in order to increase revenue. They can do so with relative impunity because the public tends to direct its anger at the insurer rather than the doctor. Without this insurer scrutiny, premiums would need to be substantially higher.

Denials can save lives, too. In the 1980s, autologous bone marrow transplants (ABMT) for advanced breast cancer became wildly popular. The expensive procedure involved harvesting a patient’s own stem cells, administering high-dose chemotherapy or radiation, and then reinfusing the cells. Heavily promoted by the media and doctors alike, the treatment was largely unproven. Insurers denied coverage because it was experimental and risky. Patients sued to force payment, with doctors publicly condemning the denials as “arbitrary and capricious.” Courts often sided with patients, ruling that insurers could not withhold coverage for doctor-recommended treatments while awaiting rigorous statistical proof.

In one instance, insurer Health Net was sued for denying coverage for AMBT and lost. The patient, unfortunately, passed away shortly after the insurer acquiesced. The family blamed her death on the insurer for delayed treatment and sued the insurer again, a case that was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Media attention escalated public pressure, and soon elected officials joined in, passing legislation forcing insurers to cover ABMT. By the late 1990s, tens of thousands of women had undergone the procedure. The insurers, however, were right all along. The evidence supporting AMBT was flimsy and anecdotal, at best. By the late 1990s, when quality research finally emerged, it was proven to be less effective than existing treatment methods and had a higher mortality risk.

Insurers also face an informational asymmetry, but this time with you, the policyholder. You know your own health risks far better than they do. Healthy people often skip insurance, convinced that cancer, heart disease, or serious illness “won’t happen to me.” Yet the moment they sense they might actually need coverage, they rush to buy it. This dynamic produces adverse selection. When insurance is voluntary, the risk pool quickly becomes dominated by higher-risk individuals who expect to use it. As claims rise, premiums increase, prompting healthier people to drop out. The pool grows sicker and more expensive, creating a death spiral that hurts everyone.

Comparing Approaches to Healthcare

Countries address these informational asymmetries in very different ways. The U.S. relies primarily on private insurers, supplemented by various government programs. This approach has delivered poor results on most fronts: it fails to achieve universal coverage, and costs remain extraordinarily high at about 18% of GDP. It combines the worst of both worlds: the government rarely imposes price controls on drugs, devices, or procedures, while employer-sponsored insurance blunts direct market feedback from patients. Despite massive spending, the U.S. continues to lag peer nations in life expectancy and many quality-of-care metrics. One clear upside, however, is strong innovation: high prices paid by American patients and insurers give drugmakers and device makers powerful incentives to develop new treatments.

Many in the U.S. recognize these shortcomings and advocate shifting to a single-payer system, in which the government serves as the sole national insurer, funded primarily through taxes. The British NHS is the most prominent example. This model offers clear advantages: it guarantees universal coverage and, through its monopoly purchasing power, drives down prices for drugs, devices, and services typically to around 10% of GDP. Yet these gains come with significant trade-offs. Suppressing price signals weakens incentives for innovation and can produce shortages, leading to long waiting times for non-emergency care. Still, single-payer countries often achieve better overall health outcomes, frequently surpassing the U.S. in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy.

A third approach, a “middle way” called “managed competition,” is exemplified by countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. These systems harness regulated competition among private insurers while pursuing broad social goals. The government defines a standard basic benefits package that every individual must purchase from a private insurer of their choice. Insurers must accept all applicants regardless of age or pre-existing conditions and may charge only community-rated premiums (the same price for everyone). The key mechanism is risk-adjusted capitation: the government provides subsidies to insurers for individuals expected to generate higher costs, thereby preventing adverse selection and keeping the market stable.

In the Netherlands, for example, the risk-adjustment system uses over 40 factors, including demographics, socioeconomic status, and prior claims history, to calculate subsidies for insurers. The goal is to neutralize adverse selection: individuals pay the same community-rated premium regardless of health status, but insurers receive risk-adjusted payments to offset expected higher costs and prevent “cream skimming” of healthy patients. Crucially, insurers can keep any unused portion of these subsidies as profit. This creates powerful incentives to deliver high-quality care at the lowest possible cost while preserving strong motives for innovation and efficiency. The results speak for themselves. At roughly 10% of GDP, the Dutch system achieves near-universal coverage, delivers among the world’s highest life expectancies, and consistently ranks near the top in global indices of healthcare innovation.

Finally, Singapore offers a compelling hybrid model that puts personal responsibility front and center. All citizens are required to contribute roughly 8–10% of their income into MediSave, a tax-advantaged health savings account used to cover coinsurance and deductibles for routine care. This individual mandate gives consumers genuine “skin in the game.” As Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” When people spend their own money, they tend to make more prudent decisions than any government bureaucracy or insurer could. The government reinforces this by mandating transparent pricing and fostering competition among providers, which drives higher quality and lower costs. The results are striking: Singapore achieves excellent health outcomes at a fraction of the spending seen in other developed nations.

Layered on top is MediShield Life, a low-cost national catastrophic insurance plan that covers major hospitalizations, chronic illnesses, and acute injuries once individuals have met their deductibles and coinsurance through MediSave. At first glance, Singapore’s system appears to embody libertarian ideals of personal responsibility. In practice, however, the government plays a heavy role: it owns most hospitals, imposes strict price controls, and carefully regulates the mix of private and subsidized wards, heavily subsidizing the latter. Singapore thus blends forceful state intervention with strong individual accountability. The results are impressive: near-universal coverage, among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest infant mortality rates, all achieved at roughly 7% of GDP.

21st Century Healthcare

There is much we can learn from international experience. At its core, insurance exists to manage genuine financial risk arising from a serious illness or injury. In the United States, however, health insurance has drifted far beyond this purpose. It now routinely covers everyday check-ups and minor, non-life-threatening conditions that do not require a safety net. Think of auto insurance: we use it for major collisions, not for oil changes or routine tire replacements. By reserving health insurance for chronic conditions and acute injuries, we can once again subject routine care to normal market forces. This shift would likely reduce costs and improve quality through greater consumer choice and provider competition.

This distinction matters. Between 1998 and 2021, while overall consumer prices rose 66%, the prices of insured medical services jumped 132%. In contrast, the 16 most popular cosmetic procedures, paid for directly by consumers, rose just 31% on average, with some even declining in real terms. LASIK eye surgery offers a striking example: its inflation-adjusted cost per eye fell from roughly $4,000 in the 1990s to about $1,000 by 2019. Singapore’s model shows the power of this approach. Mandatory health savings accounts paired with high-deductible catastrophic coverage give consumers real skin in the game. One study of Indiana residents on high-deductible plans found they were far less likely to rush to expensive emergency rooms (opting instead for urgent care), chose affordable generics over brand-name drugs, and spent about 35% less overall on healthcare than those with traditional plans.

High-deductible plans and health savings accounts are powerful tools, but they are no panacea if consumers cannot make informed decisions. In the U.S., prices for most medical services remain hidden in opaque “chargemasters” that are accessible mainly to insurers. These list prices are not true market prices; they serve as arbitrary anchors for insurer negotiations. Even when prices are disclosed, complex billing codes make meaningful comparison shopping nearly impossible. To empower patients, providers should be required to publicly post their cash prices in clear, bundled formats — much like prices in a supermarket or online retailer. This transparency is essential. It would enable consumers to shop effectively, restore genuine market discipline, and shift bargaining power back toward patients.

Layered on top of the health savings accounts would be a universal catastrophic insurance plan. One option is to fund it through a value-added tax (VAT) on goods and services, while adopting Singapore-style government monopoly purchasing power to negotiate lower prices. This would reduce costs for taxpayers but introduce the familiar trade-offs of dampened innovation and longer wait times. Given that most routine care would remain in competitive markets, many may view this as an acceptable compromise. Alternatively, policymakers could follow the Dutch model: use VAT revenue to fund risk-adjusted capitation payments to private insurers. Insurers offering the catastrophic coverage would be required to accept all applicants at community-rated premiums. In return, they would receive subsidies calibrated to each enrollee’s risk score. Properly designed, this neutralizes adverse selection, allows insurers to compete vigorously on cost and quality, and lets efficient plans retain any surplus as profit. They could also offer optional supplemental packages with enhanced benefits.

This approach carries one notable risk: insurers might skimp on care for the highest-cost patients, particularly those with chronic conditions. To guard against this, policymakers could establish an excess coverage layer that activates only for costs exceeding a high threshold, such as two standard deviations above the average enrollee’s expected cost. Funding for this reinsurance could come from Pigouvian taxes, for example on sugar-sweetened beverages and tobacco. These taxes would simultaneously discourage unhealthy behaviors (internalizing negative externalities) and generate revenue to protect the most vulnerable patients.

A Radical Rethink

Still, this policy design leaves me unsatisfied. “Healthcare” is actually something of a misnomer: insurers provide something more akin to “sickcare”; they don’t have much incentive to prevent illness or act in the long-term interests of their insureds, in part, because insurers are bound to one-year cycles and cannot count on enrollees re-subscribing year after year. Therefore, the benefits of expensive preventative efforts, such as encouraging weight loss, will likely be captured by another insurer. A recent essay from , however, offers a pathway to a fix: an elegant merger between health and life insurance.

Life insurers price policies using actuarial tables that forecast mortality based on age, lifestyle, and health. As long as the policyholder stays alive, the insurer collects monthly premiums and invests the “float” in long-duration assets such as bonds and mortgages. The longer the insured lives, the more profitable the policy becomes. This alignment of incentives opens intriguing possibilities. Research by Koijen and Van Nieuwerburgh shows that while traditional health insurers often balk at funding expensive treatments like immunotherapies, a life insurer would have far less resistance. If the policyholder could draw directly from their death benefit to pay for such care, the treatment could cost the insurer nothing, or even generate a net gain.

This alignment could drive better social outcomes. Imagine a breakthrough anti-aging treatment that extends average lifespan by 20 years but costs $10,000 annually. A traditional health insurer would likely refuse to cover it. A life insurer, however, would have every incentive to pay, because keeping the policyholder alive longer directly increases its profits. When incentives align, a virtuous cycle emerges: longer life expectancy lowers life-insurance premiums, boosts participation, and accelerates medical innovation. In this model, the life insurer effectively becomes the catastrophic “health” coverage, while health savings accounts handle routine care. The same logic could extend to disability insurance, allowing payments or loans against the death benefit following a disabling event.

Instead of requiring people to buy private health insurance, perhaps we would be better off requiring everyone to purchase life insurance instead. These policies would help pay for chronic illnesses and acute injuries by allowing subscribers to borrow from the death benefit, providing an all-important safety net above and beyond a mandatory health savings account. With some built-in premium flexibility, the life insurer would also be positioned to help its members stay healthy. For example, they might offer premium discounts to subscribers who maintain healthy KPIs, like BMI, BPM, blood pressure, and blood glucose. Indeed, keeping just 3-5 KPIs within a healthy range would prevent or delay 60-80 percent of modern illnesses like obesity, cancer, dementia, and heart disease. A small nudge here could lead to a much healthier, happier, more productive society while simultaneously reducing the social cost of healthcare.

I do not claim this proposal to be perfect; there will never be a panacea for the challenge of healthcare. But I do believe this approach would strike an ideal balance. Mandatory health savings accounts would enforce personal responsibility and expose most of the healthcare industry to direct competitive pressure. The same pressure that has successfully driven down the cost of other goods and services would unleash the innovative potential of medical providers to discover better and more affordable ways to treat routine illnesses and provide general care. Above this, a mandatory life insurance plan provides a safety net in the event of death or serious illness; for the first time, an insurance plan that pays you to live.

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Every smartphone, every skyscraper, and every scientific breakthrough is not just a consequence of human ingenuity; it is the universe computing itself at ever-higher speeds. From the Big Bang’s first binary flickers, reality is a vast information processor, turning energy into stable patterns we call “matter,” evolving life, and eventually minds capable of deliberate progress. Each advance we make, from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, to the current intelligence revolution, accelerates the same ancient process: capturing energy, encoding knowledge, dissipating heat, and carving pockets of order from chaos. What we celebrate as “human progress” is just the cosmos upgrading its own software, with us, humans, as its most sophisticated subroutine yet.

Understanding Entropy

We previously explored the possibility that the universe is informational, one where everything derives its existence from binary yes/no questions. Reality, therefore, could be the outcome of countless trillions of interactions, what we might call computations, each erasing past alternatives and recording present outputs. This process isn’t free, however; the cost is entropy. In 1961, Rolf Landauer showed that information is physical; anytime we reset a memory register from 1 to 0, or vice versa, a small amount of heat is released. Therefore, every time the universe “learns” something new, it dissipates a small amount of heat energy. Entropy was described long ago in the laws of thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Most school children learn at least this much. The Second Law, however, goes further, stating that in an isolated system, entropy will never decrease. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in a sense, the first rule of progress.

Another way to think about entropy is as a measure of “disorder.” Low-entropy (ordered) states are statistically improbable. If you build a sandcastle on the beach and return a few days later, it’s probably long gone; the grains of sand returned to a random arrangement of particles. This is because there are nearly infinite ways of arranging sand grains on a beach, but very few that will build a castle. Similarly, if you dump a box of puzzle peices onto a table, they are almost certain to land in a disordered fashion. There is only one way for the pieces to organise themselves into the final image, but there are nearly infinite ways for them to land in the “wrong” order. Entropy also gives rise to what we perceive as time. Most of the laws of the universe, mathematically described, are symmetric: they work equally well when played backwards or forwards. Yet, in our world, shattered glass doesn’t spontaneously reconnect, mixed gases don’t suddenly dissociate, eggs don’t uncrack, and we cannot “remember” the future. Entropy creates a clear direction, like the current of a river, which we call the “arrow of time.”

I argue that as time passes, the universe “computes” in a forward direction, building stable structures that encode the results of past computations. The simplest form of said structures is what we call “matter.” We usually think of “matter” as that which has “mass,” and we get mass in two ways. First, from the mass of elementary particles that make up atoms, like quarks, when they interact with the “Higgs Field,” a kind of “energy field” that permeates all space. Over 99 percent of an atom’s mass, however, is found in the energy that “glues” subatomic particles together—specifically, the “strong force,” one of the four fundamental forces of the universe created at the Big Bang.

Matter, therefore, is not entirely distinct from energy. We might best think of matter as a measure of intrinsic energy content, or “bound energy.” In fact, Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², was originally written as M=E/c², illustrating that mass is a measurement of the energy contained within a body. This is why we can produce energy by splitting or fusing atoms, releasing their stored energy. It also means that all energy contributes to mass. For instance, a compressed spring is slightly heavier than an uncompressed spring, and a charged battery is slightly heavier than an uncharged battery; the difference is just too small for us to notice in everyday experience.

Matter can also be thought of as a stable configuration of energy that encodes the results of a prior “computation.” It’s a kind of “memory” that stores a crude form of knowledge, and the more complex the material structures, the more knowledge is contained therein. The story of what we call “human progress” is an amplified and accelerated version of the same process that began with the Big Bang. A process that uses energy, creates knowledge, and encodes that knowledge into matter, dissipating heat in the process. As we will see, this basic process defines the creation of new elements in the stars, elements that would eventually combine into molecules like DNA, encoding the blueprints for life. Eventually, those molecules would discover a means to build a human brain, the first mechanism that could dematerialise knowledge and accelerate its diffusion. Chemical evolution gives way to biological evolution, and then to cultural evolution. Each rung of the ladder acquires knowledge and dissipates energy faster than the one before it.

Life: A Negentropic Force

Wait a moment, you might say. How can life emerge in a universe that tends toward disorder? Isn’t life an example of order? After all, cells are made of complex, highly ordered structures. Trees grow tall and wide, standing up against the inevitability of entropy itself. Life doesn’t violate the Second Law because organisms are not isolated systems, a prerequisite of the law. On the contrary, as we will see, life accelerates entropy by dissipating energy faster than regular chemical processes ever could. In other words, life uses knowledge to carve a slice of order from the disorder. That pocket of order, that low-entropy “bubble,” exports entropy to the surrounding universe. Life is a negentropic force.

This makes humans the ultimate negantropes. Our large brains and capacity to communicate through vocal vibrations allow us to plan, wonder, reason, and, most importantly, to diffuse knowledge. We are, as far as we know anyway, the only arrangement of atoms that is conscious; the only beings capable of discovering and understanding the laws of the universe. Humans have found means of capturing energy on a heretofore unprecedented scale. From first discovering how to harvest sunlight via agriculture, to burning the energy stored in ancient life, or fossil fuels, to splitting the atom itself. We capture energy, discover knowledge, and use that knowledge to create beneficial counter-entropic forms, which we call “technology.” These technologies allow us to do more with less. We learned, for example, how to grow more food with less land, how to build engines that shrink the world, and even how to make sand “think.”

We experience and measure the fruits of these discoveries as “economic growth.” Humans have constructed evolutionary market systems that parallel their biological counterparts, accelerating the search for new counter-entropic forms. This “social supercomputer,” as I call it, ceaselessly processes input data, producing voluminous output data in the search for answers to ever more complex counter-entropic riddles. This eternal struggle against entropy gives humanity a core purpose: a never-ending endeavour to create order from the chaos. Indeed, this is how we are wired. The desire for order is so deeply rooted in our biology that we are naturally attracted to counter-entropic forms, from flowers to architecture.

In this informational universe, knowledge is infinite. The only limitation to how far humans can go is how fast we can accumulate it. Only with continued technological advancement and expanded negentropic capacity can we sustain the light of consciousness. This, in my view, is a moral imperative. One day, an exhausted Sun will expand and boil Earth’s oceans, if not consume the Earth entirely. When this happens, all life on the pale blue dot will end; its counter-entropic beauty will cease to exist. The only hope for life is us. Our species was endowed with a nearly limitless capacity to learn and discover. With this power, the power of knowledge, we have the potential to leave this planet and to take life with us to other star systems. It is often asked, why are we here? As good stewards of life on Earth, we are here to spare it from total annihilation at the hands of that fusion engine in the sky.

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Failure is something we have all experienced. We feel failure in our bones, the disappointment, shame, our heads held low; it’s a feeling that we desperately seek to avoid. But failure is underrated and underappreciated; failure is data, and an essential component of success. Whether it’s painstakingly trying thousands of different filaments to find the perfect one for the incandescent lightbulb, or watching a dozen multimillion-dollar rockets crash into drone ships and explode when you attempt to land them. Failure tells us where the knowledge gaps are; they are a roadmap to success.

When you fail, people may laugh at you, they may ridicule you, they may discourage you from attempting the “impossible.” Best not listen. Without risk of failure, there can be no progress; this dichotomy is the very namesake of Risk & Progress. With that, I want to introduce you to Jordan Taylor and his Substack, , which I highly recommend you check out. Below, Jordan shares with us an inspirational piece on why we must bravely look failure in the eyes and try everything anyway.

Incautious Optimism

A dense but whimsical technical blog for curious monkeys.

Build rail or use driverless cars? Put up nuclear plants or wind turbines? Feed the poor or travel to space? Why not try everything!

My daughter watched Zootropolis last night, and found it a little challenging. That’s OK, she’s only four and there are quite a few adult themes peppering that movie, plus policework and (implied) murder. And she cried at the end of Kung Fu Panda 2, so it’s probably not age-appropriate, but we watched it anyway.

One of the reasons I like it is humour aimed at the parents, high-arcing over the kids’ heads, like the joke about sloths running the DMV (har-har, that joke even works if you live in Ireland, where car stuff happens a lot faster). There’s side-quips at wokeness, a great many police movie archetypes made fun of, and an actual Godzilla reference thrown in for fun. And a really good title song.

It’s by Shakira, it’s called Try Everything, and even for a man who prefers The Prodigy to pop, it’s genius. It’s all about trying, failing, being beaten down and getting up again anyway, which the four year-old doesn’t notice but sure resonates with me, and every other adult on the planet! Which is probably why the song didn’t fail, unlike the movie’s stubborn fluffy bunny protagonist, and became an instant hit.

It’s even got a nice moral to it, but the irony is that trying everything is a pretty crap strategy for any single individual, because we’ve only twenty four hours in the day…

…But it’s a great strategy for an entire civilization!

“Birds don’t just fly, they fall down and get up,

Nobody learns without getting it wrong.”

We’re half-bred monkeys dragged from a tribal past where the rule was death and resource scarcity, and thrown into a world so gleaming and energy-rich that our instincts are scrambled. We naturally assume that we have to concentrate on one thing, one goal, and the muscles of the tribe must be focused.

There are no more berries! We must hunt the mammoth!

The herds flee, we must till the terrace farms!

Our water grows sour, we must go to the next valley!

But in today’s world, none of that works. We don’t all line up behind the elders to do the One Big Thing, and then move onto the Next Big Thing after that, and so-on. There are too many of us, and our world is too complex. Grown in capability, we can till the fields, pick the berries, hunt the mammoth, reach the next valley and fly to space all at the same time.

Try Everything!

Our tribal lore doesn’t work anymore. It mouths shaman-platitudes in a world of silicon sorcery, ineffectually navel gazing in the tides of infinity. We don’t have to decide anymore, we are eight billion techno-cyborgs against nature, doing everything at once. And if we can do everything at once, that means we can fail at everything at once, too. Fail and fail and fail and get up and try again.

Shakira’s song isn’t about a bunny trying to make it as a cop in an animal city. It’s not even about her own personal story, or yours or mine. It’s about the entire human condition, mixed and spun up and spread out on the world to bubble and froth.

Fail.

Fail.

Fail!

Try again!

I listened to it and remembered the dark, sleep-deprived nights a couple of years ago, when our daughter would scream and wail through the night because she’d lost her snuggly blanket, which we’d removed so she couldn’t drape it over her head in her sleep. Over and over again she would wake and I would soothe her, then again, and again. Stories, songs, soothing lights, cuddles. Nothing worked. We grew into a sleep-deprived half-life, the world muffled in our ears.

And then one day I did the obvious, and tied the snuggly blanket in a knot, and left it with her. A knot means no suffocation, no problem. Sweet dreams.

Success!

At the other side of the Irish sea a vast construction project patiently spends and cranes its way to completion building the world’s most expensive nuclear power plant. On the other side of Britain the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Dogger Bank, pile-drives its way to completion as well. Team Nuclear and Team Wind row at each other, each proclaiming their way to be the best, the One Big Thing we should all concentrate on.

But we’re not tribal chimps; we can just do both! And carbon-capture schemes too, and weird stuff with AI, and houses and hospitals. The lot. Across the ocean a billionaire wants to shoot AI data-centres into space on re-usable rockets. It might be lunacy but go for it. Others want to deep-drill the planet’s crust with microwave lasers to tap the heat of the underworld. Go for it! Or fire up jet planes with rotating explosions. Go for it!

A forest city. Electric transit lorries. A tidal barrage across the Mersey. A mirror-finished Saudi city in a line 170 kilometres long, underscoring the desert in an edit seen from space. Sure, why not? Is it a trillion dollar boondoggle? Yep, but who cares. Go for it!

And be ready to fail. Again and again.

It’s the same everywhere. A Puma, the big lion-like cat thing in Argentina, goes hunting for big Llama-like creatures twice its size and typically does ten or twenty failed hunts for every one that succeeds. It doesn’t know how to give up.

And so with us: Most new businesses fail, most factory improvement projects don’t hit their target, most new drugs are bogus, most new authors don’t sell and almost all attempts to chat up pretty blondes end with polite refusal.

But that’s OK, because the rare successes make up for everything that goes before, and then some.

Remember the lessons of history. The first steam engine ever patented was an unsafe commercial flop. It took decades before Thomas Newcomen built on the principles of Thomas Savery and others to create a useful steam-powered pump… and it was another 57 years after that when James Watt patented a separate steam condenser that made steam power efficient, and another twelve years after that before he figured out how to turn the output into rotary motion for machinery and transport. That’s over eight decades of patient, plodding failure and improvement before the world finally had a reliable engine to power the industrial revolution. And even that was ultimately replaced, and so were its replacements, and theirs too.

Failure all the way down… or success, depending on how you see it.

Try Everything!

So let’s ignore the divisive refuseniks who claim pragmatism but deliver only the word “no” in fancier words. You will know them by their tribal language.

“Let’s fix the problems on Earth before we go to space.”

“We don’t need more power. We need to use what we already have more efficiently.”

“We’ve got enough already. We don’t need another.”

Fuck these shallow-minded cretins, who claim to speak for everyone but instead see only the short horizons inside their own head. Their lack of vision doesn’t justify them freezing the world in aspic.

Instead let’s realise that we’re not a monkey tribe in an autumn valley, teetering on the edge of wintery oblivion. We’re a civilization with billions of brains that’s figured out how to create force & energy at will and is on the verge of learning how to infinitely multiply intelligence itself.

And for something that big the best bet is not to procrastinate too much. Instead reach out with hydraulic hands and electric blood and try a million things all at the same time, until you find what works. And then multiply that a million times until it’s everywhere.

Do that enough and the lives of our children and grandchildren will be unrecognizable from our troglodyte slouching towards progress.

Ignore the naysayers.

Try Everything!

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This article is part of The Boyd Institute’s quarterly policy sprint on the debt and deficit. To learn more about them and the work they do, or submit your own article, click here.

The United States carries a public debt that now exceeds $39 trillion and counting; a truly enormous burden, even for the world’s largest economy. This challenge is far from unique to America. Many of the world’s most advanced nations now face similar fiscal pressures, with total public debts now matching or surpassing their annual GDPs. Compounding the problem, economic growth in these countries has slowed markedly, sharply reducing the likelihood that they will ever meet their obligations in full. A superficial budgetary review might suggest that runaway entitlement spending or inadequate revenues are the culprit. These conventional diagnoses, however, miss the deeper issue. To confront this crisis meaningfully, we must set aside surface-level explanations and examine the problem from first principles. We must identify the true root cause, the fundamental driver behind these unsustainable trajectories. Only with that clarity can we hope to design an effective corrective mechanism.

Drowning in Debt

I want to be clear on one issue from the outset: debt is a problem of magnitude. There is no inherent requirement that a sovereign government, one that can print and tax in its own currency, always have a balanced budget. The United States has run a fiscal deficit for most of its existence and zeroed out its Federal debt only once, back in 1835. When productivity is rising, it can be logical to borrow from the future to live better today. Our debt troubles aren’t about the existence thereof, but that it has grown too fast for too long. Many of the world’s most “advanced” nations now carry a debt-to-GDP ratio over 100 percent, levels not seen since the mid-1940s, in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Then, we had a plausible excuse; today, we have no reason to run these kinds of deficits. Equally worrisome is the cost of maintaining this debt; the United States now spends about 15 percent of its budget just making interest payments. This is flatly unsustainable.

It’s not difficult to understand how we got here. If we think 4th dimensionally, the seats of our Congresses and Parliaments are not only filled by representatives who sit in them today but also by those who will sit in them tomorrow. The problem is that we can only count the votes made by representatives sitting in those seats today. Sure, future representatives and voters are out there, playing tag on a playground somewhere, enjoying a video game, doing homework, lying in a bassinet, etc, but they are, for the moment, voiceless. Consequently, representatives seeking votes today have found that the easiest way to “bring home the bacon” is to make the bill tomorrow’s problem. I’ve discussed this immoral, “government myopia” problem before. This “tyranny of the present” means that immediate concerns, preferences, and desires take precedence over long-term challenges.

In the United States, this has created a vicious dynamic. When the Democratic Party is in power, it passes new spending measures designed to satisfy its voters, but then defers the painful tax hikes needed to pay for them. Likewise, when the GOP returns to power, it cuts taxes and defers the spending cuts. Neither party is willing or able to tackle the core drivers of the Federal deficit, namely Medicare, Social Security, and defense spending, line items which account for more than 80 percent of the projected deficit increase through 2032. Instead, all they can do is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, tinkering around the edges, leaving the deeper problem wholly intact. How can we escape this fiscal trap? In the end, the ledger must balance. This leaves us with four options: print more money, raise taxes, cut spending, or outgrow the debt.

Escaping the Fiscal Trap

Let’s begin with the idea that we can just “print” our way out of a debt crisis. This view is primarily advocated by the “Modern Monetary Theory school” of economists. They contend that public debt is not a problem because a sovereign government can always print more currency to pay it. This is wrong. Governments borrow money by selling bonds. These bonds are like “mini loans” that must be repaid. Sovereign leviathans are not magically immune to their debt obligations; they just default differently. There are two ways to default: a “hard default,” where bondholders take formal written losses, and its worse cousin, a “soft default.” In a soft default, the debt is paid by printing worthless currency, literally inflating the obligation away. The government can escape the first by printing money, but it cannot escape the second. Bondholders won’t be fooled; they will stop lending or demand higher interest rates. Printing is not a long-term solution.

Okay, if we cannot print ourselves out of the debt trap without awaking the bond trolls, perhaps all we need to do is raise taxes to bring in more revenue? We won’t need to borrow from the future if we can meet our obligations today. But does raising taxes actually solve the problem? The answer hinges on whether the deficit is a revenue problem or a spending problem. The balance of evidence suggests it’s the latter, not the former. Recall your middle school physics class, where you learned about the nature of an ideal gas and how gases expand to fill any container you place them into. Government spending is a bit like an ideal gas; the amount spent will always expand to use the revenue available to it, and then some. Think about it, why would a politician who seeks to satisfy as many current voters as possible not spend every dollar they can today?

Furthermore, a revenue-side approach to the debt problem is inherently limited, not only because the government will spend every cent it raises, but because continued tax hikes eventually shutter the wealth-creation machine underneath it. Many are probably familiar with the “Laffer Curve,” which suggests there is a maximum amount of tax revenue that the government can raise from a particular tax. The idea is simple: If we tax something at zero percent, we will raise zero dollars in tax revenue. Likewise, if we tax at a rate of 100 percent, we will still raise zero tax dollars. It’s not difficult to understand why; if the government taxed your income at 100 percent, would you still go to work? Therefore, the “optimal” tax rate lies somewhere between zero and one hundred percent, though the rate varies by context and tax type.

The Laffer Curve is primarily driven by “deadweight loss.” Deadweight loss occurs when the imposition of a tax pushes the normal supply/demand equilibrium out of balance, creating lost economic activity that isn’t translated into revenue. If the government taxes the sale of sofas, for instance, the tax raises the price of buying a sofa. Consequently, some people who may have bought one no longer will, and businesses will sell fewer sofas than they otherwise would have. It’s important to understand, however, that deadweight loss does not scale linearly with the tax rate, but rises to the square of the tax rate. This means that doubling a tax from 10 to 20 percent doesn’t double the economic loss; it quadruples it. So, as we raise taxes, deadweight losses rise faster than revenue, and if we go high enough, the tax base collapses entirely.

This is why governments that try to tax their way to fiscal solvency never can; the more they raise, the more they inevitably spend, the higher taxes must be, and the more the tax base erodes. In 1996, American economist Richard Rahn analyzed the growth and spending data of all OECD countries, finding that economic growth was strongest when total government spending was ~25 percent of GDP. When government spending exceeds this threshold, growth begins to slow. He caveated his findings with two qualifiers. First, the quality of spending still mattered; we can spend more without imperilling growth if we do so effectively. Second, his findings were probably biased to the high end; the optimal threshold was probably closer to ~15-20 percent of GDP. With many Western governments today spending well over 30-40 percent of their GDP and attempting to tax their way to solvency, we can see why growth is disappointing.

Indeed, large debt loads appear to imperil growth on their own. When government debt is low, spending a little more can accelerate growth, but past a certain threshold, every new dollar of debt has the opposite effect. A seminal 2010 study by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, for example, found that when public debt exceeds 90% of GDP, the median annual GDP growth falls by about 1 percentage point, and average growth falls even more. Subsequent studies have documented a similar “debt overhang effect,” though the threshold is debated. It’s believed that as debt rises, debt sales soak up capital that would otherwise be directed to more productive uses, stalling growth and forcing ever more distortionary taxes. In sum, while the maximum tax rates, deficit, and debt loads are debated and contextual, we know one thing for certain: high debt, high taxes, and large deficits result in slower growth, which, in turn, makes it even harder to service that debt. The fiscal crisis, therefore, is a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

Cap ‘n Grow

So we have conclusively established that we cannot print or tax our way out of this crisis. This leaves us with two remaining options: either we must cut spending or outgrow the debt. This is, from what we learned above, a bit of a false choice; they are very much the same. If we keep spending and taxes within a reasonable threshold, the economy will grow faster and, over time, make the debt less relevant. Recall that I compared government spending to an ideal gas. I was deliberately echoing Parkinson’s Law, a semi-satirical observation made by British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson who noted that even as the number of ships and naval personnel in the Royal Navy declined, the number of administrators grew about 6% annually. He reasoned that growth was not driven by increased workload but by a bureaucratic tendency for officials to create more work for each other, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Parkinson’s Law holds broadly. If you allot yourself an entire day to clean your home, it will probably take the whole day. But if you allot yourself just three hours, you will probably get it done in about three hours. Parkinson’s Law is also why many people attest to being more productive near the end of a tight deadline. In fact, we can leverage Parkinson’s Law for our benefit. Effective strategies include time boxing and the Pomodoro method; by constraining the time available for a task, paradoxically, more gets done. The government is a massive time-buying machine, hiring millions of staffers to complete administrative tasks, to review permits, conduct interviews, etc. The more revenue we provide it, the more man-hours it can afford, the more it will find work to do—even if that work is completely and wholly unnecessary.

This further bolsters my belief that the only solution to America’s fiscal trap is a spending cap, a metaphorical container that limits scope creep. And I believe the balance of evidence requires that the cap be around 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product. This isn’t unheard of. For much of America’s history, Federal government spending was only about 5 percent of GDP. With a firm spending cap, taxes can fall, and when they do, growth will accelerate. We will probably still have a fiscal deficit, but that's okay; it will be much smaller by virtue of the fact that growth will be stronger. Some might argue that reducing government revenue would endanger public services; I’d wager that it would not. After a painful transition period, the government would find a way to deliver substantially similar services within the new constraints.

Indeed, within constraints, there is beauty. Staffers will find efficiencies they hadn’t considered before. Policymakers will be forced to focus their attention on the highest return actions, discarding wasteful, low-impact distractions. With some patience and creativity, in fact, I suspect we will find that a constrained government delivers better public services. I’ve outlined some ideas for how this can be achieved at Risk & Progress. Abolishing student loans, for instance, and replacing them with ISAs, would save billions every year while cutting tuition inflation. Likewise, delivering welfare via cash assistance would be cheaper and more effective than the current hodgepodge of in-kind transfers, and relying more on nudges like mandatory Health Savings Accounts would go a long way to ensuring that the safety net remains, sans the public debt.

The only real question becomes: how do we reliably enforce a spending cap? Congress controls the purse, and any law they write can be overwritten. What we need is a “Ulysses pact” or “Ulysses contract.” The term comes from Homer’s Odyssey, in particular, the scene where Ulysses wanted to listen to the Sirens’ bewitching songs as he and his men sailed by their island home. Ulysses knew the Siren songs would render him irrational, so he ordered his men to put wax in their ears and, for the duration of the journey past the island, to literally tie him to the mast and ignore his orders and his pleas. We need a mechanism like this, something that ties our legislators to the mast, lest they be beguiled by the Siren song of spending our children’s money.

A law, therefore, won’t be enough; we need a Constitutional Amendment that would be near impossible to override. Perhaps we could even call it the Ulysses Amendment. The Amendment would cap annual government spending to within a range of 20 and 22 percent of the prior year’s Gross Domestic Product. This range leaves some room for countercyclical action; during recessions or major calamities, for instance, a majority vote of Congress would allow additional spending at the upper end of the cap. The amendment, however, would not allow such a vote to take place in more than one consecutive calendar year, forcing spending to automatically snap back to under 20 percent. Not only would this amendment enforce fiscal discipline, but it would also provide an incentive to adopt pro-growth policies; if you want to spend, you first have to grow. When we tie ourselves to the mast, we can stop ourselves from borrowing on the backs of our children, and within these constraints, we will grow and prosper like never before.

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Migration is among the most politically contentious issues facing the world today. A growing number of people around the globe are questioning the logic of allowing immigrants into their nations, asking whether their nations’ doors should be open or closed, or if a balance can be struck between the extremes. As with many of the issues explored at Risk & Progress, there are no easy answers; only imperfect solutions. Still, given this issue’s salience today, it is worth examining the merits of immigration, which approaches work and which do not, and what a pro-progress migration policy might look like.

Immigration Myths

First, it’s important to dispel some common myths surrounding this topic. First among these myths is the zero-sum notion that new arrivals take jobs from native-born people. The belief that immigration results in fewer jobs and lower wages is known as the “Lump of Labor Fallacy,” which presupposes that there is a fixed amount of labor needed in a country. Therefore, when immigrants arrive, they “take” jobs that otherwise would go to the “native” population. On the contrary, the non-zero-sum nature of immigration’s impact on employment was demonstrated in the late 19th century by economist David Frederick Schloss, who noted that the influx of immigrants increases both the supply of and demand for labor. After all, immigrants need places to live, they buy cars, they attend university, and go on vacation, etc. They consume just as the “native” population does.

A famous study, for example, examined the effect of the “Mariel Boatlift,” the mass emigration of Cubans to Miami, Florida, in 1980. This event abruptly increased Miami’s labor supply by 7 percent, yet there was no discernible impact on wages or unemployment. The labor market quickly adapted to the influx of migrants, as the surge in labor supply was accompanied by a surge in labor demand. It’s worth noting that this event occurred amid a severe economic recession in the United States and still didn’t move the needle on unemployment or wages. Similarly, after the collapse of the USSR, mass migration of Jews into Israel swelled the population by 12 percent with no negative impact on local employment.

In fact, the opposite seems true: immigration appears to be positive-sum concerning employment. One study found, for example, that with every one immigrant that arrived in the United States between 1980 and 2000, 1.2 new jobs were created. This is, in part, also because labor isn’t always substitutable. Compared with natives, immigrants have different employment preferences and expectations, including work locations, hours, and the types of occupations they seek out. For this reason, immigration restrictions usually don’t help the “native” population and may, in fact, cause undue harm to them. As wrote when discussing H1B visa restrictions in the US:

The importance of these preferences can be seen in the US doctor market – a significant number of doctors in rural areas are immigrants, which can in large part be attributed to preferences of local doctors who may prefer to live in more urban areas. Banning immigrant doctors will not result in rural areas getting ‘local’ doctors, but rather not having doctors at all.

Historically, attempts to aid the “native” population by restricting immigration do tend to cause more harm. A study examining the effects of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, found that it depressed the economy of Western US states for generations. The act was part of a series of escalating restrictions that were continually amended and extended. It began as a thinly-veiled effort to prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the US and Chinese immigrants from owning land. It eventually morphed into a complete ban on all ethnic Chinese from entering the US, including those who were already legally present, while still barring them from naturalizing as citizens. Imprisoned in their own country, many Chinese immigrants packed up and left. At the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act was broadly popular, justified as a way of protecting the jobs of “real” Americans. Yet, the white American laborers, the intended beneficiaries of the Act, were left worse off: the act(s) reduced the growth of the white labor supply in Western states by 28 percent and lowered their occupational income scores.

Anti-immigrant fever, of course, was left unsatisfied. Soon, immigration restrictions escalated beyond ethnic Chinese. In the early 20th century, law after law, executive order after order, were promulgated, gradually making it harder to immigrate to the US and eventually culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which created strict immigration quotas based on national origin. The Act was explicitly intended to restrict the immigration of “less favorable” immigrants, which, at that time, meant migrants from the “backward” nations of southern and eastern Europe. One of its architects, Sen. David Reed, wrote in The New York Times that the Act’s passage would allow the United States to become “a more homogeneous nation” and a “vastly better place to live in.” Retrospective analysis estimates that the Act, however, led to a 68% decline in patent applications in industries where affected immigrants specialized and reduced US inventive output by an estimated 30 percent overall.

Speaking of innovation, one study, tracking 130 years of patent activity by US firms and real income growth of native-born workers, found that migration into the US had a positive impact on both economic growth and innovation. In addition, they estimate that liberalization of US immigration law after 1965, which finally undid the draconian 1924 quotas, increased total US innovative output by 8 percent and wages by 5 percent. While comprising just 11 percent of the US population, immigrants account for 23 percent of patent output and 32 percent of overall US innovative output after 1990. Non-Americans account for an astonishing 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued by American universities in science, technology, engineering, or math.

Immigrants are also disproportionately entrepreneurial. Immigrants start 20 percent of all American businesses, and as of 2025, immigrants or their children founded 46 percent (231 of 500) of the companies on the Fortune 500 index. Together, these companies generated $8.6 trillion in revenue in 2024 and employed over 15.4 million people worldwide. Arguably, immigration was a key ingredient that kept the US economy and its hegemony growing while other would-be “superpowers” floundered. Japan, for example, outpaced US economic growth from the 1950s through the 1980s, and many predicted that Japan would overtake the US in the 90s. Instead, Japan sputtered as its population aged, slipping further and further behind ever since. One reason is Japan’s restrictive immigration policies, which reduced its economic and innovative productivity.

Crime and Housing

Even if immigrants do not cause economic harm to the host nation, skeptics might counter, they still bring crime. Associating immigrants with criminal activity is not a new phenomenon; the target groups just change from one generation to the next. In 1891, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge demanded that the US close its borders, claiming that Italian immigrants were all “members of the Mafia…using murder as a means of maintaining its discipline.” Once again, however, the data does not bear out these claims. Comparative studies across multiple countries (e.g., the US, Europe, Canada, Australia) have consistently found no evidence that immigration increases the overall crime rate. In fact, first-generation immigrants are typically less prone to crime than natives. A comprehensive analysis of US incarcerations from 1870 to 2020, for example, found that immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives, and this gulf has been widening since the 1960s. In other words, immigration lowers the overall crime rate.

Now, an important caveat is in order. Immigration seems to work best for the host nation when it is legal and orderly. The data, admittedly, are less sanguine when it comes to large-scale disorderly migration. European data, for instance, finds elevated crime rates among refugees who fled their home countries in mass. When millions of refugees/asylum seekers show up at your border, you are getting a broad representative sample of human traits, perhaps even a comparatively worse-than-random sample of traits. In an ordered immigration environment, however, the host nation can cream-skim the best of the best. This means that there are certain, specific instances where immigration can lead to more crime, but this is more the exception rather than the rule.

Now what about housing? Immigration critics are also keen to blame migrants for driving up housing prices. If we “deport them all,” the saying goes, the rent will decline because the demand for housing will fall. There is likely some truth to this. Immigrants need a place to live, and they tend to settle in already densely populated cities. To the extent that new arrivals do raise the cost of housing, however, this says more about domestic policy failures than it does about immigrants. The problem is not the demand for housing; it’s the artificial restrictions that policymakers place on housing supply. This, of course, is a much broader problem and a subject in its own right.

Notably, there is a significant overlap between the most ardent anti-immigrant voices, those who blame immigrants for low wages and high housing prices, for example, and the pronatalists who advocate for large families. It’s difficult, however, for me to square this pronatalist position with simultaneous declarations that “our country is full.” This logical inconsistency bolsters my suspicion that many immigration critics do not raise their concerns about jobs, wages, crime, or housing in good faith, out of genuine concern for the well-being of the nation, but rather use them to conceal xenophobic feelings and intentions. They craft arguments against immigration that sound good, but fall flat with a modicum of inspection.

You may be questioning the research I cited above. Are immigrants superhuman? Are we to believe that immigrants are more likely to file a patent, start a business, get an advanced degree, and are less likely to commit a crime than native-born people? How could that be? The answer is that immigrants are a self-selecting group. The character traits required for success in life, like intellect, adaptability, and perseverance, are the same traits needed to successfully immigrate to another country. But if you still find the research unconvincing, ask yourself how the United States, a country that spent its first century with open borders, welcoming wave after wave of immigrants, from the Irish to Chinese, Greeks and Italians, and Mexicans to Indians, became the richest, most powerful country this planet has ever seen. If immigration from poor nations necessarily made the host country poorer and weaker, the United States would be an utter backwater today. It would not have risen from untamed wilderness to a world power, it would not have led the Second Industrial Revolution, let alone the Third.

Some may concede that while rich countries may benefit from immigration, it comes at the poorer countries’ expense. This is also likely incorrect. Modelling suggests that if every country eliminated migration barriers, growth everywhere would accelerate dramatically, unlocking anywhere from 50 to 150 percent of new economic output, or over 100 trillion dollars in new wealth. This means higher wages, more opportunities, and accelerated technological advancement for all. In fact, we don’t need to erase borders to unlock an unprecedented economic and innovation boost. Even a partial easing of migration barriers would increase global wealth by tens of trillions of dollars. So, while closing borders and further restricting immigration may be a popular policy, it is profoundly short-sighted. It leaves all of humanity, including and especially native-born people in wealthy nations, poorer and worse off. It is a harmful capitulation to those false zero-sum conceptions of where wealth and prosperity come from.

Managing Migration

With the above data in mind, we can say with certainty that closing borders is not a good idea. Orderly migration simply has too many benefits for the host nation and its citizens. Still, completely open borders seem politically unpalatable, so the question we must ask becomes two-fold: 1) How many immigrants should be allowed in, and 2) What character traits should any immigration system try to select for? These questions are much harder to answer, and every country has taken a different route to answering them. Most nations employ a discretionary immigration model in which a prospective immigrant applies, pays a fee, and bureaucrats determine eligibility for an entry visa, which can later be converted into Permanent Residence (a “Green Card”) and, perhaps eventually, citizenship. Countries vary considerably, however, in selection criteria.

The United States’ immigration system, for example, emphasizes family ties, whereby an established immigrant can petition for direct relatives to join them in the US. Some 81 percent of immigrant visas are issued to family members of American citizens, while only 5 percent are for employment or investment. Critics call this “chain migration,” but let’s call it what it really is: family reunification. The “chain” metaphor, I suspect, is used to provide cover for immigration skeptics who wouldn’t want to appear “anti-family,” betting that most Americans wouldn’t know better. Additionally, it’s important to understand that this process isn’t as easy as packing one’s bags and buying a plane ticket. It costs, at a minimum, thousands of dollars in fees and years of waiting (sometimes decades), medical exams, criminal history vetting, and reams of paperwork. Moreover, a large fraction of the people who would like to immigrate to the United States are still legally barred from doing so, a key factor driving illegal migration.

A competing immigration model, however, can be found just north of America’s border, in Canada. Many consider Canada’s immigration system to be a model that Americans should adopt. Canada admits migrants based on perceived “merit” rather than familial relations. In the Canadian system, immigrant character traits are assigned point values that, when added together, determine one’s eligibility for an entry visa. For example, a prospective migrant might receive a certain number of points for English proficiency, work experience, years of education, etc. Many countries, including Australia and New Zealand, employ a selection mechanism similar to Canada's, and notably, they all admit more immigrants per capita than the US does.

Point-based systems work well, but fail in crucial ways. Paradoxically, America’s less selective immigration system produces more disruptive inventors and entrepreneurs. This appears to be a consequence of points-based systems selecting for “safe” characteristics such as education credentials, work experience, and general risk aversion. Disruptive innovators, the kind that drop out of Harvard or leave a good-paying job to start a risky new venture, don’t fit this mold. Under a points-based system, for example, it’s unlikely that Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Sergey Brin (Google), or Jensen Huang (Nvidia) would have been able to establish themselves in the United States. This also means, in all probability, that these leading-edge companies wouldn’t exist or would have been founded abroad.

Market-Based Systems

This finding confirms my suspicions that it’s naive to believe that bureaucrats can successfully determine “merit” from a single immigration file. Who is to say, for example, that an uneducated, but skilled immigrant carpenter has less “merit” than one holding a PhD in French Literature? Is “low-skilled” labor any less crucial than “high-skilled” labor? These are subjective judgements that officials sitting at a desk, thousands of miles away, are not equipped to answer. I find it amusing that many of my fellow writers in this space, all of whom wouldn’t trust an official in D.C. to buy their groceries, are somehow willing to entrust them with assessing the future value of a human. No, the best immigration system would take the government out of the driver’s seat and rely more on the collective wisdom of the market.

Visa auctions are an obvious option here. In a visa auction, the government allocates a limited number of annual immigrant visas and allows anyone to bid on them. Subject to standard health and safety vetting, of course, the highest bidders have the right to select the individual to receive the visa. Merit is determined by the market, not by officials. A visa auction system, however, would require the government to accurately set the visa allotment. If the quota is set too low, only the wealthy can afford one. If it is set too high, society might not be able to adapt to the migrant influx. Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker has suggested the inverse approach: an “entry tariff.” Here, the government sets a visa price, allowing demand to set itself. This approach, however, asks that the government accurately and fairly determine the price of an entry visa, still no easy feat.

In their book, Radical Markets Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl propose what they call the Visas Between Individuals Program (VIP visa), which holds that any citizen or permanent resident can sponsor a single immigrant. In exchange, that immigrant would pay a monthly fee to the sponsor. This fee is uniform for all migrants who are also free to live and work as they please; they are not tied to the sponsor, and either party can end the partnership at any time. If the migrant loses their sponsor, however, they will have to find another or return to their country of origin. The fees are paid until a probationary period of perhaps 3-7 years is complete. The government sets the target population growth rate and allows the market to determine the price based on demand. We might think of this approach as a migration “congestion fee,” similar to a visa auction, but allowing for a more personal, human connection between the locals and immigrants. Personally, I find this proposal too complex to be workable.

Age-Scaled Entry Tariff (ASET)

While any market-based approach is likely to be superior to the status quo, I believe we can do better. While there are many traits that we might want to select for in an immigrant, those judgment calls are highly subjective. There is, however, one trait that we can say is fairly objective and measurable: age. The older the migrant, the greater the strain they will probably present on any existing welfare infrastructure, especially on the healthcare and retirement systems of the host nation. Additionally, the older the migrant, the less time they have to contribute productively to the local tax base that funds those systems. Older individuals also tend, as we have seen, to create fewer disruptive innovations, have a harder time learning the local language, adapting to local customs, etc.

For this reason, I propose a novel spin on the entry fee system, which I call the Age-Scaled Entry Tariff, or ASET system. The ASET system charges an entry fee that scales with a migrants age. The fee would begin at or near zero for children, as they have their whole working, innovating, and taxpaying life ahead of them. From that age, however, it would gradually increase, calculated to roughly recapture the tax revenue that would have been paid by that person had they lived in the country their whole lives. In the ASET system, the government isn’t tasked with arbitrarily setting a visa quota or a price. Instead, it only looks at tax data; hard numbers that are easily calculated. With the fees set, demand will vary naturally by age, with a strong preference for young migrants. Older migrants are still welcome, so long as they can pay the higher entry fee, which ensures the welfare system isn’t additionally burdened. This system ensures that all new arrivals are an asset to the host nation. And unlike a “merit-based” system, Musk, Brin, and Huang would still be welcomed. In fact, the ASET system would make it far easier for them to immigrate.

Selling visas in this manner might seem callous, but it’s a vast improvement over the status quo. The ASET system would be far more transparent and fair than any points-based system we could ever devise; the fee schedule would be publicly available, it would not be subject to political manipulation, or require a significant government bureaucracy. Government officials only need to collect fees and undertake health and background checks. Furthermore, broader immigration eligibility would catastrophically damage the human smuggling industry. For migrants, paying a border entry fee of $50,000, for example, is preferable to paying similar sums to human smugglers, only to live a marginalized life upon arrival. Additionally, this flexible and speedy immigration system would not need to build or maintain expensive border walls or armies of border agents.

By no means do I suggest that the ASET system is a panacea for migration woes or political tensions, but I do believe it’s a significant improvement over any plan or proposal I have yet seen. Ultimately, however, this would only be a half-step toward the broader goal of untethering people from their country of birth and unlocking their full potential. Long term, we might even consider adopting Nathan Smith’s “World Migration Organization,” modeled after the World Trade Organization, which works to ease global barriers to human migration. Ultimately, freer global migration is a necessary prerequisite to unlocking the full potential of all humans on Earth; a future where all can aspire to be the best version of themselves, regardless of the geographic location of their birth on the pale blue dot.

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Ever since the earliest humans walked this Earth, they looked up to the heavens and wondered. Where are we? Why are we here? What is our purpose? In this search for meaning, science has lit the way, gradually filling cavities with knowledge and steadily pushing myth and superstition to the fringes. Over the last five centuries, these discoveries have dramatically changed our perceived place in the universe. They pushed us from the center of everything to just beings on another planet, floating in the void. On their face, these discoveries would appear to diminish our importance, but this is only half the story. While science has displaced us from the geometric center of everything, it has also elevated human consciousness closer to a place of central, if metaphorical, significance.

Our Place In the Universe

Our naked eyes can only collect enough photons of light to view a tiny sliver of the universe around us. From our perspective here on Earth, the heavens appear to rotate around us; we lie at the center, the only conscious beings in a vast universe, a recipe for certain hubris. Historically, our conception of the heavens was rooted more in myth and philosophy than in science. Aristotle thought the heavens were perfectly ordered, with the Earth at the center. The Sun and Moon were perfect spheres, orbiting Earth in perfect circles at a constant, unchanging speed. The stars were the white light of the heavens peeking through a dark mask beyond which no material substance could exist. In this perfect universe, however, a problem vexed people for millennia: the planets.

Literally meaning “wanderer,” the position of the planets, unlike the stars, could not be predicted. They often appeared to move forward and backward in the night sky. Aristotle’s model had a fatal flaw. Centuries after Aristotle, Ptolemy suggested that the planets had two orbits: the deferent, rotating around the Earth, and the epicycle, where the planet rotated within the deferent. From our perspective, this would cause a planet to move backward and forward in the night sky at various times. His explanation, however, could not accurately explain the planets’ movements either. For an ordered, predictable universe, this was a problem, but one that was mostly hand-waved away. We still believed that humanity stood at the center of it all, a narcissistic ode to understandable ignorance.

In the 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus was among the first to challenge Aristotle and Ptolemy. He suggested that if one placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the solar system, the odd movement of the planets in the sky could be explained without the need for complex orbits-within-orbits. Earth’s demotion also opened up the possibility that the Sun was one star among many. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was executed for arguing that the universe was infinitely large with many stars, each with their own worlds. Copernican heliocentricity was a parsimonious proposition, but one that still could not accurately explain planetary movement and lacked experimental proof. In the 1600s, Johannes Kepler refined the “Heliocentric” universe and further challenged Aristotle, suggesting that the planets didn’t orbit the Sun in perfect circles, but rather in ellipses. To intellectuals at the time, it must have felt like “cheating,” but by accepting imperfection, Kepler was able to predict planetary movements fairly well. Alas, he also lacked any means of proving his hypothesis.

Around the same time, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the night sky and saw things no human had seen before. Galileo saw mountains on the Moon and spots on the Sun…objective evidence that the heavens did not conform to Aristotelian perfection. He witnessed the phases of Venus, something predicted by Copernicus, and saw moons orbiting Jupiter. Suddenly, Earth was not necessarily the center of anything. Galileo’s evidence, although irrefutable, drew the wrath of the church as it contradicted over a millennium of Christian teachings, and he spent his final years under house arrest. It’s easy to understand why this truth was uncomfortable; a Heliocentric solar system meant that Earth was just another planet. Why would God govern anything other than the center of the universe?

Regardless, the truth could not be ignored for long. A century later, in the 1700s, standing upon the shoulders of Galileo and Kepler, Sir Issac Newton codified the laws of gravity and motion into mathematics. The same force that brought apples to the ground when they fell from a tree, he realized, also holds the planets around the Sun. And as for the Sun, 19th-century spectroscopy comparing the Sun with the stars confirmed similar chemical composition and temperatures; the Sun was just another star, and an unremarkable one at that. While we were no longer the center of the universe, at least humanity could understand the laws that governed that universe. Or so we thought.

The Missing Planet

By Newton’s time, it was known that the planets orbit in ellipses and that the orbits themselves also rotate around the Sun, in what we call “precession.” Newtonian physics accounted for precession and accurately predicted the movement of the planets, save for one: Mercury, which appeared to get tugged off course. It was thought that there must be another planet near Mercury with gravity disrupting the predicted orbital path. We even gave this mystery planet a name: Vulcan. Yet, observations with increasingly powerful telescopes in the 19th century could not find this mysterious missing planet. Vulcan didn’t exist; it was merely another myth created to explain what we didn’t yet understand. Mercury’s orbit was not distorted by another planet, but rather by space itself.

In 1915, a patent clerk named Albert Einstein published the Theory of General Relativity, suggesting that mass warps space. For planets that are distant from the Sun, such distortions were imperceptible. For Mercury, however, the closest planet to the Sun, the impact was substantial enough to noticeably alter its orbit and render Newtonian physics inaccurate. Einstein’s theory was not proven until 1919 when astronomers traveled to Brazil for a rare solar eclipse. To test the theory, they photographed a star cluster near the Sun at the very moment the Moon blocked its light. The images of the star cluster taken during the eclipse were then compared with images of the same cluster taken on a normal night, absent the Sun’s gravitational influence. Indeed, the apparent position of the stars was slightly distorted during the eclipse, proving Einstein correct; the Sun’s mass literally bends the space around it, altering the path of light waves as they coursed toward Earth.

An Expanding Universe

Throughout all of this discovery, however, we still assumed that we were something of a rarity in the universe. We still believed we were living around the only star that harbored planets, residing in the only galaxy in the cosmos, the Milky Way. But not long after Einstein was vindicated, Edwin Hubble trained a telescope at Andromeda, which was thought to be a dusty galactic nebula. Using a new method to measure the distance to Cepheid variable stars, he came to an astounding discovery: Andromeda was 900,000 light-years away, far more distant than the most distant stars in our galaxy. Andromeda was a galaxy of its own. The paradigm was once again shattered. Today, we know the Milky Way, our galaxy, to be one of countless billions of galaxies.

Hubble went further, discovering that not only was the universe larger than previously believed, but it was also expanding. Hubble drew on data from Vesto Slipher, who had earlier noted that many distant nebulae showed a “Red Shift.” “Red shift” is a phenomenon where light wavelengths stretch toward the longer wavelengths (more red) as the object emitting the light moves away from us at high speed. Hubble showed that the recessional velocity of galaxies is proportional to their distance; Galaxies twice as far away recede twice as fast. This relationship, now called Hubble’s Law, suggests that galaxies are not exploding away from us in a static space (which would put us at a special center), but that space itself is expanding, carrying galaxies along like dots on an inflating balloon. The farther apart two points are, the faster the space between them stretches.

With these observations, the idea of an eternal, static universe was forever put to rest. An expanding universe also meant that, if we were to run the clock backward, the universe would become smaller until it reached a singular point, or singularity. This expansion must have been kicked off by a dramatic event, which we call the Big Bang. This origin story, of course, was theoretical. Confirmation would come a few decades later when physicists using a horn antenna at Bell Labs noticed a persistent “hiss” or buzzing noise coming from all directions in the microwave range. Months of searching did not reveal the signal’s source (even pigeon droppings were considered). Until, that is, they happened across research that predicted that the Big Bang would produce exactly this kind of radiation.

According to the Big Bang model, the universe would be extremely hot and dense in its first moments. As it expanded and cooled, the light (photons) from that hot phase would be stretched into longer wavelengths, eventually into microwave frequencies. This unexplained “hiss” was the “afterglow” of the Big Bang; observational evidence of the universe’s first moments. Still, the Big Bang Theory had some problems. That cosmic microwave radiation was too uniform. In the 1980s, a modification of the Big Bang theory added a prelude, known as cosmic inflation: an extremely brief but explosive period of exponential expansion in the universe’s first moments. It explains how the universe rapidly grew from a tiny singularity smaller than a proton by stretching space itself faster than the speed of light, smoothing out initial irregularities. When inflation ended, energy converted into a hot, dense soup of particles and radiation, marking the beginning of the Big Bang. The cosmic inflation theory is generally accepted today.

Since the 1990s, new, more powerful telescopes and observational methods have also proved that our Sun is not alone in harboring planets, with new worlds being discovered almost weekly. While we still know very little about these distant worlds, one thing is clear: they represent trillions of potential opportunities for life to emerge. Alas, our special place in the universe, it would seem, isn’t all that special after all. In the course of five short centuries, we have been dethroned by discovery. This “Copernican Principle” tells us that we occupy no special place; we are not privileged observers of the universe. As we will see, however, that while these discoveries pushed us to the edges of the map, they elevate the importance of humans as conscious beings in a universe that is discovering itself.

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If you haven’t yet read Part 1, I strongly recommend doing so first. It lays the essential foundation, the why and how behind reusable rocketry, along with the transformative trajectories this technology could open for humanity’s future in space. For brevity in that initial piece, I focused exclusively on systems developed and flown in the United States. In this installment, we turn our attention outward to survey some of the most promising and innovative reusable launch vehicles now under active design, testing, and early flight attempts around the world. These international efforts are accelerating rapidly, poised to drive launch costs even lower by the early 2030s and potentially achieve even greater reductions by 2040. This expanded perspective underscores a key point: reusability is no longer a single-nation story. It is becoming a global engineering race that will reshape the economics and possibilities of space exploration for decades to come.

China

Let’s begin with China because, well, China dominates this list. The Middle Kingdom has no fewer than nine reusable rockets under simultaneous development, either by state-owned contractors or by the private sector. The same forces of government subsidies and preferential policies that drove cutthroat competition, innovation, and cost reductions, which led China to dominate solar energy and electric vehicles, and perhaps soon robotics, are playing out in the country’s space launch industry.

Long March 12A

Let’s begin this list with somewhat of an oddity. Manufactured by the state-owned Shanghai Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (SALT). The LM-12A could be seen as the successor to the already-flying LM-12, but is actually different enough that it probably should be considered a new rocket with its own new designation. The LM-12 is a traditional Kerolox-fueled medium lift rocket, powered by four YF-100K engines on the first stage and two YF-115 engines on the second stage.

The LM-12A, on the other hand, shares the same “hull” but burns completely different fuel and uses different engines. It is equipped with seven reusable methalox-burning Longyun engines developed by a private start-up on its first stage, and a single methalox-fueled YF-209 on the second. The LM-12A rocket is also a medium-lift launch vehicle, carrying up to 12,000kg into LEO. The rocket made a successful maiden flight in December 2025, but like Blue Origin and SpaceX’s first attempts, the rocket failed to stick its first landing, crashing to Earth in a ball of flames. Nonetheless, lessons learned, we can expect them to get closer to nailing the landing the next time around.

Zhuque-3

Built by LandSpace Technology Corporation, Zhuque-3 is perhaps the most anticipated Chinese reusable launcher in the Western world. Zhuque-3 incorporates lessons learned from SpaceX and applies them to a single silver rocket. Like Starship and Nova, the rocket is built from stainless steel, leveraging its unique properties as a cheaper, easier-to-work-with metal. It is powered by 12 Tianque-12B engines on its first stage, also sipping Methalox fuel. Like Falcon 9, it is equipped with grid fins for control within the atmosphere, but couples them with chines near the base of the rocket, something found on Starship and New Glenn. The chines provide additional “lift” allowing the rocket to “fly” to the landing site, reducing the amount of fuel required for landing. The rocket aims to carry 21,300 kg to LEO in expendable mode and 18,300 kg in reusable mode, similar to Falcon 9. Zhuque-3 debuted in December 2025, successfully reaching orbit, but like the others, it failed to stick the first landing. However, of all of the rockets we have explored, it was probably the closest to “success” on its first try, crashing to the ground, albeit almost perfectly on target.

Long March 10

Under development at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the LM-10 and its several variants are China’s answer to both Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and SLS. The design leverages existing hardware to expedite development; its “hull,” for example, is derived from the Long March-5 rocket, though with weight reductions, and the rocket uses an improved version of the YF-100 engines used on the Long March 5, 6, and 7 series. In its base configuration, seven YF-100K engines, burning kerolox (like Falcon 9), can loft some 14 tons into LEO with partial reuse. Uniquely, the LM-10 will land on a floating platform, caught by a system of cables that eliminates the mass of carrying its own landing legs.

In its single-core configuration, the LM-10 will launch China’s new (also partially reusable) Mengzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong space station. The aim is that the rocket would replace, or at least supplant, the LM-7, LM-2, and LM-3 series in a single design. A triple-core variant of the LM-10, akin to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, with an additional cryogenic third stage, would serve as a partially reusable answer to NASA’s SLS. At some 92.5 m tall, it will be one of the largest rockets in the world, capable of launching some 70,000 kg to LEO or 27,000 kg to trans-lunar injection. Two launches, one carrying the Mengzhou spacecraft and the other a booster and lunar lander, will be used to put Chinese astronauts on the Moon. First flight of the triple-core variant is scheduled for 2027.

Hyperbola-3

Unfortunately, I was unable to find a suitable image for this rocket. Built by i-Space, the first private Chinese company to reach orbit, Hyperbola-3 will be powered by 9 JD-2 engines, also burning methalox fuel. The new rocket, which aims to debut in 2026, will be about 69 m tall and carry a payload of up to 13,400 kg to LEO in an expendable configuration and 8,500 kg with partial reuse. Like some Falcon 9 launches, Hyperbola-3 will land on an autonomous drone ship positioned at sea.

Pallas-1

Pallas-1 is a smaller reusable rocket being built by Galactic Energy. Its seven CQ-50 engines will power the first stage, burning traditional kerolox fuel. In its base configuration, Pallas-1 will be capable of carrying just 5,000 kg to LEO or 3,000 kg to SSO while remaining partially reusable. Like Falcon 9, Pallas-1 uses grid fins and landing legs to execute a landing. A “heavy” configuration of the rocket is also planned, using two Pallas-1 first stages as boosters, thereby increasing the payload capacity to 17,500 kg, though that figure is probably only in “expendable mode.”

Tianlong-3

Under development by Space Pioneer, a private Chinese company that aspires to resupply China’s Tiangong Space Station, Tianlong-3 is powered by nine TH-12 engines, burning traditional Kerolox fuel. The upper stage is powered by a vacuum-optimized variant of the same, called the TH-12V. Like many on this list, it competes in the same medium-lift market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Falcon 9, able to loft 17 tons into LEO, and like Falcon 9, the rocket features four grid fins for control and lands on four landing legs. Unfortunately, Tianlong-3 is best known for its “accidental” launch in June of 2024, where, during a static fire test, the test vehicle broke free from its clamps and launched into the air, landing and exploding in nearby mountains.

Nebula-1

Under development by Deep Blue Aerospace, another private Chinese company, Nebula-1 will be powered by self-developed Leiting-20 engines, burning kerolox on its first stage and a vacuum-optimized variant of the same on the second stage. It is a small reusable launcher with the ability to launch about 2.8 tons into orbit

Kinetica-2

Built by CAS Space, a new commercial arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kinetica-2 is a 3.35 m-diameter, 53 m-long medium-lift launcher that uses China’s Kerolox-burning YF-102 engines on its first stage, producing ~766 tons of thrust at liftoff. The rocket aims to make its maiden flight in 2026 and demonstrate booster reuse as soon as the following year. It will be able to launch some 7,800 kg to SSO or 12,000 kg to LEO. Notably, on its maiden flight, it will carry a prototype Qingzhou-1 cargo spacecraft, a cheaper alternative to the Tianzhou spacecraft already used to resupply China’s Tiangong Space Station.

AS-1

Founded in 2024, Astronstone is one of the newest contenders in this space and, like many of the rocket firms on this list, it makes a point of leveraging experience and lessons learned from SpaceX. To that end, they are developing the AS-1, a stainless steel, Methalox-burning rocket similar in size to the Falcon 9, about 70 m tall and 4.2 m in diameter. Like Starship, they plan to land the rocket back at the launch tower, catching it with two “chopsticks” arms.

Europe

Miura-5

Under development by PLD Space in Spain and aiming for a 2026 debut, the Miura 5 launch vehicle will be fairly small, its first stage powered by five 5 TEPREL-C engines and the second stage by a single TEPREL-C Vacuum. Powered by traditional kerolox and just 34 m tall, it aims to deliver a paltry 540 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit in reusable mode. Notably, its small size makes reuse harder to achieve. To that end, the rocket must employ more exotic composite material construction and its first stage will land using a combination of propulsive landing and parachutes. The parachutes provide most of the braking force; the engines are used only for the final touchdown.

Maia

Europe has another small reusable launcher coming online by MaiaSpace, an ArianeGroup subsidiary. Powered by Methalox and 3 Prometheus engines on its first stage and one on its second, Maia will stand approximately 50 m tall, but with payload capacities of just 500 kg to LEO in reusable mode and 1,500 kg in expendable mode. Like Starship, it will be built of stainless steel construction and use SpaceX-style grid fins and landing legs for reentry and landing.

Prime*

One of the more interesting European launch concepts is under development by Orbex in the United Kingdom. Capable of taking just 180 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit, Prime will be just 19 meters tall and less than 1.5 meters wide, smaller than SpaceX’s Falcon 1. To make reuse possible, the rocket will be built primarily of lightweight carbon fiber, saving roughly 30 percent of inert mass. The vehicle will have six engines on its first stage and one on its second, burning a novel non-toxic bipropellant combination of liquid oxygen and bio-propane (also called bioLPG), a renewable biofuel derived from sustainable sources. This fuel, allegedly, reduces carbon emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional kerosene-based fuels.

Even more novel is the landing mechanism, however, where, after stage separation, the interstage, still attached to the first stage, unfolds outward into four petals. The pedals create drag, passively reorienting the rocket and slowing its descent. The rocket then deploys a parachute to further slow down so that it can safely splash down in the ocean, where it can be recovered for reuse.

*Sadly, Orbex ceased operations while I was writing this article.

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History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes: the world’s two greatest superpowers are once again locked in a race to the Moon. This time, however, it’s a race between an ascendant China and the venerable stalwart, the United States. Yes, before anyone says it, the US has “already done that,” but let’s be real, the US lost the capability of sending humans to the Moon when it killed the Apollo program in 1972. Not a single human footprint has been left on the Lunar surface since. Still, the dream was alive. Since 2005, the US has been funneling billions of dollars annually into hardware needed to make a triumphant return; it has struggled at every turn. Today, NASA plans to put Americans back on the Moon as soon as 2028, but that seems optimistic. Meanwhile, China has been quietly building up the infrastructure and expertise needed in its own bid to land humans on the Moon.

The Chinese Space Program

When it comes to space exploration, the Chinese have one advantage over the United States. China, like the USSR, is a single-party state; its space program, therefore, isn’t vacillating between new goals every four-year election cycle. Yet, while you will often see China’s manned space program described in the media as “aggressive,” it’s actually rather conservative compared to its Soviet forerunner. The Soviet space program, for example, was often defined by reckless abandon for safety in pursuit of technological firsts, resulting in, for instance, the N-1 rocket destroying its own launch pad and cosmonauts perishing on reentry. China’s space program, in contrast, doesn’t seem concerned about what other nations are doing; it marches to the beat of its own drum.

As such, China’s space program doesn’t execute particularly fast, but it does execute methodically. China laid out its manned space strategy all the way back in 1992. Known as Project 921, it was a three-step goal: 1) Develop a crewed spacecraft for launch and return, 2) Perform rendezvous and docking with a space laboratory, and 3) Construct a long-term modular space station. To execute this plan, China launched its first astronaut in 2003, making it the third country to send a human into space. In that single flight, China replicated the entirety of the US’s six-flight Mercury program. Two years later, Shenzhou-6 flew, carrying China’s first multi-person crew. Shenzhou-7 wouldn’t fly for three more years, but executed the country’s first spacewalk, and Shenzhou-8, launched three years after that, demonstrated orbital rendezvous and docking. In just three flights, China replicated the entire US Gemini program of twelve flights.

This capacity to carefully plot and follow a technology roadmap allows the country to combine missions in clever ways. Take Tiangong-1, for instance, launched in 2011. The media treated this spacecraft as merely a mini-space lab, and indeed, it was; Shenzhou-9 and 10 crews docked with and lived aboard it for two weeks, testing the technologies required for a planned future Chinese space station. But Tiangong-1 was actually two spacecraft rolled into one, serving also as the prototype of the uncrewed Tianzhou cargo vessel designed to resupply the future large Chinese space station. You can see their similarities in the images below.

A decade of careful planning and execution paid off. In the span of just 1.5 years, from 2021-2022, China launched and constructed its full 100-ton Tiangong space station, completing the objectives laid out in Project 921 almost exactly 30 years earlier. Compare this dedicated focus to NASA’s wild political swings. In the mid 90s, NASA’s attention was focused on building the ISS and developing a new reusable space shuttle, only to scuttle the latter in favor of project Constellation to return humans to the Moon, then scuttle that program for nearly a decade, before setting its sights on the Moon again with the Artemis program.

Lunar exploration has proceeded in an equally methodical fashion. The China Lunar Exploration Plan, or CLEP, was also divided into three technological phases: 1) Orbiting the Moon, 2) Landing on the Moon, and 3) Bringing rock and soil samples back to Earth from the Moon. From 2007-2010, China’s Chang’e 1 & 2 Lunar orbiters completed phase 1, studying the Moon and mapping its surface in detail. Phase 2 was demonstrated by Chang’e 3 & 4 in 2013 and 2019, respectively, landing robotic rovers on the Lunar surface. Phase 3 was executed by Chang’e 5 & 6 in 2020 and 2024, returning Lunar regolith samples to Earth, including the first sample ever retrieved from the Moon’s far side. Again, execution wasn’t “fast,” but it was darn near perfect, each mission performing almost flawlessly.

Having executed its primary robotic exploration plan, future missions are pivoting to laying the groundwork for crewed Lunar exploration. Chang’e 7 will launch in 2026, aiming to land near the Shackleton Crater to search for water ice that can be used by future spacecraft as fuel. It will be followed by Chang’e 8 in 2028 or 2029, which will continue to experiment with in-situ resource utilization, including the possibility of 3D printing “bricks” for future Lunar settlements. To get humans to the Moon, China plans a relatively simple architecture: two powerful carrier rockets are launched from Earth, one carrying a propulsion module and a lunar lander, the other a spacecraft with its crew. The two components dock in low Lunar orbit so the crew can make their way into the lander for Lunar exploration. To return, the lander blasts off the Moon, redocks with the spacecraft, which returns home.

Let’s dive in and check the status of this hardware. How far, or close, is China to landing humans on the Moon? Probably a lot closer than Americans realize.

The Long March 10 Rocket

Half the battle in getting to the Moon is building a large and powerful carrier rocket capable of tossing enough tonnage there. In the 1960s, the US chose to build a single, large, expensive carrier rocket: the Saturn V. Chinese engineers (for now) are content with two smaller (though still rather large) rockets. Known as the Changzheng 10, or Long March 10 in English (LM-10), the rocket is 5 meters in diameter and up to 92.5 meters tall. In its most powerful configuration, it will utilize two side “boosters” and be capable of taking some 70 tons to Low Earth Orbit or 27 tons to the Moon. For those of you keeping score at home, this is about the same capacity as NASA's troubled SLS rocket.

While the LM-10 hasn’t flown to orbit yet, much of the hardware is already proven. The main structure is derived from the Long March-5 launch vehicle, albeit elongated and with improvements to reduce mass. Each LM-10 core is powered by seven YF-100K engines, based on the proven YF-100 engines already flying on the LM-5, 6, 7, 8, and 12 series rockets. The rocket’s second stage is powered by two YF-100M engines, a vacuum-optimised variant of the same, and the third stage uses three hydrolox YF-75E engines, an improved version of the venerable YF-75D that has been flying for years. In August 2025, engineers completed the rocket’s first full “static fire” firing all seven YF-100K engines. A subsequent test vehicle, featuring only the first stage, successfully lifted off in a suborbital test flight in early 2026 and landed softly in the ocean. The first orbital flight is planned before the end of 2026, likely carrying a prototype Mengzhou spacecraft (see below).

While no publicly available figures exist, I’d wager that even two LM-10 carrier rockets are significantly cheaper than a single NASA SLS launch. An educated guess would be that a single LM-10 costs less than $500 million per launch, or about ~$1 billion for Lunar flight; half the cost of a single SLS at about $2 billion a piece. Yet, even my guestimate may prove conservative because the LM-10 can do something the SLS never can: it can refly. The LM-10 is designed to be partially reusable, coming back on Earth like a SpaceX Falcon 9, landing on a floating platform, where it can be recovered and reused. China’s approach to landing these stages is novel, however. To save mass on the rocket, they have removed the landing legs and built a special-purpose ship with cables to “catch” the boosters as they land out at sea.

Mengzhou Spacecraft

China’s Shenzhou spacecraft, currently used to shuttle crews to and from the Chinese space station, is not suited for Lunar flights because it lacks deep-space capability. More importantly, however, Shenzhou was designed in a bygone era, when rockets and spacecraft flew only once. No amount of modification could make Shenzhou meaningfully reusable, and reusability is key to the affordability and sustainability of space operations. Recognizing this, Chinese engineers have been quietly designing a partially reusable next-generation manned spacecraft for some time. This craft, named “Mengzhou” 梦舟, or “dream vessel,” will come in two variants: one optimized for Low Earth Orbit operations (~14 tons) and another for Lunar flights (~20 tons). As currently designed, Mengzhou will be able to carry up to six astronauts to the Chinese space station and up to four to the Moon.

The first Mengzhou test vehicle, basically a sub-scale empty shell to test the basic aerodynamic design, flew successfully in 2016. A second, full-scale, unpiloted prototype flew into space in 2020, testing orbital maneuvers, reentry, and successfully landed in the Inner Mongolian desert. In 2025, engineers completed a “pad abort” test to verify the abort system, then followed this in 2026 with an “in-flight abort” test aboard the LM-10 test article mentioned above. The first orbital flight of a complete Mengzhou spacecraft is planned for late 2026, almost certainly aboard the first complete LM-10 rocket. Should this be successful, flights carrying humans would likely commence in 2027.

Wangyu Spacesuit

Working on the Moon will require a new kind of extravehicular spacesuit, one that is lightweight, flexible, and resistant to lunar dust damage. Thus far, China has revealed little about its Lunar spacesuit, other than some images and its name: Wangyu 望宇, meaning “gazing into the cosmos.” First unveiled in late 2024, the spacesuit is described as a dedicated Lunar exploration suit, separate, though likely building on the experience learned when developing the Feitian space suit currently used on the Chinese space station. The suit is undergoing a battery of ground tests and will almost certainly see in-space testing aboard the Tiangong space station before Lunar deployment.

Lanyue Lunar Lander

To bring astronauts to the Lunar surface, China will also need to develop a Lunar lander. China’s 揽月 Lanyue Lunar lander is a conservative design: intended to take two astronauts to the surface of the moon, and return them to the Mengzhou spacecraft waiting in Lunar orbit. Uniquely, the lander will launch with an attached propulsion stage, somewhat analogous to those used on the Chang’e 5 and 6 sample return spacecraft, but with one key difference: the propulsion module will follow the lander as it descends onto the Moon, only detaching at the final moments before landing. To extend the astronauts’ reach when they arrive, the Lunar lander will also carry a stowable rover with a planned range of 10km.

Development work on Lanyue is progressing well. In October 2024, initial tests of the separation mechanism were completed. In August of 2025, Chinese engineers completed an integrated landing and ascent test, simulating a full Lunar landing and ascent. Engineers describe the Lanyue design as a “safety first” approach, with multiple redundant systems, including redundant engines, ready to take over if another fails, and a navigation system that autonomously identifies and avoids hazardous terrain during landing.

The Future

Compared with NASA’s Artemis program, China’s Lunar architecture faces fewer unknowns and technical hurdles. While China is certainly starting from behind, there is, in my view, a better than 50 percent chance that China will land humans on the Moon before the US manages to return. Furthermore, China’s architecture, which utilizes partially reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft, will be much more affordable. As it stands, a single NASA Lunar flight will cost around $4.5 billion; it’s hard to imagine China’s hardware costing more than $2 billion, and it is probably closer to $1 billion. Still, there is hope for NASA: Starship and New Glenn. NASA is all but certain to shift Lunar operations to cheaper and reusable private launch providers after winding down the prohibitively expensive SLS, which could drastically reduce operational costs and increase the total tonnage to the Moon.*

The United States' advantage, however, may prove short-lived. China sees its current Lunar architecture as transitional; its engineers are hard at work developing a larger and potentially fully reusable carrier rocket known as the Long March-9. This vehicle draws inspiration from SpaceX’s Starship design, including methalox fuel, full-flow staged-combustion cycle engines, and a large (100+ ton) payload capacity. The LM-9 aims to begin launching in 2035, greatly increasing the tonnage China can loft to the Moon, doing so with a higher launch cadence and at a much lower cost. Ultimately, this is what truly matters in this new space race. It’s not about who can get there first: it’s about who can establish a long-term and economically viable presence.

* I wrote this before recent announcements from NASA confirming that it plans to stop flying SLS after Artemis V.

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Recently, the posed an expansive, but thought-provoking question: How can America improve its problem-solving capacity? Indeed, it is undeniable that many Americans, rightly or wrongly, feel that the country’s best days are behind it. It’s as if the chilly waters of uncertainty continue to build and rise, because our ability to manage them, the metaphorical spillway, isn’t working as it used to. Inevitably, the dam will burst, and the resulting torrential flood of unsolved challenges will inundate the nation. But there is hope. America has been in dire straits before and recovered. The waters may be rising, but with some oil on the spillway valves, we can manage our problems once again.

Problem-Solving Capacity?

When asked how we can improve America’s problem-solving capacity, most will probably seek to optimize Federal government policy and its institutional operations, perhaps even extending those optimizations to the state or local level. While beneficial, these moves would aid only at the margins; the reality is that the vast majority of “problem-solving” doesn’t involve the government. Problem-solving is the college student debating a startup with his roommate. Problem-solving is the family considering whether to buy a local food franchise. Problem-solving is the corporation deciding which project to allocate billions of dollars in research and development. Human problem-solving capacity is the vast decentralized coordination of human brains, linked together by social and market forces, which I call the “social supercomputer.”

Yet, despite our collective cognitive prowess, our problem-solving capacity is inherently limited. The human brain perceives reality through what I call the “reality distortion field,” in which cognitive fallacies color and distort our perception. Perhaps no fallacy plays a greater role than loss aversion. Studies have repeatedly shown that our brains place greater emotional weight on losses than on gains. Losing $20 in a bet, for example, impacts us more than gaining $20 in the same bet. This is probably an evolutionary development that once made sense; for our ancestors, picking the wrong kind of berries, for example, could mean the difference between life and death. Today, however, because all problem-solving involves some risk of loss, we are naturally, perhaps irrationally, wired against trying new things. Every new startup risks failure, every career path risks being wrong, and every dollar allocated to one project might have been better spent elsewhere.

A Presumption of Guilt

We have spawned entire social institutions and industries to manage loss aversion. We have convened courts to adjudicate disputes and created insurance companies, where, in exchange for a premium, we can shift the risk of loss to a third party that specializes in managing it. In America, however, these institutions are no longer working as they should, with significant consequences to our aggregate problem-solving capacity. Instead of managing loss aversion, the legal system now feeds off it, driving up costs for families and businesses. of , called this the “litigation tax,” which Americans pay in insurance premiums, legal fees, or baked directly into the prices of the goods and services they buy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) estimates that, in 2022, litigation costs and compensation in the U.S. tort system totaled 2.1% of GDP, or $529 billion, that’s $4,207 per household. A separate analysis by ATRA estimates that Americans are paying $367 billion annually in “excessive” litigation costs. Indeed, litigation costs rose 7.1% annually from 2016 to 2022, outpacing both GDP growth and inflation.

America’s litigious exceptionalism comes from the dysfunctional way in which it handles disputes. America has 50 states, each with its own statutes, licensure requirements, and case law, requiring highly compensated professionals to navigate. America’s common law/jury trial tradition is also a factor, as jury trials move more slowly and cost more to prepare for and hear. But the issues facing America’s legal woes are deeper: the plaintiffs’ bar heavily funds political campaigns, creating a legal environment that favors plaintiffs over defendants. For example, unlike most countries, in America, plaintiff’s lawyers can advertise their services to the public, and are allowed to work for “free” (on contingency), taking 30-40 percent of the final settlement or judgment. At the same time, the United States lacks a strong “loser pays” rule, so plaintiffs often have nothing to lose and everything to gain by filing a lawsuit.

For the defendants, on the other hand, even a “win” at trial can be a pyrrhic victory if they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get there. The plaintiff’s bar has helped cultivate a system where the cost of defending oneself from a lawsuit is so onerous that the system now operates as if there is no presumption of innocence, but instead a de facto presumption of guilt. Defendants will only risk the expense of a trial when they feel certain they can “prove” their innocence to a jury. Plaintiffs’ attorneys know that all they need to do is slow walk the case, make it expensive, and muddy the waters just enough to raise the spectre of doubt; to play upon the defendant’s loss aversion and force them into settlement, if only to stop paying their defense staff $550 an hour. But this, in turn, encourages more litigation because plaintiffs’ attorneys know that even the most frivolous lawsuits will receive payments. In short, America’s legal system has become a shakedown racket, at the expense of its businesses.

America’s civil legal environment has become so dysfunctional that the insurers can no longer manage it either. In many states, defendants are legally required to provide a copy of their insurance policy to the party suing them. This helps the plaintiff craft their complaint to ensure it gets covered by insurance. It also gives them extreme leverage because many states have adopted laws that allow plaintiffs to uncap the insurance limits. Say, for example, a business has a $1 million liability policy. Armed with this knowledge, plaintiff’s attorneys will almost always demand the full $1 million right away, no matter how small the case is. This is because the law holds that if the insurer doesn’t immediately settle for that number and the plaintiff goes to court and prevails for more than $1 million from a jury (leaving the insured liable for excess exposure), the court will have deemed the insurer to have “gambled” with its insured’s money. This leaves the insurer an impossible situation: tender $1 million right now, often knowing little about the case’s true value, or risk a multi-million dollar verdict two years from now.

The insurers, the companies we rely on to manage losses, now operate under loss aversion themselves. I have personally witnessed the consequences of this unequal playing field. I have been ordered to pay half a million dollars to a plaintiff who claimed injuries after falling into a “hole” in the floor of his apartment. It didn’t matter that he purjered himself during his deposition about not being able to work. It didn’t matter that, days before the alleged shoulder surgery, we had video of him benching weights at a gym and dancing at a club. I’ve been forced to pay $1 million to a plaintiff who claimed she injured her back when a stair step collapsed as she was running up it. It didn’t matter that the mechanism of injury was impossible, that the step in question had been tampered with, and that the CT scans of her back showed zero evidence of acute injury whatsoever. In both cases, the fear of a jury “going nuclear” against the landlord and the insurance policy limits being potentially uncapped was all that mattered.

The true cost here isn’t limited to insurance premiums and higher prices. At the end of the day, America’s businesses are problem-solving mechanisms. Google was formed to solve the internet search problem, Tesla to solve fossil fuel dependence, SpaceX to solve space access, etc. But even small businesses solve problems; from the mom and pop corner grocery store to the local barber, even the in-house daycare that allows parents to work. How many businesses, startups, and otherwise good ideas never materialized or reached the market out of fear of being sued or simply because the insurance premiums were prohibitively expensive? How many landlords elected not to build a new property because their last tenant never paid rent and sued them upon eviction? How many doctors ended their practice because they could no longer afford the malpractice premiums? How many startups elected not to launch a product for fear that it would inadvertently infringe on a patent?

Without risk, we can have no progress. Our dysfunctional legal system has cultivated systemic loss aversion, making it difficult for entrepreneurs and innovators, our problem solvers, to survive in the market, let alone try anything new. Unsurprisingly, US business vitality, measured by new business formation rates, entrepreneurial activity, and business dynamism, has declined since the 1970s, a trend that accelerated after 2000. Indeed, while many pin the blame on the rise of the “precautionary principle” in legislation and among regulators, most have ignored the exacerbating role of the legal system. Americans often quip that the European Union has strangled innovation through overregulation, but the US finds its own innovative spirits tempered by overlitigation. Both civilizations are on different paths to the same destination: stagnation.

Balancing the Scale

Solving America’s legal woes requires curbing the incentives to file lawsuits and the cost of defending them. We could, for instance, make greater use of bench trials. A 2005 study of US state-level trials found that bench trials reached a verdict about six months faster and cost 30-50% less than comparable jury trials. Attorneys typically bill by the hour; a faster turnaround time means fewer billable hours. Moreover, the streamlined nature of bench trials makes them more cost-effective. Without a jury, there is no need to hire a jury consultant, engage in jury selection, prepare jury instructions, and less time and money must be devoted to hiring experts who can clarify complex evidence for laypeople. Importantly, bench trial judgments also tend to be more predictable, ameliorating fears of so-called “nuclear verdicts.”

Faster, cheaper, and more predictable trials would certainly help defendants and their insurers manage risk and loss, but most cases shouldn’t need to proceed to trial in the first place. In the US, a typical civil case takes between 400 and 800 days to resolve, but many countries could handle those cases in about 200 days. Partly, this is because most countries have a mandatory mediation requirement, which is currently voluntary in the US, but resolves about 70 percent of cases ahead of trial. If the US were also to widely adopt a mandatory mediation rule, it would further reduce the cost of lawsuits (for both sides) and ease the strain on the broader legal system, allowing resources to be devoted to the most valuable and contentious of cases.

Going further, the US should adopt the “loser pays” doctrine widely used abroad. In a “loser pays” regime, the party that loses at trial must pay the reasonable attorney’s fees of the prevailing party. This is meant to deter frivolous lawsuits by giving the plaintiff “skin in the game.” Additionally, we should reform the “collateral source rule,” which prohibits the introduction of evidence that a plaintiff received compensation from other sources, allowing the plaintiff to “double dip.” Currently, in many US states, the damages awarded by a jury cannot be reduced by amounts the plaintiff has already recovered from “collateral” sources. For example, if a plaintiff incurs $100,000 in medical bills from a car accident but their health insurance covers $80,000, the defendant could still be liable for the full $100,000, because the jury wouldn’t be allowed to know about the insurance payment.

The effect of this is more consequential than it appears because American medical providers bill at higher rates than they actually charge. For example, an MRI might be billed at $5,000, charged at $1,500, and then paid by the plaintiff’s health insurance, meaning the plaintiff owes nothing. The jury, however, only hears about the $5,000 bill. This creates a strong incentive to file lawsuits and to inflate billing. In the US, there is an entire industry of doctors and lawyers who cooperate to inflate billing. These doctors will, free of charge, perform unnecessary treatments, including surgeries, then bill at 10 times the usual rate in exchange for a cut of the final settlement or verdict. This “legal voodoo” allows them to transform $50,000 in actual medical procedures into $500,000 of fictitious billing that can be shown to a jury. The jurors are falsely led to believe that, if they rule against the plaintiff, they will leave him or her saddled with the $500,000 in debt. In reality, however, the plaintiff owes nothing. They didn’t pay for the treatments or the lawyer and never will, but the jury is kept in the dark.

Gavels and Sledgehammers

Everything I have described in this essay comes from years of personal observation, directly from the battle-weary trenches of the litigation and finance world. But in the process of writing this, I learned that I am not alone in my assessment that America’s litigation environment is holding the nation back by making it difficult to do anything. Dan Wang has even written a book about it, called Breakneck, where he argues that the rise of China as a rival superpower owes to the fact that, “China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.” Indeed, from my own experience living in China, I am inclined to agree. China’s society is more pragmatic and focused on outcomes, whereas America gets tied up in process. This is perhaps a reflection of their respective governments. China’s political elite is dominated by engineers, while America’s is dominated by lawyers. Engineers solve problems, lawyers argue problems.

As a consequence of America’s lawyer dominance, however, the deck is stacked against the problem solvers. Millions of American businesses and innovators now operate in an environment of fear. They fear introducing new products. They fear laying off employees. They fear making any moves that might trigger a lawsuit and years of expensive litigation that they have no hope of truly winning. This fear imposes a cost that goes beyond insurance premiums; the cost is progress itself. New ideas, especially the kind of breakthrough innovations that help Americans collectively solve problems, arrive more slowly, if at all, and their benefits are spread more unevenly. To accelerate progress, America must rebalance the scale of its legal system and restore its role as the blind arbiter of truth. Only then will its entrepreneurs and innovators be able to build the future we wish to see.

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Technological advancements enabled us to extend the reach of our senses far beyond their natural limits. Earlier, we examined how technology allowed us to observe and study the microscopic world, from cells to subatomic particles. Now, we will explore how many of these same optical innovations also made it possible for us to see deep into the heavens above and around us. These capabilities, to resolve the hidden worlds both small and distant, have allowed us to, figuratively, go “back in time,” to unlock the secrets of life’s many mysteries. Using technology, we have gained a clearer understanding of the beginning of life, the origin of the universe, and perhaps even some insight into its future.

Bending Light

Like many inventions, there is no clear answer as to who invented the first telescope that allowed us to study things that our eyes could not perceive. Many spectacle makers claimed to have built the first telescopes as far back as the late 1500s, but many trace the first telescope to a patent application filed in the Netherlands in 1608 by Hans Lippershey. The basic function of a telescope is rather simple. The human eye, our ‘‘lens” to the world, is small, collecting only just enough photons to see the brightest of stars in the sky. Telescopes can augment the human eye, using larger lenses or mirrors, collecting far more photons, and enabling us to see much fainter objects. Ceteris paribus, the larger the telescope’s light-collecting area, or “aperture,” the more capable it is.

Though he didn’t invent the telescope, it was Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, who, inspired by the “Dutch perspective glass,” unlocked its potential. Galileo replicated the Dutch device using a convex objective lens with a concave eyepiece. Initially, with just a 1.5 cm aperture, Galileo would eventually fashion lenses up to 4 cm in diameter that would magnify objects up to 30x. It was with these early telescopes that Galileo observed spots on the Sun, mountains on our Moon, rings around Saturn, and the moons orbiting Jupiter. Armed with only these crude devices, Galileo overturned thousands of years of teachings about the universe. It wasn’t long before Galileo’s contemporary, Johannes Kepler, further improved the telescope’s design by substituting a convex lens for the eyepiece. This allowed for a wider field of view and higher magnification, albeit flipping the image “upside down.”

Subsequent astronomers would continue pushing the limits of telescope technology, but they ran into physical limitations. Early refracting telescopes used single-element objective lenses, meaning they had extremely high focal lengths. With every doubling of the aperture diameter, the focal length quadrupled, and, as a consequence, telescopes quickly grew unwieldy. By the end of the 17th century, the largest lenses were some 22 cm across, and telescopes grew so long that, in some cases, the objective lens had to be mounted on a tall pole or building with the eyepiece connected to it via a string.

A breakthrough came in 1733 when English barrister Chester Moore Hall developed the first achromatic lens. Using multiple peices of glass with different dispersions in the objective lens, he could reduce the chromatic aberration of the images produced while simultaneously reducing the focal length, allowing telescopes to shrink back to a reasonable length. However, limitations in lens-making technology restricted their size to about 10 cm. Thus, early refracting telescopes were either limited by the size of the lens or their unwieldy length. It would not be until the end of the 19th century that these limitations were overcome. In the meantime, an alternative telescope emerged: reflectors.

Reflecting Light

Just as the first refracting telescopes began scanning the heavens, thinkers began wondering if it was possible to use curved mirrors instead of lenses. The advantages were many; curved mirrors would not suffer the same chromatic or spherical aberration challenges, thus, they could be made larger and gather more light. The first functional reflecting telescope was built by Sir Isaac Newton in 1668. Though workable in concept, the speculum metal mirrors of the day (an alloy of mainly copper and tin) provided poor image quality. Nonetheless, new methods of manufacturing parabolic mirrors emerged in the 18th century, bringing about the first >1 meter telescopes, like William Herschel's “40-foot telescope,” which remained the largest telescope in the world for about half a century.

Reflecting telescopes, however, were burdensome to maintain. Primarily because the mirrors of the day didn’t last very long. Around 1858, a breakthrough in mirror technology emerged: silver-coated glass. Silver coatings were more reflective than speculum metal, their shine lasted longer, and the silver could be redeposited without remaking the entire mirror from scratch. Better, longer-lasting mirrors led to the construction of the first “modern” observatories, often located at high elevations to minimize light pollution and atmospheric distortions. Among these was the 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker Telescope, introduced in 1917. With this powerful device, Edwin Hubble proved that other galaxies existed outside of our own and that the universe had been, at one time, much smaller.

Silver mirrors still suffered challenges, however, as they had to be “resilvered” every few months. Then, in 1932, came another breakthrough: John Donavan Strong, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, developed a technique of “silvering” mirrors with aluminum using thermal vacuum evaporation. The new aluminum coatings greatly extended the life of telescopic mirrors, allowing them to get larger and easier to maintain. In 1948, the 200-inch (5-meter) Hale reflector at Mount Palomar became the largest telescope in the world. Hale, alongside the BTA-6 telescope in the USSR, would be unsurpassed for decades.

Silicon Savior

For a time, it seemed that telescopes had reached their limit. Any larger and their mirrors would sag under their own immense weight, and atmospheric distortions would make it pointless to build larger anyway. Then came the microchip, our silicon savior. Using computers and sensors, we could build telescopes with larger mirrors by leveraging the power of “active optics.” First pioneered in the 1980s by the 3.58-meter New Technology Telescope or NTT, computers monitor the image coming from the telescope several times a minute, actively adjusting the shape of the mirror to correct for minor distortions. This enabled the use of thinner, lighter mirrors, and for the first time, telescopes could use multiple smaller mirrors rather than a single large one.

A similar technology conquered the other limitation: our atmosphere. Even at high altitudes, the imagery from large telescopes was becoming distorted by the movement of the air above us. In the 1990s, further advances in computer technology gave way to “adaptive optics.” In contrast to active optics, where a computer corrects the image a few times a minute, adaptive optics makes minute changes several hundred times per second, making it possible to correct for tiny atmospheric distortions in real-time. The first telescope to utilize this technology was the 10-meter Keck telescope in 1993, more than twice the diameter of the Hale telescope decades earlier!

This technology will allow us to build bigger and more capable telescopes. The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), scheduled for completion in 2028, will have an aperture diameter nearly four times larger than Keck, at some 39.3 meters. The ELT will be able to gather 100 million times more light than the unaided human eye and resolve, for the first time, details about exoplanets orbiting other star systems. This telescope may even provide us with the capability to determine the presence of life on these planets and/or their suitability for human exploration and future colonization.

Above is a visual representation of the maximum aperture diameter humans have achieved over time. Plotted on a log scale (below), we can see an interesting and notable trend. Since 1650, aperture sizes have roughly doubled every 50 years. This sounds impressive, but actually undersells the improvement rate in total light collection. In these charts, I am only looking at the relative diameter of the aperture, but diameter is not the proper metric; the total area of the aperture is. With every doubling of the aperture diameter, we quadruple the total light collection area, meaning that our telescopes have become about 4x more capable every 50 years.

Space Telescopes

Ultimately, however, if our goal is to study the origins of the universe, even these massive Earth-based telescopes will hit a wall. First demonstrated by Edwin Hubble in 1929, the further an object is from us, the more “red” its color appears when we see it. This concept, known as “red shift,” is primarily caused by the expansion of the universe, which literally stretches light wavelengths toward the red color of the visible spectrum. To understand this, imagine drawing dots on a balloon that represent galaxies. As you inflate the balloon, representing the expansion of the universe, every dot moves away from every other dot, and the “space” between them stretches. Light waves that travel through this space get stretched too; their wavelengths get longer, and are shifted to red. The most distant objects get shifted out of the visible spectrum entirely into infrared light.

While we can build sensors that can pick up infrared light, there is a problem: the water vapor and CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere absorb or block most infrared energy, and the thermal glow from our warm atmosphere adds noise that makes it difficult to “see” anything in this wavelength band. A space-based telescope, located outside our atmosphere, is therefore needed to see the most distant objects. The Hubble Space Telescope was among the first to experiment with near-infrared astronomy from space, but it was still located too close to Earth’s warm glow. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), on the other hand, was optimized for near- and mid-infrared observations. The JWST is located far from Earth, orbiting the Sun at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km away. It’s equipped with a large sun-shield made of thin, reflective material that blocks heat from the Sun, Earth, and Moon and makes observations of very red-shifted objects possible.

The Gravity Telescope

Still, while the JWST will help us unlock the secrets of the early universe, it won’t be powerful enough to see and study many of the objects that we would like to know more about. It would be nice, for example, to be able to resolve, in detail, other planets orbiting other stars so that we could evaluate them for possible colonization prospects and, possibly, observe evidence of life on them. This capability, however, remains far beyond what can be achieved using existing lenses and mirrors. Enter the “gravity telescope,” or more precisely, the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) telescope, which might be considered the “Holy Grail” of telescope technology.

The SGL concept leverages the Sun’s immense gravity to act as a natural “lens”, magnifying and imaging distant exoplanets. As you recall, Albert Einstein correctly predicted that massive objects can bend light. Here, however, we focus those light paths, forming a giant cosmic telescope, using spacetime curvature to achieve unprecedented resolution. As light from a distant exoplanet grazes the Sun’s edge, it gets deflected by its gravity, converging at a focal region about 548 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. That’s roughly 14 times farther than Pluto’s average orbit. This creates an “Einstein ring,” a circular distortion of the incoming light around the Sun’s position in the sky.

Spacecraft positioned in this region, equipped with a modest telescope and a coronagraph to block the Sun’s glare, could construct an image of a distant object from the deflected light. The space telescopes would scan the Einstein ring region, pixel by pixel, using computers to reconstruct the full high-resolution image from the data. With an SGL, light amplification could reach up to 100 billion times, allowing us to potentially map the surface features on exoplanets up to 100 light-years away with details as fine as 10 kilometers per pixel. With resolving power like this, we could even see features like large cities on the surface of these distant worlds. Remember, however, because of the distances involved, we would only witness what was, not what is. We would be seeing these planets as they appeared in their past, not as they appear today.

Alas, the gravity telescope is but a distant dream, for we would need to be able to send spacecraft further from the Sun than ever before, spacecraft that would need to act autonomously given the immense distances involved. Still, there is no reason the concept wouldn’t work. If we are daring enough, we could very well receive our first clear images of distant exoplanets before the conclusion of the 21st century. What we see on these alien worlds will forever change how we perceive the universe and our place in it.

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Space isn’t actually that far away; it’s only 100km above our heads. We routinely travel further every time we go on a business trip or on vacation. Why then do we consider space to be the “final frontier?” Well, getting to space has historically been an expensive and perilous endeavor. It demands that we ride a column of fire powerful enough to escape the Earth’s loving grasp. This controlled explosion must be so intense that it pushes the limits of human ingenuity and, yes, physics itself. Every drop of fuel was consumed in the journey, and the rockets themselves, multimillion-dollar engineering marvels, could only fall lifelessly back to the pale blue dot. If your next vacation required that your commercial jet be dumped into the ocean upon landing, you, too, could expect a multimillion-dollar ticket price.

Alas, our industrious species is forever unsatisfied. Human progress, as we have explored, has a knack for making things that were once prohibitively expensive much more affordable. In the early 20th century, the Ford Motor Company devised a way to reduce the cost of the automobile using the moving assembly line. Later in the century, we learned to mass-produce silicon transistors using light, the basis for modern microelectronics. Initially, we could only make a few transistors at a time, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, etc. Today, using machines with mirrors, lenses, and lasers of unimaginable precision, we can etch hundreds of billions of transistors at once. The transistors themselves are now barely larger than atoms, the universe’s fundamental building blocks.

While our artistry in microelectronics now borders on divine, rocketry is a different animal. Only today do our microchips bump up against the limits of what is physically possible; rockets began their journey to space under those extreme constraints. Even the most efficient of designs required that 98 percent of the rocket’s mass be dedicated just to getting into orbit. This leaves only 2 percent for a valuable payload and literally nothing for a return trip. Undeterred, in the early 2000s, a newly-minted millionaire named Elon Musk, determined to make space access affordable, decided to risk it all. In 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, dedicated solely to solving the cost problem.

Musk began small. He first examined the total cost of the raw materials that make up a rocket. Then he compared those raw materials’ costs with the price of the final finished product. He quickly realized that this ratio was laughably large, indicating tremendous waste and inefficiency in the production process. Using this data, which Musk called the “idiot index,” SpaceX designed and built the Falcon 1 and later, the Falcon 9 rockets. There was nothing particularly special about these machines; they used traditional fuels and proven engine cycles. The magic, instead, was in the production process, where Musk and has team ruthlessly drove down costs and by 2013, SpaceX was offering spaceflights at about half the price of everyone else. To learn more about SpaceX's history and future, I highly recommend that you check out ’s Substack:

Chris’s Substack

Chris Prophet is a sci-fi and space development writer with an economic and entertaining style. His space related books provide unique perspectives on the NewSpace arena and emerging space economy. https://chrisprophet.substack.com/p/spacex-evolution

By Chris Prophet

Of course, the “idiot index” approach would only get SpaceX so far. To achieve lower costs, SpaceX would have to demonstrate that it could reuse parts of the rocket. When we refly these parts, the cost of building them can be amortized over many launches, and the more, the better. This was well known in the industry, of course, but most believed that reuse was impossible, and even if it were possible, it would never be economical. The video below, where Arianespace’s Richard Bowles disparages the “dream” of reusable rocketry, gives you a sense of the prevailing sentiment at the time. While Bowles confidently forecasts that the market will eventually “wake up” from the reusability dream, history tells us that he, and others like him, were the ones who were actually asleep.

Again, SpaceX started small, initially aiming only to reuse the Falcon 9’s first stage. First stage-reuse is much less challenging than trying to reuse the second stage, because the first stage doesn’t actually reach orbital altitude and velocity. SpaceX tried several different approaches to this problem, including using parachutes, before settling on a radical idea that, in hindsight, made so much more sense: Use the rocket’s own engines for powered landing. This was no easy feat, however. Additional hardware needed to be bolted onto the rocket, including grid fins for control, heat shielding, and landing legs. Moreover, the rocket needed to have some fuel remaining in the tanks after payload delivery. This all added mass, forcing engineers to push the limits of efficiency further than ever before. Indeed, even after cutting the max payload, the Falcon 9 could only slurp fumes by the time of landing. The margins were so narrow that SpaceX encountered repeated failures as it worked to land its first rocket. So many failures, in fact, that SpaceX even created its own “blooper reel” celebrating them.

The failures continued for years until the closing days of 2015, when, finally, the company landed a Falcon 9 first stage back on Earth. Impressive, but not dispositive. Landing a rocket was not enough; SpaceX needed to prove that it could refly a previously-flown rocket. It would be nearly two years before they reflew a Falcon 9, and even then, the rocket required considerable refurbishment that made the economics of those reflights questionable.

What many failed to appreciate, however, is that landing rockets back on Earth had a hidden advantage: for the first time, engineers could examine their monstrous creations after flight. They can see which parts were holding up well, which were overengineered, and which were not. Using this data, they could optimize the design further to make it lighter, more efficient, and easier to reuse. In 2018, this culminated in the “final” version of the Falcon 9, known as “Block V,” and the triple-core Falcon Heavy, both optimized for reflight. Today, a Falcon launches and lands every few days, and some of these Falcons have flown dozens of times each. In fact, the Falcon 9 launches and lands back on Earth with a higher degree of reliability than most rockets achieve just getting off the ground! The impossible has become commonplace. If you would like to learn more about the Falcon 9 and its impact on the launch industry, I recommend checking out ’s Substack, Planetocracy, below:

Planetocracy

The Future of Humanity in Space

By Peter Hague

Yet, while SpaceX has certainly cut the cost of a space launch dramatically, launch prices haven’t fallen commensurately with those declines. Why? The feat achieved by SpaceX has been so difficult to replicate that, as of this writing, more than a decade after SpaceX landed its first rocket stage, only one other company has successfully landed an orbital-class rocket, and it still has yet to prove that it can refly. In short, there is no real competition. Additionally, SpaceX also has an interest in ensuring that its competitors, namely the ULA, remain in business, lest they be considered a “monopoly” and subject to antitrust investigations.

That is all about to change in 2026. Using variations of SpaceX’s now-proven propulsive landing approach, competitors are flooding in from around the world, and many are poised to begin reusing rockets before 2030. This also means that we can expect launch prices to drop rapidly as each new player attempts to grab a piece of the market before it’s too late. In the US alone, there are at least seven new reusable launch systems nearly ready to come online. Here is a look at some of the beautiful beasts we can expect to see flying soon. A special thanks to Flight Atlas and ApoStructura for helping build this list.

New Glenn

Backed by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon fortune, New Glenn, designed and built by Blue Origin, is the closest thing to a rival that SpaceX currently has. At some 7 meters in diameter and 98 meters tall, New Glenn is a monster, and one of the largest rockets ever built. In many respects, NG is advantaged over Falcon 9 because it was designed for reuse from the outset. Its first stage is powered by seven staged-combustion BE-4 engines that run on cleaner and more efficient methalox fuel. The second stage, meanwhile, is powered by two BE-3U engines burning hydrolox. New Glenn successfully flew its maiden flight in January 2025, but it failed to stick its first landing. That didn’t last long, however, for in November 2025, on only its second flight, NG succeeded with both a launch and a landing.

The company hopes to demonstrate that it can refly New Glenn this year and has revealed plans for rapid design upgrades, including improved engines, fairing reuse, reduced mass, and enhanced thermal protection. This will enable the rocket to launch approximately 45 tons into orbit with partial reuse, surpassing the capabilities of both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin also revealed plans for a larger version of the rocket, called New Glenn 9x4, with nine BE-4 engines on its first stage and four BE-3U engines on its second. This larger version could take flight as soon as 2027, carrying up to 70 tons to Earth orbit. As you can seein the illustration below, New Glenn 9x4 will even dwarf the historic Saturn V that took humans to the Moon.

Neutron

Hot on Blue Origin’s heels and eagerly anticipated for a 2026 launch, RocketLab’s Neutron rocket aims to build on the success of Electron, their first, much smaller launch vehicle. Neutron is specifically designed for the megaconstellation market and aims to carry up to 13 tons to low Earth orbit, powered by 9 Archimedes engines burning clean methalox fuel. Its claim to fame is its unique design; the rocket is made of lightweight carbon fiber, which tapers along its height. The business end of Neutron is larger, which helps spread out reentry heating and keep plasma from building on the side of the rocket during reentry, improving performance.

This isn’t the only trick up RocketLab’s sleeve, however. The second stage is optimized to be extremely mass-efficient. Instead of resting on top of the first stage like every other rocket, the second stage literally “hangs” inside the fairing, keeping it in tension, instead of compression. Metals and composites tend to be stronger under tension than they are under compression. Think of a soda can; it’s easier to crush than it is to pull it apart. This allows the upper stage, which is to be expended, to be made thinner, lighter, and cheaper. This also allows for “captive” fairings, which are connected directly to the first stage. Instead of being jettisoned, the fairings open up, release their payload, then close, and return with the first stage. No parachutes or separate recovery ships needed.

Terran R

Under development at upstart Relativity Space, the Terran R was originally envisioned as the world's first fully 3D printed rocket. Engineers have since partially backed off that approach, adopting a more conventional design, visually similar to the Falcon 9, though large sections will still be produced using 3D printing. Like most others on this list, Terran R will also burn methalox fuel, feeding 13 Aeon R engines on the first stage. The company hopes Terran R will provide enough power to loft some 23 tons to orbit with partial reuse, considerably more than Falcon 9, but less than Falcon Heavy. Like Falcon 9, the Terran R also relies on grid fins for control and lands on four deployable landing legs.

Eclipse

Less well-known is Eclipse, another two-stage, partially reusable rocket, which is under development at Firefly Aerospace. Firefly is the phoenix that rose from the ashes of now-defunct Firefly Space Systems. The rocket is fairly conventional, but has big backing: Northrop Grumman is co-develeloper and hopes that Eclipse will serve as a successor to their Antares launch vehicle. Fueled by traditional kerolox, the seven Miranda engines are aiming to launch up to 16 tons into low Earth orbit.

Starship

The elephant in the room, of course, is SpaceX’s enormous Starship rocket. Larger than even New Glenn 9x4, Starship is the largest rocket ever built by a significant margin. The rocket’s first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, the most engines ever affixed to a single rocket stage. These engines are marvels of engineering themselves; they are the world’s first production rocket engines using a “Full Flow” Staged Combustion Cycle (FFSC). This is important because the FFSC cycle improves efficiency and reduces engine wear: essential if the goal is to fly the rocket many times a day. The first stage lands propulsively back on Earth, but unlike the others on this list, it lands directly back at the launch site, caught by the very same launch tower that it took off from minutes before. Literally, it’s a skyscraper catching another skyscraper. This trick eliminates the need for landing legs, making the rocket simpler, lighter, and much easier to prep for relaunch.

The second stage is currently powered by six more Raptor engines, including three special vacuum-optimized Raptors, but plans call for this to be upgraded to nine total in later versions. The Starship upper stage aims to demonstrate what only the Space Shuttle has done before: land and reuse a rocket returning from orbital velocity. This means, unlike the first stage, Starship must survive the full heat of orbital reentry. The Space Shuttle achieved this with tens of thousands of unique, fragile ceramic tiles glued to its hull. Each tile, as it were, needed to be inspected and tested before every flight, limiting flights to once every few months.

SpaceX has also elected to cover Starship in thousands of ceramic tiles, but with standardized shapes and better materials. Unlike the Shuttle, however, Starship also aims to land propulsively. The spacecraft “belly flops” into the atmosphere, using actuating fins for control, then, once near the ground, fires three sea-level engines and performs a last-second “flip” maneuver to orient the rocket upright for a gentle landing. SpaceX hopes to demonstrate that Starship can refly with minimal refurbishment. That is a tall order, and so far, development and testing have bumpy, but promising, with several ships landing successfully in the Indian Ocean.

In essence, what SpaceX is attempting to do here is build the first “jumbo jet” to space; the world’s first fully and rapidly reusable rocket that flies like an airliner. Should they be successful, there is a real potential for launch prices to collapse to under $100/kg; a true game changer that would alter the course of human history. For the first time, millions of humans living and working in space could become a reality.

Nova

Lastly, I would be remiss if I failed to talk about the “dark horse” of the bunch: Nova. Stoke Space’s Nova is, arguably, next to Starship, the most ambitious design listed here. Like Starship, the rocket’s first stage engines burn methalox in an FFSC engine cycle, and the stage is reusable, landing propulsively. It’s Nova’s upper stage, however, that makes the design worthy of a closer look. As you can see in the concept art below, the upper stage resembles an elongated capsule, and in contrast with the first stage, it’s powered by a single hydrolox-fueled expander-cycle engine. This is a simple and proven design, using the engine’s own heat to vaporize the hydrogen fuel and drive the pumps. Uniquely, however, the engine is embedded within the craft's heat shield; in a sense, it is the heat shield. Instead of a single nozzle protruding from the back of the vehicle, thrust is delivered through many smaller nozzles embedded around the perimeter. The rocket launches like any other; the real magic to this design, however, comes during reentry and landing.

During reentry, the engine, obviously, is switched off, as we don’t want to be generating any thrust, but Stoke’s design allows the hydrogen fuel to continue flowing anyway. Instead of being pumped along by the heat of the engine, however, the fuel is driven by reentry heating. In effect, the hydrogen fuel serves a double purpose as a coolant, replacing the brittle heat-shield tiles used by Starship. The vaporized hydrogen is then vented through a small hole near the center of the heat shield, providing additional cooling. Once the spacecraft nears the ground, the nozzle valves are reopened, and the engine flips on as normal, providing thrust for a soft landing.

In many ways, Stoke’s approach to upper stage landing and reuse is more elegant than Starship's. There is no need for heavy fins, actuators, or the complex seals needed to protect them from reentry plasma. There is no need for thousands of ceramic tiles that will require inspection after every flight; the spacecraft passively cools itself using its own fuel. Further, the rocket is always oriented correctly with the engine pointing downward. There is, therefore, no need to perform a “flip maneuver” near the ground or to worry about fuel sloshing, which could cause the landing burn to fail. Additionally, the upper stage design functions like a quasi-aerospike engine, using the same engine and nozzles for both ascent in a vacuum and descent in the atmosphere, eliminating the need for separate landing engines and hardware.

Accelerate

Even if only two or three of these launch systems come online, we can expect a sea-change in space access, with collapsing launch prices and greater variety and vehicle availability. Remember, this list only features upcoming American launch vehicles. The rest of the world, too, is poised to begin flying reusable rockets, especially the Middle Kingdom. We will examine those launchers next. Please subscribe to Risk & Progress for updates, or, if you enjoyed this list, share it with your friends using the button below.

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When it comes to human progress, the paramount importance of the discovery and dissemination of knowledge cannot be understated. It may not, then, appear befitting for me to attack the education system, which is seen as playing a crucial role in that process. Yet, there is a compelling case to be made that societies are misallocating their young’s time and money, forcing them to spend thousands of hours studying subjects they will never use and/or to take on loans to fund degrees that provide little tangible benefit. Indeed, despite spending almost $1 trillion annually on education, or about 6 percent of the US GDP, we still hand diplomas to high school and college graduates who fail basic literacy and math tests. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the race to outshine each other with yet more diplomas and certificates continues.

“Human Capital”

In his book, The Case Against Education, author and economist notes that the standard justification for funding education is that it cultivates positive spillovers by expanding our “human capital.” This notion is as intuitive as it is attractive. As our society has become more complex and technology more advanced, we need to raise new generations of humans with the advanced skillsets required for this new age. As compelling as this argument might be, however, it seems little more than just another convenient myth we tell ourselves. There is strikingly thin evidence that the education system is actually an investment in our “human capital.”

To illustrate this problem, Caplan begins with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a “Martian sociologist” studying those industrious little humans on the Blue Planet. To better understand their society from afar, you devise a clever study to examine what humans teach their young in school. It’s only logical, after all, that economically scarce resources would be prudently spent preparing young humans for the real world. To an extent, the education system does exactly that. A considerable amount of time is spent teaching numeracy and literacy, universally beneficial subjects. However, considerably more time is allocated to other subjects, including teaching foreign languages, poetry, classical literature, and geometry. From this, as a clever Martian researcher, you might conclude that human society is filled with well-compensated poets, writers, translators, and that solving quadratic equations was part of a daily experience.

Of course, this is not the case. Much of what is taught in school is unused in adulthood. This education mismatch extends to the higher education system. Caplan notes that in 2008-09, over 94,000 graduates were bestowed a psychology degree. When we consider, however, that there are only 174,000 practicing psychologists in the entire country, and far fewer job openings, it’s clear that the vast majority of them will not find employment as a psychologist. Similarly, in just one year, over 83,000 students graduated with a degree in “communications,” far outnumbering the 54,000 people employed as reporters/news broadcasters, which again far outnumbers job openings in that field.

Yet, while we allocate significant resources to teaching students unnecessary material, we are falling short in our effort to educate them in universally essential subjects. Studies have found, for example, that a majority of Americans fail the very same citizenship exam they require of immigrants. These include basic questions like, “Is the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution?” and “What are the three branches of government?” Scientific illiteracy is equally bad; one in every four Americans doesn’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun, and about one in three doesn’t understand that atoms are larger than electrons.

Defenders of the education system counter that we shouldn’t judge the system’s merits on the mere retention of information; schools teach pupils how to ask the right questions, to “learn how to learn,” and how to apply these skills outside the classroom. Caplan writes, however, that the data does not support this notion either. At best, students learn what they were taught in school, but almost universally fail to apply their knowledge outside the classroom before forgetting much of what they had learned. I believe that we can attribute these low retention and application rates to schools routinely teaching subjects in isolation, without clarifying their relevance to real-world applications. This is difficult to do when the subject has no real-world relevance in the first place!

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