The Next 100 Years

revo lu ti on i n en erg y
The American obsession with space will intersect another intensifying prob­
lem: energy. During the war, the United States will invest huge amounts of 
money to solve the problem of delivering power to the battlefield from 
space. It will be uneconomical, primitive, and wasteful, but it will work. It 
will power Allied forces in Poland in the face of the Turkish- German inva­
sion. The military will see space- based power generation as a solution to its 
massive logistical problem on the battlefield. In particular, the delivery of 
energy to power new weapons involving intense energy beams will be a crit­
ical problem. The military will be prepared, therefore, to underwrite the de­
velopment of space- based power generation, as a military necessity, and 
Congress will be prepared to pay for it. It will be one of the lessons learned 
from the war—and it will instill a sense of urgency into the project. 
There are two other episodes in American history that are instructive 
here. In 1956, the United States undertook to construct the interstate high­
way system. Dwight Eisenhower favored it for military reasons. As a junior 
officer he had tried to lead a convoy across the United States—it took 
months. In World War II he saw how the Germans had moved entire armies 
from the eastern front to the west to launch the Battle of the Bulge using 
their autobahns. He was struck by the contrast. 
The military reasons for the interstate system were compelling. But the 
civilian impacts were both unexpected and unintended. With the time and 
cost of transportation reduced, land outside of cities became usable. A mas­
sive decentralization of cities took place, leading to suburbs and the distri­
bution of industry outside of urban areas. The interstate system reshaped 
the United States, and without the military justifications it might not have 
been built or seen as economically feasible. 
A second example can be drawn from the 1970s, when the military was 

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heavily engaged in research. It needed the means to move information 
around among different research centers more quickly than it could by 
courier or the mails—there was no FedEx. The Defense Advanced Research 
Projects Agency (DARPA) funded an experiment designed to create a net­
work of computers that could communicate data and files to each other at a 
distance. The creation was called ARPANET. It was developed at some cost 
and effort for a highly specialized use. ARPANET, of course, evolved into 
the Internet, and its essential architecture and protocols were designed and 
administered by the Department of Defense and its contractors until well 
into the 1990s. 
As with the automobile superhighways, the information superhighway 
might have come about on its own, but it did not. The basic cost of creating 
it was a military undertaking designed to solve a problem the military was 
experiencing. To push this analogy a bit, the energy superhighway will have 
its origins in the same kinds of necessities. It will be built for the military, 
and therefore its economics will make it more competitive than other en­
ergy sources. Since the military will absorb the basic capital cost and will de­
ploy the systems, the commercial cost of this energy will be enormously 
lower than it might be otherwise. Cheap energy in the civilian sector will 
be critical, particularly as robots become more and more prevalent in the 
economy. 
Military space programs will, quite literally, reduce the cost of commer­
cial endeavors by piggybacking them. Advances in commercial launches 
into space will reduce the cost of lifting payload but will never have the ca­
pacity to handle a massive project such as the development of space- based 
solar power generation. The military program of the 2050s and 2060s will 
solve this problem in two ways. First, one of the important parts of the proj­
ect will be reducing the cost per pound of payloads. The United States will 
be putting a lot of stuff into space and will need to dramatically lower the 
price of a launch. Partly through new technology and partly through the 
sheer volume being launched, cost will begin to decline dramatically, even 
over that of commercial vehicles developed earlier. 
Second, there will be surplus capacity built into the system. One of the 
lessons of the war will be that not having spare space- lift capacity left the 

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United States scrambling to deal with the initial attack. That will not be al­
lowed to happen again. So the nation will have a huge surplus of usable lift 
capacity. Private sector utilization of the project will be essential to reduce 
costs. 
The period when the interstate highway system and the Internet came 
into being was a period of explosive economic growth. The interstate high­
way system stimulated the economy by employing armies of construction 
crews and civil engineers, but it was the entrepreneurial spin- offs that really 
drove the boom. McDonald’s was as much a creature of the interstate high­
way system as was the suburban mall. The Internet’s construction involved 
a lot of Cisco servers and PC sales. But the real boom came with Amazon 
and iTunes. Both had massive entrepreneurial consequences. 
NASA has been involved in research on space- based energy since the 
1970s, in the form space solar power (SSP). In the war of the 2050s the 
United States will really start using this new system. And in the space- based 
energy project of the 2060s, it will become a feature of everyday life. Vast 
numbers of photovoltaic cells, designed to convert solar energy into electric­
ity, will be placed in geostationary orbit or on the surface of the moon. The 
electricity will be converted into microwaves, transmitted to the earth, re­
converted to electricity, and distributed through the existing and expanded 
electric grid. The number of cells needed could be reduced by concentrating 
sunlight using mirrors, thus reducing the cost of launching the photovoltaic 
arrays. Obviously, the receivers would have to be installed in isolated areas 
on earth, since the localized microwave radiation would be intense, but the 
risks would be far less than that from nuclear reactors or from the environ­
mental effects of hydrocarbons. One thing that space has available is space. 
What would be unbearably intrusive on earth (say, covering an area the size 
of New Mexico with solar panels) is swallowed up by the limitlessness of 
space. Plus there are no clouds, and collectors can be positioned to receive 
continual sunlight. 
These advances will lead to reduced energy costs on earth, and thus 
many more energy- intensive activities will become feasible. The entrepre­
neurial possibilities that emerge will be astounding. Who could have drawn 
a line between ARPANET and the iPod? All that can be said is that this sec­

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ond wave of innovations will transform things at least as much as the inter­
state highway and the Internet did—and bring as much prosperity in the 
2060s as the interstate brought in the 1960s, and the Internet in the 2000s. 
The United States will also have created another foundation for its geo ­
political power—it will become the largest energy producer in the world, 
with its energy fields protected from attack. Japan and China and most 
other countries are going to be energy importers. As the economics of en­
ergy shifts, other sources of energy, including hydrocarbons, will become 
less attractive. Other countries will not be able to launch their own space-
based systems. For one thing, they will not have a military making the down 
payment on the system. Nor will any country have the appetite to challenge 
the United States at that moment. An attack on American facilities will be 
unthinkable given the now vast imbalance of power. The ability of the 
United States to provide much cheaper solar energy will create an additional 
lever for the superpower to increase its international dominance. 
We will see here a fundamental paradigm shift in geopolitical realities. 
Since the start of the industrial revolution, industry has guzzled energy, 
which was accidentally and haphazardly distributed around the world. The 
Arabian Peninsula, which otherwise had little importance, became crucially 
important because of its oil fields. With the shift to space- based systems, in­
dustry will produce energy instead of simply consuming it. Space travel will 
be the result of industrialization, and an industrialized nation will produce 
energy at the same time as it fuels its industry. Space will become more im­
portant than Saudi Arabia ever was, and the United States will control it. 
A new wave of American- generated culture will sweep the world. Re­
member that we define culture not simply as art, but in the broader sense of 
how people live their lives. The computer was the most effective introduc­
tion to American culture, far more profound than movies or TV. The robot 
will represent the computer’s logical and dramatic conclusion. In a world 
that needs economic growth but no longer has a surging population, robots 
will become the driver of productivity, and with space- based solar systems 
there will be ample electricity to power them. Robots, still primitive but de­
veloping rapidly, are going to sweep the world, and will be particularly em­
braced by the population- constrained advanced industrial world, and by 

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countries that will be closing in on the first tier and nearing or passing pop­
ulation peaks. 
Genetics science will continue to extend life expectancy, and will eradi­
cate or bring under control a series of genetic diseases. This will lead to in­
creasing social instability. The radical shifts that have wracked Europe and 
the United States, transforming the role of women and the structure of the 
family, will become a worldwide phenomenon. Deep tensions—between 
supporters of traditional values and new social realities—will become in­
tense throughout the second- tier countries, and all major religions will be 
wracked by them. Catholicism, Confucianism, and Islam will all be arrayed 
with traditional understandings of family, sexuality, and the relations be­
tween generations. But the traditional values are going to collapse in Europe 
and the United States, and they will then collapse throughout most of the 
rest of the world. 
Politically, this will mean intense internal tensions. The late twenty- first 
century will become a period in which tradition tries to contain a medically 
and technologically driven upheaval. And since the United States will be the 
originator of much of the controversial technology, and its model of internal 
social chaos will be becoming the norm, it will become the enemy of tradi­
tionalists everywhere. To the rest of the world, America will be seen as dan­
gerous, brutish, and treacherous, but it will be treated with caution—and 
envied. It will be a time of international stability, regional stress, and inter­
nal unrest. 
Outside the United States two powers will be thinking about space. One 
will be Poland, which will be busy consolidating its land empire and still 
smarting at its treatment under the peace treaty of the 2050s. But Poland 
will also still be recovering from the war and surrounded by American allies. 
It will not be ready for a challenge. The other country thinking about space 
will be Mexico, which into the late 2060s will be emerging as one of the top 
economic powers in the world. Mexico will see itself as a rival of the United 
States, and will be stepping onto the continental and world stage, but it will 
not yet have defined a coherent national strategy (and will be afraid of going 
too far in challenging American power). 
There will be other emerging powers whose economies begin to surge as 

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population growth pressures decline. Brazil will be a particularly important 
emerging power, a generation behind Mexico in population stability but 
moving rapidly in that direction. Brazil will be considering a regional eco­
nomic alliance with Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, all of whom will be mak­
ing major strides. Brazil will be thinking in terms of peaceful confederation 
but, as is often the case, will in due course entertain more aggressive ideas. 
The Brazilians will certainly have a space program by the 2060s, but not a 
comprehensive one, and not one linked to immediate geopolitical need. 
Countries like Israel, India, Korea, and Iran all will have limited space 
programs, but none of them is going to have the resources or the motivation 
to make a play for substantial space presence, let alone try to deny the 
United States space hegemony. Therefore, as happens at the end of global 
wars, the United States will have a wide- open shot—and will take it. The 
United States will be living in a golden moment, lasting at least until around 
2070. 

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