Deep Future Pablos

Short opinion piece about these helium airships and the need to preserve helium.







I think they're cool. But there's a real problem with trying to make a lot of hydrogen next to actual humans and somehow imagine that it's going to be safe. So since then, people have played around with things like blimps and things that don't have passengers and stuff like that. But these things don't, aren't very popular. I have seen a little bit of news lately about this group called Lighter Than Air Research, which is trying to create air ships today.



These are in part probably safer because they don't fill them with hydrogen, they fill them with helium. So this is a massive craft. They call Pathfinder one. I'm going to link to an article in IEEE Spectrum about this and I'm just going to give you, the highlights.



Pathfinder 1 is 120 meters, long, 20 meters in diameter. I think biggest Goodyear blimp right now is 75 meters. So this is like the biggest air ship ever made. I think.





The idea is to carry about four tons of cargo. It sounds like a lot, but if you're not familiar with a ton, four tons is about one Humvee. Or, maybe four tons might be a good size Amazon delivery van fully loaded. That's four tons of cargo. There's still, also a crew, there's what's called water ballast, which is, water you carry for weight. So if you have a problem, descending too fast, you could drop the water and it would slow your descent to make it safe. And then fuel, cause you still need fuel in order to propel the thing. The idea is this thing would go 65 knots. So that's about 120 kilometers an hour, which I think about 70 miles an hour. That's about as fast as these things seem to ever really be able to go, but the, average cruising speed probably maxes out at more like two-thirds of that. This is a modern Airship probably worth revisiting it to see if it can be done better. The old ones were built with, a lot of wood. They were built with a lot of aluminum which is, good strength to weight ratio, but incendiary. In the sense that it melts at a low temperature. Modern crafts could be built with carbon fiber and titanium and all these modern materials that we can coat to make them less inflammatory,



So that's the frame and then you also have this covering and the coverings gonna be made of not cotton the way we used to do it, but we're going to make that out of some modern polyvinyl from DuPont called Tedlar. So obviously those materials have advanced a lot in our lifetime. If you sense a little bit of a dubiousness in my voice, I'm going to tell you why that is in a little bit here.



That's the basic idea. There's also a lot that's advanced in weather prediction. There's a lot that's advanced in electric motors for propulsion. There's a lot that's advanced in autonomous flying and driving. And so we have lidars and we have things that can figure out how to make these things dramatically safer. I buy all that. Here's what bothers me.



The world has unlimited hydrogen on earth, more or less. We have a lot. We can make more. Hydrogen's awesome. What the world does not have on earth is very much helium. We have very little helium. We have very little helium left. We've been able to find a few new helium mines in the last decade, but there's just not much of it.



And that is a super valuable element that we really need for lots of different things. We need it for making computer chips. We need it for figuring out how to make fusion reactors and things like that. We're just running out of helium and I'm pretty disappointed in any plan that involves using a lot of helium as it's lighter than air substance.



Because of that, I'm really having a hard time getting excited about these modern airships that want to use helium. Helium is not flammable, so it won't burn up the way that hydrogen does. If you remember your periodic table, if you look at the very beginning, the reason you've probably heard of hydrogen and helium is they're numbe

Sleep is the most natural process that you can do other than breathing. Like breathing, we don't need technology to help us sleep. The reason many people don't sleep is because of what's between their ears – their mental stability, anguish, or stress. Do you fall asleep easily or does the slightest noise wake you up? Dr. Michael Breus, gives me a full brain dump as I try to learn everything I can about sleep in one session. He takes on taboo ideas like polyphasic sleep and the role of nutrition and the microbiome in having a good night’s rest, how melatonin, CBD, and some pharmaceutical interventions such as Zolpidem affect the sleep process, how much sleep we should have, and more.







Pablos: The thing I'm trying to go after is that at least my way of seeing the world is through all these problems that we have. This is a pile of problems that are possibly growing. We also have this other pile, which is tools and technologies, and it's also growing because of what I mentioned. The job for us is to figure out how we sit in the middle and connect to those things. If we have some optimism that it's possible and we can demystify the problems so people understand what the real problems are, we can demystify the technology so they're not terrifying and complicated.



People then can build that sense of optimism about how we could make the future better. That's how I think about things a lot. Not only the idea here is to give people some insight into how we think about things and our experiences. One of the things I'm curious about is that years ago, there was no such thing as a sleep doctor. Maybe there were some researchers or whatever, but it wasn't a legitimate career track. How did you end up being a sleep doctor? What does that mean?



Michael: What's interesting about the field of sleep medicine in general is it's an incredibly small new field. The very first sleep lab in 1945, Walla Walla, Washington, built demand on narcolepsy. It wasn't even about sleep apnea. When you look at medicine and you think about Hippocrates. Thousands of years of innovations in medicine, we're literally at the sperm and egg stage of sleep medicine. That's where it was. I fell into it by accident. I was doing my residency. I was getting my PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia and I was interested in Sports Psychology. I had no interest in sleep at all. I wanted to tell athletes how to get the mental game of sports and run faster into all this cool shit with psychology.



I went to the University of Georgia, the top twenty programs. The best internship residency program, believe it or not, is the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. They had an eating disorders and athletes program that I was fascinated with. This was going to be an interesting area for me to get into and understand more about, but I couldn't get into the program. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, they all got in the program. I went to Georgia's top twenty programs, but to be fair, it wasn't Harvard.



It wasn't even top seventeen.



I'm sitting there, I'm looking through the application and they have like a specialty track for sleep medicine and a specialty track for neuropsychological testing. I didn't know anything about sleep medicine in Jackson.



You figured out, “I can't get on a program I want, but I can at least go to Jackson.”



I had an ulterior motive because when I saw this thing, I had worked my way through graduate school in the Electrophysiology department. I'm the kid who used to take the old rotary phones apart, put them back together, there would be 4 or 5 pieces on the side, and this thing would work like a gem.



I took the phone apart for different reasons and did not get it back together.  



I like to tinker with stuff. I like to measure stuff. I have that kind of a brain. When I saw that there was a sleep track that used those machines, I said, “I'm going to sell myself as a sleep guy. I'm

About two billion people that are going to move into cities by 2050 and with that growth, the demand for efficient transportation is going to increase dramatically. In an era where we’re already seeing inefficiencies in urban mobility having a massive impact on the economy, public health and environmental health, it’s hard to imagine a future of transportation that doesn’t border utter chaos. Cognizant of these projected problems, Assaf Biderman, is working on solutions that harness the power of artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies that are already within our reach. Assaf is founder and CEO of Superpedestrian, founder of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and an awesome guy to learn from. I'll admit, I have been dubious about the rentable scooter business, but Assaf has me convinced there's an important place for these things in our cities. If you have any interest in urban mobility, this conversation is important.







You're still at MIT, but you don't have to go anymore because no one goes to work anymore.



The whole lab has been removed since March. I'm still on the board of the lab. I spend most of my time at Superpedestrian.



Is the Senseable City Lab still going?



Yes.



What are you guys trying to do?



Senseable started in 2003, 2004, where the goal was to say, computers are becoming part of everything. They can emit data. They can act on data. You can embed them in your environment. That allows us to completely change the way we study design and impact cities. Some people call this field of smart cities and I don’t like that.



It is because there's no such thing



People are smart enough, but there is a lot that you can do. You can discover new things about how people organize themselves and about how it flows through the city, energy flows, waste, the things we consume, people, and communication. A lot of that can impact how you design them and how you manage them in real-time. It's got a lot of value. It's one of the largest lab fields. I've been doing work since 2004 in partnership with cities all over the world. Those are big city partners and a lot smaller. It was funded by corporate for the most part and more will survive by long-term brands, but most of the money came from corporate where cities volunteered themselves as a subject matter and tell us about what problems they care about. Probably they want to look at together with us. We use the bigger money from corporate, all thrown together into one pot. We basically manage the deployment of dollars into research areas that we care about and the cities care about and the consortium that the management cares about. Most of the time, technology surrounds machine learning, robotics, various types of analytics.



For example, when you think of the seventeen-year history or something, what are the things that stand out to you as examples of what that lab is doing so that I could understand?



The impact areas that we care about are the stuff that makes cities function better or worse. We look at a lot of transportation, and probably half of those are transportation, whether it is dispatch algorithms to global taxis that we’ve been working on for many years. There's quite a bit of knowledge there that’s generated this whole micro vehicle angle, which is what Superpedestrian is spun into.



How do you define micro vehicles?



These are tiny vehicles that take vertical space. The key thing is you got to take much less space on the road than a car does, but the longer answer it depends on the occupants. We want to make sure that we are able to get a lot more people on the road. There are about 2 billion people that are going to move into cities by 2050. There is no way that these people are moving. Cities are already overbooked so 1.16 people in a car, which is what we do today, like Sedan don't cut it. Think of something else where the utilization is a lot higher, either a tiny vehicle for “1.16 people” or some w

Brent Bushnell is one of the most positive people I know. He's created Two Bit Circus to reimagine how the newest developments in computing technology can shape the future of entertainment, work, education and human interaction. Brent grew up in the house that built Atari and has been a lifelong hands-on maker that brings a prototyping mindset to everything he does. Listen in to this candid and eclectic conversation and learn about the mass of possibilities that we can bring into fruition with just a little stretch of our imagination.







Pablos: We’re rolling.



Brent: Have you heard that term from reality shows, frankenbiting where they have a conversation for eight hours, “What do you think of Hitler? What do you think of all this stuff? What do you think of Pablos?” Later they cut those responses together and it is like, “Pablos is the worst person I've ever heard about.”



I've seen for the Joe Rogan podcast people who do that to his show. They're like, “Joe Rogan wants to eradicate Jews.” They clipped together two words snippets to make it sound like that's what he said, but it's such a popular show that people probably count it as clickbait.



It's almost like Machinima, people did with video games in order to be able to tell stories, but the AI side of that and the whole Deepfake thing has me excited from an entertainment perspective.



I was ahead of that one because my view of the entertainment industry for the last decade or so has been that the camera would get replaced with this pile of sensors. You could have a human actor, but the point would be to capture what they do because we're going to render them anyway. We're going to render them at the point of consumption like a video game. The reason for that is you don't know when you're making the film, my native language dialect, the aspect ratio of my screen, my preference for how big the boobs are or whether it's Ferrari's or Lamborghini's and product placement.



It's all going to get rendered at the point of consumption like a video game. The video game is oppression and showing the future of all entertainment and all media. It's interesting because a couple of things happened out of order. We've been making video game rendering better so that we could do real-time rendering equivalent to Pixar. We're getting pretty close to that, but then Deepfakes turbo-charged it because that gives you the ability to imagine making these high-quality renderings out of people who didn't even know. I saw somebody who's trying to make like a James Dean movie starring James Dean, “The legal parts were done with the estate of James Dean. He's going to star in a new movie.”



The guy creating it won't ever leave his room and the rendering bay.



You might still have a human actor because the toolkit for the guy in the room to make the virtual actor expressive is still limited. That's why we still use a human actor because they're a stand-in, but it could be your wife playing James Dean, get a real actor. They have to move and express themselves.



There are certain times where the expression says that the actual mouth forming the syllabus matters less. If they were across the room, all of a sudden you could do synthetic audio and James Dean is pronouncing your names.



The AI to do the synthetic audio are there. With twenty minutes of audio from you, we can make you say anything. We can make you read war and peace falsely and know the Brent Bushnell applications. That's all solved. We're not going to be aiming a camera at the actor's lips for that because we're going to render the actor in speaking whatever language the audience is watching. Get rid of the subtitles, overdubbing and stuff.



I think it's better to get the audio right than their lips matching.



I thought about this a long time for AR and VR. Everybody's fixated on those goggles, but the audio matters.



The 360 is amazing. Some of these proximity audio games, you turn your he

Probably whatever you were doing with your life as a kid isn't as cool as building a Dyson swarm. 12 year old Levi Hurt has already decided to devote his life to doing so.



Levi is a delightful kid. It will warm your heart to hear his curiosity and excitement about these ideas. Even with my antagonistic questioning, his sense of wonder is infectious.

My friend, Dr. Melissa Selinger is a Doctor of Neuropsychopharmacology who has done actual research on using psychedelics and virtual reality for treating things like depression, anxiety, and PTSD. A huge frontier where there are all kinds of potential, and very little actual scientific research has been done here so far. It's an exciting frontier to be able to help a lot of people who we don't have any real idea how to help otherwise.



I'm super thrilled about that and the potential for it. It's great to get to talk to somebody who knows what state of the art there is. Melissa knows a lot about all kinds of things that I don't know anything about. As you guys know, part of what I love to be able to do is sit down with somebody who has a lot of knowledge and experience in something that I don't know about, pick their brain, try and break it down, see if I can understand it and take you guys along for the ride so that we can all learn.



Carcinogens, teratogens, exosomes, stem cells, cytokines, CRISPR, gene editing, all these are things that we talk about in this conversation. A lot of it is me trying to get her to explain in layman's terms what this stuff is and how it works. There is incredible potential here. If you were ever interested in what's possible in stem cell therapy, you're going to want to learn about exosomes and her experience with that. A couple of biotech startups had some ups and downs in that and learned a lot. I'm thrilled to be sharing our conversation with you. Enjoy this episode.







Pablos: I'm going to explain what I know, which is not very much, and you could tell me if I'm full of shit. Sound good?



Melissa: Yeah.



Human bodies are made up of a bunch of cells, most of which are not actually human. They're like parasites and shit, and microbiome crap and other bacteria are living on your body everywhere. To the extent that there are human cells, the cells are super complex little cities inside. I've seen these microscope photos of all the shit inside of a cell, and it's a lot. It's complex.



Most people like me have a vague notion that there's a cell wall, which makes it like a balloon or a bowl or something, and then on the inside is all these goodies, including DNA, RNA, and other stuff. That's the extent of anybody's general education on this stuff. There are different kinds of cells. There’re bone cells, blood cells, meat cells, and shit.



There's a variety of different cells that do different things. All of them started out as stem cells which were basically blank cells. The thing got written into being whatever they're going to become. You have some of those in an embryo. Over time, as your body is growing, these cells get programmed to be different things. Muscle tissue or brain cells, and then what happens is gamma rays come from space, bombard them, and you get these cell mutations. You end up with all kinds of variations and mutations, and then everybody ends up eventually getting cancer and dying. Is that pretty much the circle of life?



It's fairly accurate. There's a lot of causes of cell mutations.



There’re other causes like nicotine.



A lot of just manufacturing in our environments in general are heavily laden with carcinogenic compounds that was a byproduct of the industrial area. Look at California, for example. Everything is a possible carcinogen.





What does carcinogen mean?



It's a compound that's able to alter the cell's DNA structure in a manner that causes aberrant growth, like a malignant tumor. Essentially, the way that cells operate is they have a terminal point of senescence where they die. With cancer cells, they lose that, and they are able to live continuously.



They don't die like they're supposed to. They just hang around and replicate. I know some people like that. Carcinogen means that it's some chemical that you could ingest or come in contact with that can alter the DNA in a cell.



Also, teratogens, which are birth defect c