A comment in my most recent diary - which is the first part in a history, sociology, and futurism series - prompted me to realize something profound: Between humanity as it currently operates and an infinite, economically and physically unbounded future, are only five steps...and all five involve merely scaling technologies that already exist and are already proving their economic viability. In the current climate of anxiety, pessimism, and downright cynicism about the future, this is a shocking revelation: Utopia on Earth and a millennia-long Age of Exploration in space may be right on our doorstep, even as we increasingly believe these dreams lost as past approaches to them lose relevance.
Utopia and infinite possibility in five steps:
1. Photovoltaic (PV) solar panels
2. Electric Vehicles (EVs)
3. Reflective surfaces to reverse global warming NOW
4. Seawater desalination and transcontinental piping
5. Cheap, reliable access to space.
1. Photovoltaic (PV) solar panels.
The following is a short list of the economically explosive virtues of this technology:
- Thousands of times more accessible energy than the entire world currently produces from all other sources combined.
- Arbitrarily large or small modules.
- Arbitrarily large or small arrays of modules.
- Arbitrary spectrum absorption (i.e., how much and what kind of light it uses to generate electricity).
- Arbitrary geographic location (as Germany has demonstrated).
- Arbitrary immediate location (roofs, walls, windows, car tops, clothing, eventually road surfaces, etc.)
- A large and growing multitude of input options (silicon, tellurium, gallium, cadmium, selenium, indium, arsenic, etc.)
- A large and growing multitude of module options (concentrators, filters, films, heat-capture, tracking or stationary, etc.)
- A large and growing multitude of storage options to smooth over intermittency (batteries, capacitors, compressed air, heated substances, fuel cells, etc.)
- Synergy with semiconductor industry.
- Exhibiting 18% reduction of cost with every doubling of volume (7% average annual reduction) - Solar Moore's Law
- Uncharted theoretical minimum cost.
- Fully renewable and inexhaustible energy source.
- Zero greenhouse gas emissions.
- Zero gas emissions period.
- Zero particulate emissions.
- Cannot be monopolized or controlled by oligopoly over long-term.
- Decentralization of energy / self-sufficiency by localities and individual buildings worldwide.
- Electrification of isolated, rural third-world villages.
- No need for third world cities to have dangerous wire tangles to tap into a grid.
- Every square centimeter of Planet Earth potentially economically productive.
- Directly applicable to space exploration and colonization.
- Much faster implementation than all other energy options.
- No noise or chopped birds à la wind turbines.
- No elaborate safety mechanisms needed to avoid catastrophe à la nuclear.
- No earthquakes, subsidence, or sinkholes à la geothermal.
- Removes inefficiency and vulnerability of extended grid while maintaining all of its advantages.
- Minimal regulatory oversight needed (primarily disposal/recycling).
- Endlessly recyclable materials
- Jobs impossible to outsource (everything other than manufacturing) and well-suited to unionization or small business.
- No more unhealthy relationship with the Middle East.
- The Middle East can still benefit internally because it's got plenty of sunshine and plenty of sand/silicon.
- War over this highly unlikely.
- Significant political corruption over this highly unlikely.
- Large and growing number of aesthetic options.
The economic freedom, diversity of options, and mundane opulence of a decentralized solar-based society is beyond imagining. Cheap fossil fuels were what made the 20th century American consumer lifestyle possible, so what would a world look like with an energy source that had sunk in price to a fraction of that and had none of the logistical, socioeconomic, political, or environmental disadvantages? We can reasonably suppose it would be a society of unprecedented, kaleidoscopic richness - something like a human-friendly, entertainment-oriented equivalent of a rainforest. But that is far down the road.
For the moment, there are short-term market concerns surrounding the attempts of China to corner silicon and rare metal production and, in the latter case, the absolute abundances of accessible material on Earth. On the former issue, China's machinations will not grant it any lasting control of this technology, and I think they know that - it's pretty obvious that all they're doing is trying to make a quick buck, even though other countries will just be induced to build up their own capacity.
There is nowhere on Earth that has a truly decisive strategic advantage in any of these materials, because they don't occur like oil, in specialized, contiguous environments: They're strewn throughout the planetary crust. What has been unequal is the degree to which a given area's deposits have been characterized and exploited. So the only way China could keep the market cornered is to keep their own prices artificially low, but that would defeat the purpose of cornering the market in the first place; meanwhile, raising prices (as they've done) just guarantees that in the long-run they'll make foreign competitors stronger, so all such manipulations of the solar market are ultimately self-defeating.
As to the absolute abundances of metals, silicon is ubiquitous - we could not run out of it in absolute terms if we spent a thousand years trying. What can happen is that current demand can outstrip the ability of current mining and processing facilities to meet, and then there is a price spike and a delay while new capacity is brought on-line by producers. This was what occurred with the widely-noted silicon shortage of 2009 - an event many laymen badly misinterpreted as signaling the approach of an absolute resource limit. In fact, the price plummeted beneath previous lows once new capacity had been brought into operation, and that will continue to be the pattern essentially ad infinitum - up to timescales that aren't worth contemplating in this diary.
However, there is legitimate cause for concern with respect to rare metals such as indium, gallium, tellurium, and so on. We have some ways to go before absolute limits would be within view, but they are indeed rare, and for reasons that are ironically auspicious: The overwhelming majority of such metals on this planet sank into the core a long time ago - they're denser than most components of rock, so once in the mantle they migrate downward and ultimately merge with the core. If that were the whole story, our crust would be totally devoid of these metals - in fact, it would be devoid of life, because we depend on many metals that would long ago have stratified into layers well beneath the crust. Earth's surface would basically just be sand, salts, and water - silicates, carbonates, and other compound solids from the low-mass top of the periodic table popping up here and there above dead seas.
But fortunately the universe is a lot bigger than our planet, and every once in a while something crashes into it. Whether a meteor burns up in the atmosphere or makes it to the ground intact doesn't especially matter - its elemental components will ultimately end up on the surface, with the only difference being whether they occur in a contiguous seam due to impact or a light sprinkling over a large area from the dust of its disintegration. Some meteors leave behind nothing special - carbon compounds, silicon compounds...basically sand. But some leave behind significant quantities of iron and nickel, and with them some amount of much rarer metals. This is where all the rare metal available to us comes from - meteorites. Our own planet's rare metal is all trapped in the core, so in essence we're already engaging in primitive asteroid mining by harvesting and utilizing these rare celestial gifts.
Think about that: The solar panel on your roof probably contains pieces of an asteroid. So does the chip in your computer, and the one in your watch, and perhaps the one in any implanted medical devices you or your family members have. You see, most asteroids don't have much gravity to stratify their elements, so they just occur in blobs throughout their mass - in fact, most are fragments of material that precipitated from the primordial cloud of the solar system when it cooled sufficiently to allow coalescence and solidification at the location of their original solar orbit.
Since then, they've just been wandering around smashing into each other, taking on weird elliptical orbits, fissioning and fusing together, and every once in a while one of them will careen into a planet and start the long journey to its core. Others will fly into the sun, and take a much longer journey to its core. Still others may be flung out of the solar system to wander in the dark. And a few are massive enough, and hit a planet with enough force, to blast fragments of that planet back into space.
Anyway, I think about this when I consider that highly desirable metallic elements are scarce on the Earth's surface, will play an increasing role in an economically explosive, self-sustaining technology, and occur in vastly greater concentrations in asteroids - some of which have nearby orbits. I also think about the fact that the Moon isn't tectonically active (i.e., elements that reach its crust do not migrate to its core) and doesn't have an atmosphere to scatter impact debris, so most of the remnants of impactor material could easily be right there in contiguous seams within reach of the surface.
So not only does PV solar technology work in space (the International Space Station is powered by massive arrays larger than a football field, and space probes sent as far as Jupiter are usually solar-powered), but the materials for some types of PV are vastly more abundant, more concentrated, and potentially more accessible in space than on Earth. In other words, everybody wins no matter what: If an absolute limit approaches and the price of rare metals becomes extreme on an enduring basis, for the first time in human history there may actually be a rigorous business case for space exploration. This asteroid for instance, 433 Eros, has about $20 trillion in metals - though of course the value would decline as the supply ramped up, so it would be somewhat lower than that if actually introduced to the market:
Asteroid mining would be very expensive, obviously, but the costs are unlikely to be in the trillions of dollars, so the only reason such ventures aren't already being undertaken is that the up-front costs would be enormous and there is no established industry with a sufficient motive to make the investment. If, as seems inevitable, PV solar energy becomes far wealthier than Big Oil ever was, there is a distinct possibility that not only would there be an industry with just such a motivation, but that that industry would be the largest and wealthiest in all of human history.
Anyway, if the above scenario happens, there wouldn't be any haggling over NASA's budget - financial elites all over the world would beg governments to do their resource-scouting for them, much as they usually love to impose their business costs on the public. Meanwhile, for the first time ever there would be large-scale private investment happening in deep space exploration, transportation, and development. Think back to the fact that the potential energy production of solar is thousands of times bigger than all non-renewable energy sources combined - try to imagine an industry even twice as large, five times as large, ten times as large, a hundred times as large as Big Oil having a profound motivation to fund humanity's emergence into space. The possibility sends shivers of awe down this geek's spine.
But even if we are overestimating how rare these elements are; even if they never come anywhere near to motivating an overwhelming investment in space development, then that just means solar power develops faster and more consistently, which is still beneficial to space applications - it's a win-win scenario. Or perhaps, WIN-win, since admittedly the possibilities are not equally awe-inspiring. However, it's just a matter of time: Whether we move into space sooner or later, quickly or slowly, boldly or timidly, it is an inevitability. I address this further in Item 5.
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2. Electric vehicles (EVs)
Even with a grid that continues to pollute, it actually releases less pollution to power vehicles with dirty electricity than with internal combustion engines, and the case for EVs only becomes more powerful with time as the grid moves to clean, renewable energy. And I don't just mean electric automobiles - motorcycles, lawnmowers, tractors, boats, aircraft, trains, forklifts, cranes, chainsaws (horror movies just won't be the same without that buzz...buzz...BUZZZZZZ!), bulldozers, and so on - basically, all vehicles and all industrial equipment that is currently powered with fossil fuels. Here are some of the benefits of EVs off the top of my head:
- Cleaner and fresher air.
- Less respiratory illness.
- Lower healthcare costs.
- Clearer and more pleasant-looking skies.
- No more unhealthy relationship with the Middle East.
- Liberate the auto industry from the oil industry.
- Lower greenhouse gas emissions even with the current grid. Ditto particulate emissions.
- Zero greenhouse gas emissions if powered directly from PV solar or other clean renewables. Ditto particulate emissions.
- No need for smog checks, ever again.
- Drives development of energy storage / charging tech in tandem with PV solar, laptop computers, and mobile devices, so mutually beneficial with multiple high-tech industries.
- Lighter than gas-powered vehicles.
- Physically simpler than gas-powered vehicles, with less to go wrong (once the technology matures).
- Much quieter, cooler, and potentially faster.
- Probably safer in a crash / no gas leaks to spark fires.
- Eventually, lower auto insurance premiums than gas-powered autos.
- Will ultimately be much cheaper than today's gas-powered autos, both in unit price and ongoing costs of charging and maintenance.
- Arbitrary vehicle configurations with similar performance.
- Support the United Auto Workers.
- Tesla makes awesome cars.
- Annihilate the oil industry.
- Disempower OPEC.
- Preserve Alaskan wilderness from oil exploration.
This step pretty much speaks for itself, and is central to zeroing out all further greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. But it does more than that - the electric motor is a fundamentally more efficient, more advanced technology than engines fueled through organic combustion, even with all the fancy bells and whistles piled on to the latter over the years to make them work better. And it's not only more advanced today, but its limits are uncharted while fossil-fueled heat engines don't have a lot of room left to evolve. Moving electrons is an inherently easier, more efficient thing than moving hot gases and organic fluids around pipes.
Making this change will radically simplify transportation and industrial machinery while exploding the number of options, improving their safety and reliability, and reducing their cost. It also creates a massive degree of potential parallelism in design and components across applications that currently have little to do with each other. An aircraft runs on jet fuel, a truck on diesel, and a car on unleaded - the machinery of each is very different, undergoes divergent and incompatible processes, and those processes which are similar occur under different metrics that go beyond mere scaling. They're not really the same technology, but totally separate incarnations of the fuel-burning heat engine.
But whether you're talking about a (theoretical) electric aircraft, an electric truck, or an electric car, electrons are electrons; circuits are circuits; and any motor powerful enough, and battery system dense enough for automotive applications could probably be adapted (upscaled and in larger numbers) to more energy-intensive vehicles over time. This has the potential to give birth to a truly general transportation technology - designs and components that can be applied across a vast range of systems, with differing needs being met through simple scaling. I can't overstate the economic potential of having the core of every major transport technology simply being a larger size or larger quantity of otherwise identical components. That becomes at least possible with EVs.
We are obviously not there yet - storage technology has yet to be developed that can discharge energy at the rates needed by any but the lightest, slowest aircraft, and they're too small to carry the sizes or quantities of storage media that would be needed. But batteries (and ultracapacitors - another electron storage tech) are undergoing rapid development and evolution, so perhaps some day soon they'll exhibit their own Moore's Law equivalent to what is happening with PV solar.
To recap, EVs can be lighter, faster, quieter, safer, more efficient, more reliable, and cheaper than gas-powered autos, emit nothing (other than heat), and have the potential to unify the supply chains and research investments of a massive number of industries. About the only way these technologies could be any more helpful to the world would be is if they maintained the roads as they drive.
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3. Reflective surfaces to reverse global warming NOW
Even as we zero-out greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, they will not stop increasing nor will the planet stop heating for a long time. The gases already released will linger in the atmosphere, and the heating they cause will induce environmental changes that drive further heating: A lot of energy is going into the phase-change of melting polar and glacial ice, but once it's gone, any additional heating goes entirely to increasing the temperature of the atmosphere, so the upward trend will accelerate. Furthermore, ice reflects light, so its loss from glaciers and snowpacks worldwide means more of the Sun's energy will be absorbed by the ground and re-radiated at wavelengths captured by the atmosphere. In addition, as permafrost melts, it releases large volumes of greenhouse gases trapped in it over ages, so their concentrations in the air will increase even after we stop emitting them.
In other words, clean energy may not be enough. We have to simultaneously begin working to reverse the heating that has already taken place, as well as what will occur in the future, and fortunately the way to do that is simple, cheap, technologically trivial, and immediately beneficial to individual households, businesses, and cities: White or reflective surfaces.
A building with a white roof in a sunny area can save substantially on energy bills, reduce its carbon footprint while the grid is still dirty, compensate for the heat island effect of cities, and - however negligibly in individual terms - actually cool the entire planet by reflecting a predictable amount of sunlight back into space at wavelengths that aren't trapped by greenhouse gases. So white or reflective rooftops and other surfaces are not only a financial boon to property owners and an environmental boon to the immediate climate, but actually a measurable benefit to the entire world in fewer emissions and less heat captured. With enough reflective surface area, we can reduce the heating of the planet to manageable proportions even while greenhouse gas concentrations still linger at unacceptable levels.
Now, I must admit, there is a bit of dissonance between coating surfaces in reflective colors and materials on the one hand, and installing solar panels on the other: They do essentially opposite jobs. One rejects light from the Sun back into space, and the other captures it for use in electricity, which will ultimately be released as heat into the atmosphere. But when you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense: You are taking control of the balance of energy input/output into the atmosphere by making a conscious policy of both absorption (solar panels) and reflection (white/mirrored surfaces). Kind of like an energy yin-yang: Over time, scientists would be able to determine the optimum planetwide balance of absorption and reflection to compensate for global warming, and adjust it to changing gas-balances in the atmosphere.
Unless you're a major science fiction geek like me, you probably don't realize what this means: Weather control. Not at first, of course - we will be occupied for a long time just keeping global temperatures manageable. But we will come to have a more detailed understanding of the relationships in our atmosphere's energy balance and how they can be manipulated through changes in surface albedo (reflectivity). With those details will come the ability to respond more precisely - to instruct, for instance, arrays of solar panels in one area to flip over and reveal mirrors because increased energy usage in another area is pumping out more heat that would adversely impact the immediate climate. Weather control is ultimately as simple as that: Just flipping mirrors in some places, and absorbers in others. The climate models used to manage those systems would be insanely complex, but the physical technology is trivial and already exists.
You don't need to seed clouds to get rain, you just need to have a sufficiently advanced climate model to know where to cool the atmosphere and where to heat it so that it ends up raining where you want and not where you don't. Aside from making immediate progress against global warming, this is the kind of future you're enabling and participating in by painting roofs and other surfaces white, having reflective sunshades, or using white sand in sandboxes (most sand is somewhat darker than optimum for this purpose), and so on.
If we can get a handle on the temperature, we can start to manipulate other aspects of atmospheric dynamics even more closely, and pretty soon we're in Star Trek territory because a regional government could call up the institution that manages the mirror/PV arrays and request rain for the morning of next week, and then get it. Hurricanes would become standardized to feed tropical climates without devastating infrastructure and populations. Desert continental interiors can be brought into bloom, and made into productive agricultural centers. This is going to happen, and sooner than you think. But first, we have to stop the runaway heating, and it doesn't take a technological revolution to make a dent - just a bucket of white paint and a roller.
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4. Seawater desalination and transcontinental piping
Right now, as crazy as it seems, the human species depends almost completely on rainfall, rivers, and ground wells to feed its crops and keep itself safely hydrated - the same as we've been doing since the beginning of time. If the rain doesn't come, the crops don't grow; if the river dries up, the trees die; if the aquifer gives out, the price of living skyrockets and the local population dwindles as people leave. We use reservoirs to smooth out the intermittency of rains, rivers, and groundwaters, but they can't do anything to help us if the overall amount of rain declines; we use aqueducts fed from mountain glaciers to relieve regional aridity, but that can't help us if the glaciers melt and the freshwater lakes evaporate.
Long before we can start commanding rain as envisioned above, we will have to make the transition from relying on it to meeting our water needs from the most abundant and most obvious store of water on the planet: The oceans. Even in dangerously high global warming scenarios, the seas are not going anywhere (other than somewhat inland), and they have enough water that it would take approximately 34,000,000,000,000,000,000 (34 quintillion) people to drink it all. If we factor in all the other household uses of water (showering, washing hands, dishwashing, laundry, toilets, lawn sprinklers) that number could go as low as the high hundred-quadrillions, but the point remains - we can never and will never exhaust the water of the oceans.
But we've already more or less exhausted the freshwater supplies, given the sheer (and growing) numbers of people who have no secure access. So in many arid places of the world - for instance, the UAE, and Australia - governments are already building large-scale desalination infrastructure on their coasts (I'm told the city of Melbourne is poised to get 1/3 of all its water from the sea within a few years). However, removing salt from water is a very energy-intensive process, and both expensive and polluting if powered from today's grids - a fact which has made such projects unattractive to most countries that could afford them, and unaffordable to most countries that need them. It would also be insane to begin pumping that much additional greenhouse gas load into the atmosphere, especially since water-supply pressures have largely been caused by climate change.
Enter solar power. PV will ultimately be substantially cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuels, and we don't even know how far down in price it can go as it scales up to ubiquity. The cost of water desalination will become continuously lower in terms of electricity and zero in terms of pollution once connected to solar energy, and there are numerous efficiencies to be realized: Some of the energy put into extracting the water can be recouped from both it and the remaining salt, and they can both be used as effective storage media for the solar energy put into separating them. A number of approaches doing just this are already being explored or implemented in pilot projects all over the world, and still more ideas are being developed at the academic level.
We will be seeing steady progress not only on the implementation of large-scale projects, but on the efficiency and affordability of desalination overall as these innovations mature. They will undoubtedly be first rigorously implemented in the Arabian peninsula and Australia, because these are the two regions that are both desperate for water and have the money to spend building cutting-edge infrastructure to provide it. Soon, however, up-scaled projects would come to semi-arid climates like Southern California and Spain, and then grow from there.
At first they would directly feed only the immediate coastal cities, but water pipelines are old and well-known technology whose economic value would be obvious, so the benefits of water desalination would spread inland. The energy price of pumping water uphill into continental interiors would be lower than it is today, involve no emissions, and at the largest scales may even be cheaper than the market price of water has ever been for some of those regions. There is quite a ways to go while this technology scales up to replace lost water capacity, but eventually there will be overwhelmingly more available water than ever before in history, piped to arbitrary locations to restore (or build for the first time) agriculture, and allow deserts to bloom.
It is a point worth emphasizing: Just as there is no known lower limit to the cost of PV solar energy, there is no predictable lower limit to the ultimate cost of water with desalination infrastructure and trans-continental pipelines powered by it. The water itself never becomes any scarcer or harder to obtain, no matter how much more of it is brought in; the power just keeps getting cheaper; the process just keeps using less power as efficiencies are realized and new approaches taken; the infrastructure gets bigger and more standard, but also more ubiquitous; and eventually it's just everywhere, and every state that isn't in chaos or corrupt beyond salvage has a more than adequate water supply. Secondarily, that means they can support agriculture - i.e., feed themselves. And that brings both political stability and further progress.
I am realistic about the timeframe for these developments - a desalination plant is a major bit of infrastructure, and can't evolve as fast as PV solar panels. This is a long, slow march toward water abundance and security, but it has begun and it will inevitably continue. We will have to sort out some things along the way - e.g., how to protect marine life; how do we avoid affecting the salinity of coastal waters one way or another; what do we do with the salt once it's removed; and how do we equitably deal with the disproportionate power (literally, water empires) of coastal nations over their landlocked neighbors? But at the "end" of this path - and it never really does end, the continual progress just becomes mundane - water is never a problem. And even when we realize the ability to command rain described earlier, we will never return to a position of being at the mercy of so temperamental a delivery system.
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5. Cheap, reliable access to space
Space exploration is not merely necessary for our long-term survival as a species, but for our collective sanity. Nature abhors a vacuum, so without the deep, immediate understanding of human unity provided by going beyond our world, we will naturally fragment and turn against one another. Sanity requires the perspective of an external context, always - we must go out and look back; settle other worlds and regard this one with the eyes of foreigners; become new societies, pursue new ways, and look back on the old with new understanding; remix and reinvigorate humanity in waves. Gene Roddenberry was wrong - space is not the final frontier. It's an infinite number of individual frontiers, each awaiting its role in history.
But enough with the abstractions. As it stands, humanity does not have the infrastructure to travel beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and even there we are only capable of supporting at maximum about a dozen people up at a time - all elite astronauts and cosmonauts, and at enormous cost that is, if anything, higher than it was in the past without having any increased capabilities. Project Apollo was the greatest triumph of mankind in its history, but at the same time it was never designed to be a sustained program of exploration and settlement - it was purely goal-oriented, and once it achieved its goals there was nothing for it but to be canceled. It would never have gotten any cheaper, nor probably any safer, had it continued: That's just not what NASA is set up to accomplish.
Sadly, the same was true of the Space Shuttle despite its being explicitly premised on lowering costs to orbit. Unfortunately, politics naturally trumps long-term purpose in the public sector, so many technical decisions about the Shuttle were made on entirely political bases - i.e., highly expensive, balky parts and processes settled on because they could meet arbitrary deadlines instead of taking more time to evolve a cheap and reliable system. Also, the program's contractors continued to be paid on a cost-plus basis, which gave them zero incentive to reduce costs because taxpayers would continue to guarantee a profit even in the face of overruns.
Shuttle, though it looked like a sleek, science fiction dream on the outside, was actually a hideous Frankenstein's monster that just barely limped to orbit. Even calling it a "shuttle" was false advertising, given how lumbering and expensive it was - I'd say it was a rocket Potemkin Village designed to make the public drool because of how cool it looked, and not notice until decades too late that it added absolutely nothing to the long-term process of extending humanity's reach into space. And it succeeded marvelously at that, although it certainly wasn't a total waste - the payloads it delivered, the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, and the construction of ISS were all worthwhile achievements. They just failed to address what the Shuttle was supposed to address, the enormous costs of it all: The thing keeping everyone but a tiny handful of select professionals from ever seeing outer space with their own eyes. Garden of the elite, beautiful and tragic:
Well, finally someone is doing something about it, and they're succeeding. Namely, Elon Musk - founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX (and also CEO of Tesla Motors - the man is insanely prolific). In short, he's a repeatedly-successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his second fortune building up and selling Paypal to eBay, and subsequently started SpaceX with the express long-term intention of putting humans on Mars. He intends to do this by first reducing the cost of reaching Earth orbit by a factor of 10 - a goal that is somewhere between 20% and 30% complete, given the current launch prices of his rockets, which are substantially beneath what any other competitor (including the massively-subsidized launches of the Russians) can offer.
NASA has signed huge fixed-price contracts with SpaceX whereby it will deliver cargo to ISS and swallow any cost overruns itself, thus giving it both an incentive not to allow overruns, and to cut costs still further so that it can reap higher profit (because it gets paid a fixed amount). At the same time, it is competing for "Commercial Crew Development" (CCDev) contracts on the same model that will involve ferrying astronauts to the ISS. Both types of flight would be achieved through the Dragon spacecraft - a capsule designed for Earth orbit that can deliver up to 7 crew, or a substantial amount of cargo. It has already been launched into space (unmanned) and been recovered at a fraction the cost of a typical satellite launch.
The Chinese government has admitted it cannot compete with SpaceX, and Musk has cunningly refused to patent any technology developed by the company - he keeps developments as trade secrets rather than patents because, as he says, China would (as it usually does) simply use the patent as a blueprint and ignore I/P law.
But none of the company's domestic competitors come anywhere near to it either - they deliver solid products (e.g., ULA's Delta and Atlas rockets), but anywhere from 2 to 3 times the cost for the same delivery. Nonetheless, these competitors still get contracts because of long-standing relationships with government customers and, it must be said, revolving-door employment between agencies and their contractors. Even so, Musk continues to erode their financial base, forcing them to devote more resources to becoming commercially competitive.
Now, SpaceX is an American company, all of its facilities are in the US (to my knowledge), and as far as I know, so are its employees (they now have well over a thousand). The plant that builds the rockets is in Hawthorne, CA; the facility that tests them is in TX; and they have launch facilities in the South Pacific (on a US island US-leased island called Omelek), Cape Canaveral, and now Vandenberg. In other words, they're already benefiting the US economy, despite having spent less in their entire history than a single launch of the Space Shuttle. Musk himself implies that he would not be shocked if his company was putting people on Mars 15 years from now, but I am much more cautious - I find it much easier to believe 20 years, and doubt more than 30.
Try to realize this: If the scenario described in item 1 plays out and a demand for access to space occurs over rare metals, Elon Musk would basically be the Union-Pacific Railroad facilitating all of it and taking a chunk of the resultant proceeds. The amount of wealth involved could easily dwarf any that had gone before, and infuse his Mars dreams with the kind of money that not even a nation-state would spend on it - and yet with costs vastly lower than NASA could achieve on the Apollo model. Of course, the success of SpaceX does not at all depend on such a thing occurring: They have plenty of business already, the money keeps flowing in for them, and their costs keep going down.
So while he seems poised to personally preside over opening LEO to humanity and (hopefully) implementing some early exploration of Mars, there is at least a minority possibility that his efforts could open the entire domain of Earth, the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids to human exploration. In other words, we are in a scenario in which the cautious future is merely one of continuous, methodical progress, and the optimistic one beyond most people's wildest dreams. I can't state this enough: The "fantasy" scenario just outlined...is not merely possible, but thoroughly plausible. We are approaching an era where in some ways the depressing outcome would be that our success is gradual and hard-bought rather than overwhelming and unlooked-for.
There will be plenty of catastrophes and surely despair along the way, but most of that will only be the legacy of old approaches being confronted by new realities - new approaches not coming fast enough to always stop negative consequences from being felt. But the other side of this transition is something our hearts fear to hope, and yet if we look closely, our minds tell us is already heading this way. These are not blue-sky daydreams, and most of what I describe doesn't rely on optimism - it's already happening. Of course, accelerating global warming, the resultant climate change, and the collapse of non-renewable resources is also happening, so the 21st century seems to be taking on the character of a dramatic race for the prize sought by evolution: To join with the cosmos in eternal freedom and infinite variation, or have our long-squandered opportunities finally taken from us.
Note: Most photographs are not mine - click for attribution.