Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything: Summary & Key Insights

We start with what is perhaps the grandest dream of all: escaping Earth’s gravity without blowing up metric tons of explosive fuel. A space elevator sounds like a fantasy of silver-age science fiction, but it’s actually an engineering problem we could, in principle, solve. The idea is simple: tether a long, super-strong cable from the Earth’s surface to a point in geostationary orbit. Climb it, rather than launch from it, and the cost to reach orbit could drop by orders of magnitude. The difficulty, as we discovered while researching this chapter, is everything else.

Cables of that length need to be stronger than any known material—stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, far exceeding what carbon nanotubes can do today. The atmosphere’s winds, the Coriolis forces, and the impact of micrometeoroids make it an engineer’s nightmare. Yet even if the physics is harsh, the economic implications are dazzling. Cheap access to orbit could make space tourism, asteroid mining, and even solar power stations truly feasible. But like every miracle technology, it could also collapse markets, shift geopolitics, and lead to entirely new military vulnerabilities. We learned that the space elevator, as breathtaking as it is, ultimately serves as a metaphor for technological ambition itself: you aim for the stars, but you hang everything on a thread that’s not yet strong enough to hold you.

Of all the technologies humanity has pursued, fusion—harnessing the process that powers the Sun—might be the purest expression of optimism. It offers essentially limitless clean energy, no greenhouse emissions, minimal waste, and a poetic symmetry: we would be bottling the fire that gives life to every living thing on Earth. And yet, fusion research has been the butt of the same joke for half a century: it’s always thirty years away.

Writing this chapter, we dug into why it remains so hard. The problem isn’t ignorance, but precision. To sustain a fusion reaction, you must heat hydrogen plasma to hundreds of millions of degrees and confine it long enough for nuclei to collide. The devices that achieve this, called tokamaks and stellarators, are extraordinary feats of engineering. However, keeping the plasma stable is akin to holding a sun in a magnetic bottle—the tiniest instabilities can unravel it. Despite that, the field is accelerating, with private startups and national labs experimenting with new designs, materials, and magnetic systems.

If fusion succeeds, the world changes in ways we can only half predict. Energy abundance could eliminate scarcity-driven conflict, or it could drive unsustainable consumption to new heights. As we wrote, fusion symbolizes the paradox of progress: the capacity to liberate humanity from limits, coupled with our knack for creating new problems the moment we solve old ones.