Fighting Space Debris & Building a New City
Downloading the skills we need to face any challenge
Welcome to the 5 new Growers who have joined us since my last post on 1/23! Join 85 ambitious and self-motivated champions by subscribing here:
Hi Growers 🌱,
My goal is to always keep this informative, yet concise.
I cover a broad range of topics to keep things interesting. If you prefer certain sections, feel free to skip around and follow your own curiosity!
As always, it makes my day hearing from you all in the comments. :)
Please Enjoy!
Running out of Space
7 years ago, a SpaceX rocket was launched and has been floating in Earth’s orbit unintentionally ever since. In a few weeks, it will crash into the moon…
This represents a broader trend of space debris becoming an emerging issue to our satellite infrastructure, earth and moon.
NASA abruptly called off a spacewalk shortly before it was set to begin in November after receiving a notification that space junk could threaten the astronauts outside the International Space Station. The notice came weeks after Russia fired a missile that destroyed a dead satellite, polluting low Earth orbit with more than 1,500 pieces of debris that forced the astronauts and cosmonauts to evacuate the space station and board their spacecraft in case they had to flee.
A company that can address space debris, whether through repurposing or destroying, will be critical to our space infrastructure in the decades to come.
Downloading Skills
The Matrix is one of my favorite movie series of all time (besides the 4th one).
There’s a scene in one of the movies, when Tank, the operator, sends Neo, the main character, skills directly to his brain. Neo was able to instantly download Jiu Jitsu to his brain, effectively acquiring that skill instantly through code, and thus able to have a martial arts showdown with Morpheus (as seen below).
I was recently with friends, when one of them airdropped an app to all of us. We were all able to quickly accept the app on our phones and play the app game together. This reminded me of Neo downloading skills in the Matrix.
The fact that your friends can instantly airdrop you an app and unlock skills both online, but also ways to navigate the physical world, will only become more prevalent and powerful.
I see downloading apps as tools to navigate the world, get smarter, and accomplish more.
Praxis
I joined a new city that is being built called Praxis.
This city is not tied to any nation state but will function as it’s own jurisdiction within some country. Which nation that is, is still on-going.
In order to join this new civilization, I had to apply and be accepted. The questions in the application were about what my ideal city would like and why I wanted to join Praxis. The city will have about 10,000 Praxis citizens to start.
You see, Praxis is building the new city of the future. Built on modern thinking and values.
The citizens of Praxis are uniting on the internet. Connecting based on a common bond for improving society and experimenting with how we can organize humans more effectively.
Praxis citizens, including myself, are exploring the ethos of what the city of Praxis is all about. This includes discussing health, education, philosophy, and every other category you can imagine when thinking through a new city from the ground up.
We have to fundamentally ask - what is education? And how should we think about it when rebuilding an education system from scratch.
What has been demonstrated thus far by the Praxis leadership team along with the Praxis citizens, is nothing short of incredible. Deep conversations, intellectual discourse on peer reviewed papers, and pure creativity, make me feel like I’m seeing the new Greece emerge in front of my eyes.
The founder of Praxis, Dryden Brown, reached out to me after I wrote a long piece about how we can improve human civilization. I instantly new this was something I wanted to be apart of.
Praxis raised money from some incredible VCs who see the value in trying to re-think cities from the ground-up.
VCs including Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder, SpaceX investor), and Balaji (CTO at Coinbase, philosophical genius), the Winklevoss brothers (co-founders of Facebook and Gemini).
Building a city is no easy feat, and this will be challenging to make this even remotely happen.
But, I’m so glad that smart and ambitious people are working hard to bring this to life. Without them, I would be less inspired about human potential.
Podcast Feature
I was recently featured on a podcast where I talked about how science and technology can make the world a better place.
If you’re interested in listening, you can do so here.
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Praxis sounds fascinating! Glad to know about it.