The Pale Blue Dot The bitter lesson of space, is “look at Earth”, it’s ironic that whatever goes to space always ends up facing Earth. It’s also ironic that it’s a pale BLUE dot, and not a pale green dot. “Earth” is complete misnomer it’s only 29% earth, the Earth is 71% water. We all live on a planet that is totally dominated by open water. The ocean is vast, it’s open, it’s free, it’s also very accessible even for massive things… especially for massive things. 81% of world trade is by sea, $24.5 trillion. If you control sea lanes and divert trade routes, you control 10s of trillions of dollars of capital flows, nation states thrive or die on these flows. The majority of the planet’s mineral wealth is just sitting on the seabed waiting to be picked up. Even seawater itself is a giant pool of minerals, the salt in the sea is ions of sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, chlorides. It’s also the best heat sink in the solar system, any large thermal energy process is optimally located at sea. “Maritime will be the new space” … is totally right. The ocean is many orders of magnitude more massive than space, because space is a void. You can build a 1 million ton machine and float it out to sea, we’ve done that before, we can do it often. A lot of Western nations are finding it’s very hard / almost impossible to build things on land where a society has strong property rights and distributed land ownership. Independent courts and strong property rights make infrastructure a challenge. But this doesn’t apply in space, and it doesn’t apply at sea. So the sea and the open ocean are going to be secured, and are going to be developed and industrialised. Because we can. AI = Autonomy, and autonomy is a big unlock for 71% of our planet. The opportunity to go and build offshore in the maritime domain is huge. It’s fully of resources, you can build bigger (stuff floats) you can run machines harder (unlimited heat sink), you can deliver to every major economy. You don’t need anyone’s permission.