Create an Age of Wonders
Only vision and will are necessary.
I. The Moment We’re In
We’re standing at the edge of a civilisational phase transition, with a convergence of technologies, each amplifying the others, together shifting what’s possible.
For the first time in history, we have the tools to design intelligence, simulate nature, and reprogram life. These tools are opening the door to a wondrous future, shaped by what we choose to create.
(i) Intelligence We Can Build
Artificial intelligence is the most visible shift. In just a few years, we’ve gone from simple chatbots to tools that reason, write code, and solve scientific problems.
If you’ve worked in software, you’ve felt this. What began as autocomplete now feels like magic: agents that scaffold entire codebases, reason through architectures, and debug complex systems while you sleep. Tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex now amplify what one person can build.
As birds fly with instinct and agility, weaving through branches and surfing the wind, so planes fly higher, farther, and faster—along the routes we build for them. Artificial intelligence is like that: vast in power, and shaped by human intent.
Intelligence turns vision into action. AI systems are already proposing hypotheses and helping scientists test them: from protein structure prediction[1] to early-stage drug, material, and catalyst design.
(ii) Matter We Can Design
Quantum computing helps us understand the world at the atomic level.
Biology already shows us what’s possible. Nature builds its structures using the same atoms we have access to. Muscles, shells, spider silk, and coral are all made with simple elements, yet are stronger, lighter, and more adaptive than most human-made materials.
The magic is in the assembly.
We still find new materials by trial and error. Quantum computing and AI-accelerated simulation will let us explore more of their behaviour before we make them.
This unlocks new possibilities—
Materials that transmit energy without loss. Fabrics that store power like batteries. Structures that respond to their environment, heal themselves, or shift form on command. All built from first principles.
And we’re already seeing glimpses: early quantum simulations have modelled lithium-sulfur battery molecules and nitrogen activation on iron surfaces[2], the reactions that could rewrite energy storage and fertiliser production.
(iii) Materials We Can Grow
Biotech is where design meets production.
Once we know what to build, whether it’s a protein, polymer, or an entirely new material, biology gives us a way to make it.
For billions of years, biology has built wood, silk, and muscle with atomic precision, using ambient energy, water, and local materials.
We’re learning to build that way.
CRISPR gave us the first clear edit button[3]. Tools like AlphaFold are decoding protein structure[1]. Synthetic biology lets us design new organisms with specific functions: cells that produce medicines, microbes that extract rare metals, and yeast that brew biofuels[4].
Imagine plants that grow solar panels. Materials that self-repair. Foods tailored to your biology. Bioreactors that produce clean energy, high-performance materials, or rare drugs under mild conditions.
Biotech brings the physical world closer to the information world. Instructions become materials. A design becomes something we can grow.
II. Take the Possible Seriously
- The universe is abundant beyond our wildest dreams.
- We can create a future of wonders.
- Access is everything.
The Sun floods Earth with thousands of times more energy than we use.[5] The oceans contain fusion fuel for billions of years.[6] Graphene aerogels can be lighter than air. Other carbon structures can be stronger than steel by weight.[7] Physics permits levitation,[8] time dilation,[9] even energy extraction from black holes.[10]
Some of the gap is engineering we have yet to master. Some is investment that will not wait, regulation written for an older technology, or an imagination that mistakes a present limit for a permanent one.
If energy becomes abundant, whole categories of problems disappear. If matter becomes programmable, design reaches into the physical world.
Take seriously what physics allows, and an Age of Wonders comes into view.
III. A Universe Richer Than We Imagined
The universe floods us with energy.
Every hour, the Sun delivers more energy to Earth than all of humanity uses in a year: 173,000 terawatts arriving continuously[5][11].
The challenge is capture, conversion, and distribution.
Energy Everywhere
Zoom out to the Solar System, and the energy is overflowing. Earth intercepts roughly one part in two billion of the Sun’s output[11]. The rest radiates into space: twenty trillion times the power humanity uses, rushing past like a great waterfall.
The oceans contain enough deuterium, a fusion fuel, to power humanity for billions of years[6]. One gallon of seawater, properly harnessed, holds the energy equivalent of hundreds of gallons of petrol. The Moon’s surface contains an estimated one million tonnes of helium-3, another fuel, deposited by billions of years of solar wind[12].
Materials That Defy Intuition
While we solve energy, we’re also redesigning matter itself.
Graphene aerogel, essentially frozen air with a carbon skeleton, has a density of 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimetre[7]. That’s lighter than helium. You can balance it on a flower petal without bending the stem.
Carbon nanotubes, metallic microlattices, and advanced composites can be stronger than steel by weight. Each breaks the old rules about what matter can do.
Lighter, stronger structures would change what we can build in orbit. Space elevators and interstellar craft demand more still: materials that survive the loads, radiation, and time the journey imposes.
Physics Permits Wonders
Even phenomena that sound like magic are just applied physics.
Magnetic levitation already carries trains. In a sufficiently strong, uneven magnetic field, even water-rich living things can float[8]. Scientists have levitated frogs, grasshoppers, and drops of water.
Superconductors offer another route: quantum locking, where magnetic flux pins a chilled material in place.[S] Bearings without contact. Structures held above a track.
Even time itself bends in our favour.
Einstein’s relativity shows that at near-light speeds, time dilates. A spacecraft accelerating at 1g could reach the nearest star in 3.6 years of ship time, or reach the centre of the galaxy in roughly 20 years for those onboard—though millennia would pass on Earth[13][9].
The universe, as it turns out, is generous even at extremes.
Physics permits energy extraction from rotating black holes. A spinning black hole can yield up to 29% of its mass-energy[14][10], enough to power civilisation for eons.
Within the Laws of Nature
Known physics permits—
Effectively unlimited clean energy through solar and fusion. Some materials are stronger than steel by weight. Others are lighter than air. Magnetic levitation at scale, interstellar travel within a human lifetime, and energy extraction from rotating black holes.
Some are already on clear deployment paths. Others are far-future engineering.
None are impossible.
IV. The Resource That Unlocks the Rest
Energy is the resource that unlocks all others[15].
Every human capability, from agriculture to medicine to computation, scales with available energy. The difference between poverty and prosperity, between survival and flourishing, often comes down to a single variable: watts per capita[16].
From Scarcity to Possibility
When energy is scarce, societies face zero-sum trade-offs[17]. Clean water or electricity? Food production or manufacturing? Healthcare or heating? Every choice means sacrifice. Conflict becomes structural. Suffering gets rationalised. Short-term thinking dominates because tomorrow’s problems seem insurmountable when today’s needs aren’t met[18].
Cheap, plentiful energy changes the equation. It powers desalination, drawing fresh water from the sea[19]. It powers farms stacked in buildings, growing food without clearing another forest[20]. It runs the machines that draw carbon from the air[21] and take dangerous, degrading work out of human hands. It makes distance less punishing, bringing goods, services, and opportunities to remote places.
When basic needs are effortlessly met, people can focus on creation instead of extraction. On building instead of competing. On long-term flourishing instead of short-term survival[22]. Education becomes universal. Healthcare improves. Research accelerates[23][24].
Abundance Makes Room for Care
Abundance enables moral expansion.
Greater wealth can remove pressures that make cruelty seem necessary.[25]
When clean fuels are scarce, preventable deaths are accepted as inevitable. When resources are scarce, exploitation feels like survival.
But when energy becomes effectively unlimited, those justifications collapse.
It becomes harder to rationalise suffering when the means to prevent it are abundant. Harder to accept inequality when the resources exist to lift everyone. Harder to defend systems built on extraction when clean alternatives are cheaper and better. Abundance doesn’t guarantee good choices. Humans are still humans. But it removes the false excuse that cruelty is economically necessary.
The work is building the infrastructure to access what is already there[26].
Abundance enables moral expansion.
V. Nature is Abundant. Infrastructure is Not.
Nature provides Abundance. We ration access.
The bottleneck is infrastructure.
We lack efficient solar capture and storage. We haven’t mastered fusion containment. We don’t have the materials for space-based collectors or the economic models to fund them at scale. These are problems of access, not physics.
The same patterns appear everywhere. Graphene aerogel, lighter than air, exists in laboratories but not in construction yards. Other carbon structures are stronger than steel by weight. Magnetic levitation works, given infrastructure we haven’t yet built. Time dilation enables interstellar travel, only if we develop propulsion systems that can sustain 1g acceleration.
But look at what’s already shifting. Solar energy costs have fallen about 90% since 2010[27]. Battery storage costs have fallen about 93% over the same period[27]. Fusion experiments have crossed key milestones in ignition and target gain[28]. Desalination costs have dropped sharply since 2000[29].
We’re now building the bridge between what exists and what we can use. Every breakthrough in materials science, energy storage, or manufacturing brings Abundance closer. Every improvement in solar efficiency or fusion confinement raises the ceiling.
VI. You Can Build This
The starting gun has fired. AI that amplifies intelligence. Quantum experiments that probe matter. Biotech that reprograms life. Solar panels. Fusion research. Advanced materials. Open-source knowledge. Global networks.
Measured. Published. Waiting for vision and will.
You don’t need permission.
Individuals and communities are deploying solar installations without waiting for utilities.[30] Fusion startups raised $2.64 billion in the year to July 2025, part of $9.77 billion raised to that date.[31]
More of the tools of creation are coming within one person’s reach.
The Age of Wonders is something we can create today.
And intelligence is no longer the bottleneck.
Courage is.
References
[1] Jumper, J. et al. (2021). “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold.” Nature 596, 583–589. See also: AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. (Over 200 million predicted protein structures, nearly every known protein.)
[2] Cao, Y. et al. (2019). “Quantum Chemistry in the Age of Quantum Computing.” Chemical Reviews 119(19), 10856–10915. See also: Rice, J.E. et al. (2021). “Quantum computation of dominant products in lithium-sulfur batteries.” Journal of Chemical Physics 154, 134115; Christopoulou, G. et al. (2023). “Quantum hardware calculations of the activation and dissociation of nitrogen on iron clusters and surfaces.” (Molecular behaviour is quantum-mechanical; early quantum demonstrations have modelled battery-relevant molecules and catalytic reactions.)
[3] Doudna, J.A. & Charpentier, E. (2014). “The new frontier of genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas9.” Science 346(6213). (The CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing platform.)
[4] McKinsey Global Institute (2020). “The Bio Revolution.” (Estimates that up to 60% of the physical inputs to the global economy could, in principle, be produced biologically.)
[5] NASA Science / Earth Observatory. “Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget.” (Earth’s solar-energy balance and incoming solar radiation.)
[6] ITER Organization. “Fuelling.” See also: International Atomic Energy Agency (2023). “What is Deuterium?”; HyperPhysics. “Nuclear Fusion.” (Deuterium is abundant in seawater; one gallon of seawater holds fusion energy comparable to hundreds of gallons of petrol.)
[7] Sun, H. et al. (2013). “Ultra-light graphene aerogels.” Advanced Materials 25(18), 2554–2560. See also: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017). “Researchers design one of the strongest, lightest materials known.” (Ultra-low density of graphene aerogels; MIT reports porous 3D graphene forms ten times as strong as steel at a fraction of the weight.)
[8] Berry, M.V. & Geim, A.K. (1997). “Of flying frogs and levitrons.” European Journal of Physics 18(4), 307–313. See also: open PDF, University of Maryland copy. (Diamagnetic levitation of water-rich objects, including the famous frog, in magnetic fields of about 16 T.)
[S] CERN (2024). “The Flux-Pinning Effect.” (Trapped magnetic flux fixes a cooled superconductor relative to a magnet.)
[9] Rindler, W. (1977). “Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological.” (2nd ed.) Springer. (Standard treatment of time dilation and relativistic motion.)
[10] Christodoulou, D. & Ruffini, R. (1971). “Reversible Transformations of a Charged Black Hole.” Physical Review D 4(12), 3552–3555. (The black-hole mass-energy formula: up to 29% of an extreme rotating black hole’s mass-energy is, in principle, extractable.)
[11] MIT News (2011). “Shining brightly.” See also: Australian Bureau of Meteorology / Space Weather Services. “The Solar Constant.” (MIT gives the 173,000 terawatts continuously striking Earth; the Bureau gives the Sun’s luminosity and the fraction Earth intercepts.)
[12] Wittenberg, L.J., Santarius, J.F. & Kulcinski, G.L. (1986). “Lunar Source of 3He for Commercial Fusion Power.” Fusion Technology 10(2), 167–178. See also: OSTI record. (Lunar helium-3, deposited by the solar wind, as a potential fusion resource.)
[13] Gibbs, P. / Koks, D. (1996–2006). “The Relativistic Rocket.” Physics FAQ. See also: Forward, R.L. (1984). “Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails.” Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 21(2), 187–195. (Constant-acceleration relativity: at 1g, the nearest star is about 3.6 years of ship time; the galactic centre about 20.)
[14] Lasota, J.-P., Gourgoulhon, E., Abramowicz, M., Tchekhovskoy, A. & Narayan, R. (2014). “Extracting black-hole rotational energy: The generalized Penrose process.” Physical Review D 89, 024041. See also: Comisso, L. & Asenjo, F.A. (2021). “Magnetic reconnection as a mechanism for energy extraction from rotating black holes.” Physical Review D 103, 023014. (Modern treatments of extracting rotational energy from Kerr black holes through Penrose-like and electromagnetic processes.)
[15] Smil, V. (2017). “Energy and Civilization: A History.” MIT Press. (Energy as the master resource across the history of civilisation.)
[16] International Energy Agency. “Access and Affordability.” See also: International Energy Agency (2025). “Achieving access for all.” World Energy Outlook 2025. (Global energy-access data, including electricity and clean-cooking deficits.)
[17] World Bank Group. “Energy.” (Energy access as a foundation for development, health, education, and productivity.)
[18] United Nations Development Programme (2020). “Human Development Report 2020: The Next Frontier—Human Development and the Anthropocene.” See also: full report PDF. (Human development under planetary and resource pressure.)
[19] IRENA / IEA-ETSAP (2012). “Water Desalination Using Renewable Energy.” See also: Fthenakis, V. et al. (2024). “Review of Solar-Enabled Desalination and Implications for Zero-Liquid-Discharge Applications.” National Renewable Energy Laboratory. (Desalination is energy-intensive; renewable electricity and solar heat can drive it, making freshwater increasingly a function of cheap clean energy.)
[20] IRENA & FAO (2021). “Renewable Energy for Agri-food Systems.” See also: Dohlman, E. et al. (2024). “Trends, Insights, and Future Prospects for Production in Controlled Environment Agriculture and Agrivoltaics.” USDA Economic Research Service. (Energy is central to modern food systems: irrigation, refrigeration, fertiliser, and controlled-environment agriculture.)
[21] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022). “Mitigation pathways compatible with long-term goals.” AR6 Working Group III Report. See also: International Energy Agency (2022). “Direct Air Capture 2022.” (Net-zero pathways require carbon dioxide removal; direct air capture depends on clean energy and rapid scale-up.)
[22] Rosling, H. (2018). “Factfulness.” Flatiron Books. (Long-run global trends in health, income, and living standards.)
[23] OECD / IEA (2017). “Energy Access Outlook 2017: From Poverty to Prosperity.” (Links energy access to education, health, and development outcomes.)
[24] World Health Organization (2023). “Energizing health: accelerating electricity access in health-care facilities.” (Electricity access in health-care facilities.)
[25] Pinker, S. (2018). “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” Viking. See also: Our World in Data, “Poverty”, “Life Expectancy”, and “Child and Infant Mortality.” (Long-run data on poverty, life expectancy, and child mortality, the empirical context for material progress and moral expansion.)
[26] Dixson-Declève, S. et al. (2022). “Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity.” Club of Rome / New Society Publishers. (Systems modelling of pathways to wellbeing for all within planetary limits.)
[27] International Renewable Energy Agency (2025). “Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2024—Summary.” (Utility-scale solar PV LCOE fell about 90% from 2010 to 2024; battery storage costs declined about 93% over the same period.)
[28] Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2022). “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieves fusion ignition.” (First controlled fusion experiment to produce more energy than the laser energy delivered to the target.)
[29] World Bank (2019). “The Role of Desalination in an Increasingly Water-Scarce World.” World Bank Technical Paper. (Desalination cost declines and deployment trends since 2000.)
[30] International Energy Agency (2022). “Renewables 2022.” (Growth of distributed and residential solar deployment.)
[31] Fusion Industry Association (2025). “Over USD 2.5 Billion Invested in Fusion Industry in Past Year.” (Fusion companies raised USD 2.64 billion in the year to July 2025; total reported private funding reached USD 9.77 billion.)