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When the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021, mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory could only watch. The signal confirming landing arrived 11 minutes after the event—the time it took for light to travel from Mars to Earth. No intervention was possible; the rover had to land itself.

When the US Social Security system was designed in 1935, the retirement age was set at 65 and life expectancy at birth was around 61. That comparison is frequently used and is somewhat misleading—life expectancy at birth was depressed by infant mortality, and a person who reached 65 could expect to collect for over a decade. But the direction is right: the system was designed for a population in which many contributors would not reach the age of eligibility, and those who did would collect for a limited period.

Governments are being asked to regulate technologies they do not fully understand, developing faster than legislation can be drafted, built by firms whose technical staff earn several times what any regulator can offer, operating across borders that domestic law does not reach.

The central thesis of this book is simple to state, difficult to accept: the next decade will compress what previously took a century. AI-driven acceleration will transform biology, energy, transportation, space, education, government, media, manufacturing, finance, and more—not sequentially over generations, but simultaneously within years.

For everyone building the future—and everyone who will live in it.

Every rocket that has ever carried humans to space has burned chemical propellants—hydrogen and oxygen, kerosene and oxygen, hydrazine, or other combinations. Chemical propulsion works. It provides the thrust needed to escape Earth's gravity and the reliability demanded by crewed missions.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): AI with human-level capabilities across all cognitive domains. Does not yet exist.

There's a graph that energy analysts return to again and again. It shows the cost of solar electricity over time—a line that starts in the upper left corner and plunges toward the lower right. In 1976, solar panels cost over $100 per watt. Today, they cost around $0.20 per watt. That's a 99.8% decline.¹

Every technology in this book extends what humans can do. This one changes how long they get to do it.

The principles of business strategy have not changed. Differentiation still matters, cost position still matters, and network effects still compound. What has changed is how quickly a defensible position stops being defensible.

What happens when machines can do most jobs?

The sun is a fusion reactor. Hydrogen atoms, crushed together by gravitational pressure, fuse into helium, releasing energy that warms the Earth 93 million miles away. This process has powered the sun for 4.6 billion years and will continue for another 5 billion.

Sixty-three chapters have described what could happen. This one argues about what should.

In science fiction, interplanetary travel looks effortless. Crews wake from cryosleep as their ship enters orbit around a distant planet. Years pass in dreamless cold. They emerge refreshed, ready to explore.

Most of this book has described change at scale—industries, institutions, civilizations. Nobody experiences change at that scale. People experience a job that changed, a skill that stopped mattering, a field that used to hire and now doesn't.

Every kilogram of material in space was launched from Earth at enormous cost. The International Space Station, humanity's largest space structure, weighs about 420 metric tons—approximately $150 billion worth of launched mass at historical costs.¹ Every tool, every experiment, every spare part had to climb out of Earth's gravity well.

The most consequential thing about artificial intelligence in 2026 is not what it does for medicine, or energy, or transportation. It is what it already does for itself.

Every chapter in this book has described a technology that could remake its domain. This one describes what the same capabilities look like pointed the other way.