Among my friends and family, I am notorious for being a skeptic. I don't believe in ghosts; I find all cryptozoological sightings unconvincing; I dismiss astrology out of hand. But (and this might surprise my inner circle) I am quite open to the possibility that some form of extraterrestrial life exists. I agree with what Alexandra Oliva wrote in The Atlantic this week: 'Considering the sheer number of stars in the cosmos, and the possibly larger number of planets that revolve around them, the idea that humans are alone in the universe strikes me as unlikely. So, instead, I wonder: What is that life like, and will we ever encounter it'' Oliva recommended six books in which the presence of aliens prompts readers to think more deeply about humanity. Do I believe that another planet's life-forms would be anything like us'social, intelligent, self-aware' Well ' that's where my skepticism kicks back in. But I suppose I can't rule it out, and imagining what another species might value prompts me to reconsider which traits make us fundamentally human and which ones might not be unique to us at all. Oliva's list made me think of a book I read recently and adored. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, is nominally about an interstellar voyage to initiate first contact, but it's actually about sex, love, God, and the problem of evil....
Quantum Space, a startup with plans to build highly maneuverable spacecraft for the U.S. military, announced plans to go public through a $1.2 billion merger with a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. In a season of mega-IPOs, there's something almost quaint about a SPAC ' in 2021, a fad for going public through the vehicle began in the space sector and spread throughout the tech world. Many SPACs proved disastrous for retail investors who wagered on immature companies, but a few deals, notably Rocket Lab and Planet, proved successful. Another positive outcome was Intuitive Machines, a purpose-built NASA contractor launched by Kam Ghaffarian, a long-time space investor who backed a team of former NASA officials eager to sell their expertise back to the agency. Today, Intuitive Machines is a $6.4 billion company sending a regular cadence of robotic missions to the moon. Now, Ghaffarian is trying to do it again with Quantum Space, a startup he launched in 2020 to capitalize on the founding of the U.S. Space Force and the growing need for vehicles that can move between orbits and rendezvous with other spacecraft....
Startup investors were in a spendy mood this week, backing more than a dozen rounds in the multiple hundreds of millions. Of those, the biggest one went to spend-management platform Ramp, which closed on $750 million, followed by three $500 million rounds for companies in the AI and space tech sectors. 1. Ramp, $750M, finance software: Spend-management software provider Ramp secured $750 million in a financing led by Iconiq, GIC, and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. The round set a $44 billion valuation for the seven-year-old, New York-based company. 2 (tied). Impulse Space, $500M, space tech: Redondo Beach, California-based Impulse Space, a developer of spacecraft and propulsion systems for transport, moving and orbital repositioning in space, raised $500 million in Series D funding. 137 Ventures and Banner VC led the financing which brings total investment to date to more than $1 billion. 2 (tied). Supabase, $500M, AI developer tools: Supabase, provider of an open source platform for developers and AI app builders, closed on $500 million in fresh funding. GIC led the financing, which set a $10.5 billion valuation for the six-year-old, San Francisco-based company....
Elon Musk is about to set in motion a chain of events that will reshape the global financial order. For starters, when SpaceX formally goes public next week, he is all but guaranteed to become the world's first trillionaire. His rocket company is targeting a valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would make it one of the 10 biggest companies in the world'bigger than Meta, Walmart, and, for that matter, Tesla. All of this activity is less about colonizing Mars and more about providing the infrastructure for the AI boom: Musk wants to use his rockets to launch data centers into space, where there is abundant solar power to harvest. His rush to tap into the public markets seems to be pushing the other AI behemoths to do the same. On Monday, Anthropic filed confidential documents to begin the process of going public as early as this fall. And OpenAI is reportedly preparing to do the same any day now. Anthropic and OpenAI, too, will likely be valued at $1 trillion or more, dwarfing JPMorgan Chase and Exxon Mobil. These will be three of the largest initial public offerings, or IPOs, in history'and all three may hit the stock market in the span of just a few months. It's hard to overstate the effects this rapid succession of gargantuan IPOs will have on the American economy'think of it as dropping three boulders, one after the other, into a kiddie pool....
