The future keeps happening
What's next in Wirepine & other interesting things
Welcome to 2024! Crazy stuff is gunna go down this year and I’m psyched to be here together with you all to check it out and have some fun.
I gave both The Wirepine Weekly and Wirepine the Design Agency a think over the holidays and I will be tweaking a few things that I’ll talk about later but first the FUTURE
Here's my first prediction for 2024 - total solar eclipse on April 8th! That’s the one where the moon completely blocks out the sun for a few minutes and it will happen over North America so if you hang out here you can see it; wear the funny glasses. NASA is psyched and gearing up to do nuts stuff like have a special jet fly 50,000 feet above most of the atmosphere to take snappy chats of the Suns Corona which you can all of a sudden see clearly when the rest of the sun is blocked out.
The moment when the moon completely covers the sun is called Totality. Of all the sciences, Astronomy has the best terminology - how cool are Dark Matter or Singularity or Event Horizon. The last total eclipse you could see in the US was 2007 and it’ll be another 20 years in 2044 if you miss this one so start make your plans now1!
This prediction would be amazing, worthy of Merlin in King Arthurs court2, but today meh. It's odd - take a curve based on a pattern of data and you can extrapolate where it's going in all kinds of fancy ways, similarly science predicts a solar eclipse based on planetary orbits and even insanely complex things with a zillion variables like the weather or global warming - but try predicting significant future human events even in a relatively short timeframe like 12 mos? Fuggedaboutit
So there’s my only prediction. But! I’m going to highlight three super interesting areas that will change society and given the rate of change they will all look very different in a year's time. The fun of this is putting down a marker and then looking at where these things went in January 2025.
AI has to be first up:
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes 🤖
I have one more for sure prediction - I will not write another article in 2024 with multiple Mark Twain references. This quote is from Mark Twain and he's also the author of the Merlin 1v1 reference above in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court.
I like the quote in the context of AI because we are indubitably at the beginning of a new technology wave and we have seen multiple technology waves before. 2023 saw AI burst into the mainstream and 2024 will begin to reveal the true impact its gunna have besides writing press releases and creating pictures of babies dancing into the new year.
An unforeseen consequence of the last tech wave was social media which by and large is a scourge against humanity. Will AI lead to the creation of something even more nefarious? Will it instead raise us all up with leaps in say education? Both are likely; I’ll keep an eye out for you.
Next up - Space! more specifically:
Rockets 🚀
I am such a nerd for rockets you would not believe. Not to brag but I was the President of the Rocketry Club at Fairfax High School. Awkward.
The company that cornered the red hot amateur rocket market then and now is Estes. Big rocket or little rocket - it's all about the engine. When I was building rockets the engines were the were the size of a AA battery, and with the meteoric rise of big rockets now Estes spun off a company that makes BIG engines with solid propellant. Their tagline? Thrust you can Trust.
The super geeked out Estes rocket model every President of the time wanted was the Space Shuttle. Now it's the SpaceX Falcon 9 - SpaceX Falcon 9 Model Rocket - Estes Rockets. Yeah, I kinda want one 😭
What SpaceX is doing now is bonkers. If you haven’t been paying attention you might’ve missed it, but in 2024 you’re going to hear a lot about their massive Starship which is ultimately meant to go to the Moon and then Mars with the aspiration to make mankind an Interplanetary Species.
SpaceX launched nearly 100 rockets in 2023 (98) which is one every 3-4 days so launches are now commonplace. The Falcon 9 is the workhorse with nearly 300 (!) total launches including delivering astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Making rockets reusable is the way SpaceX scaled to this level and Falcon rockets land back on earth on these ridiculous drone boats with clever names like Just Read the Instructions.
A lot of Falcon launches this year carried and installed thousands of Starlink satellites into orbit. There are now nearly 5,000 of these little guys surrounding the earth in this sci-fi mesh providing internet services and more. A bunch of other launches were military satellites 😳 Too much stuff happening high above our heads. I’ll dig in and write more about what’s going on, because you need to know and also because I’m not convinced this interplanetary future our dueling space Billionaires (Musk vs Bezos) talk about is going to be so fun.
Starship is the most bonkers of all and I hope 2024 is the year they launch it without a big explosion. It’s Godzilla sized and if you haven’t seen it, check out the second launch from late last year🧨
Last topic for today - Energy, more specifically:
Fusion ⚛️
The way the Sun makes energy is Fusion and it’s always been an unattainable holy grail of clean and plentiful energy. It’s the opposite of nuclear power - instead of splitting one atom into two, it combines two small atoms into a bigger one which releases a ton of energy to make up for the difference in mass of the new atom versus the two that formed it.
The running joke in Fusion is “it’s been 30 years away for 50 years.”
I hope 2024 is the year. Sam Altman (the OpenAI guy) invested millions in a company called Helion and they are building a fusion power plant called Polaris up in Everett Washington - Microsoft’s adjacent datacenters are meant to be their first customer. Would be amazing; stay tuned.
Wirepine
I am the master of this domain so here I speak with certainty and can I just say I love that? I created Wirepine holiday MERCH (future article) and I dig running my own company.
Wirepine, the Digital Design agency carries on full force. In 2023 I made it out of the red and into the black, worked with people I like, did some creative work I'm proud of and learned a few things. I want to work with more non-profits and ramp up a bit in general this year.
Wirepine, the newsletter carries on into 2024 with a few tweaks. First thing is I'm going to write about whatever I want - not only because that's what you told me in my end-of-year survey, but I can sneak in articles about Space and Energy that I want to write about because they're just cool even if only tech adjacent.
Second thing is I'm not going to fret over a strict publishing schedule. I'll still get an article out every week or so but I’ll ship it when it’s ready and not stress if it's Thursday or Friday or whatever. I hit a weekly schedule for about 6 months to see if I had enough writing in me and it turns out I do but it’s for fun and not for likes. So we're now The Wirepine Weekly-ish.
I'm quite happy with this eclectic community we've built and how it's growing organically now. I’d love to interact more with you all in comments/notes or direct to me (andrew@wirepine.com) so shoot me a line or drop a comment in Substack if something hits you.
Last thing - I have to mention Substack’s Nazis because this is really troubling and may drive me off the platform I’ve been happy with so far. I wont get into the weeds here but sheesh Substack get your *&# together and have the cojones to ban hate speech. Here’s
with a good summary from yesterday. If Substack doesn’t take steps here I will move us to another home.Til next week Wirepine!
Best, Andrew
If you haven’t already read the book you probably wont so the spoiler is the dude who wakes up in King Arthur’s court and gets thrown into the dungeon predicts the eclipse to save his life so they think he’s a Wizard and Merlin gets super jealous.