Weekly Dose of Optimism #189

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TLDR

  • Edition #189 covers five frontier technology stories spanning superhot geothermal drilling, wave energy, personal desalination, non-invasive BCI, lucid dream induction, and sonogenetics.

Key Takeaways

  • MIT spinout Quaise Energy announced Project Obsidian in Central Oregon: a commercial superhot geothermal plant targeting 50 MW in Phase I, scaling to 1+ GW, using gyrotron millimeter-wave drilling to reach 300-500°C rock at 10-12 miles depth by 2030.
  • Panthalassa (Portland) is sea-trialing an 80-meter lollipop-shaped floating wave power plant with one moving part, targeting 90% capacity factor and $1,500/kW, with simulation results closely matching Puget Sound prototype data.
  • Vital Lyfe (SpaceX alumni co-founders) launched Access: a 25-pound personal desalination unit producing 6 gallons/hour from seawater for $749, with a manufacturing facility in Torrance designed to produce more units per month than currently exist worldwide.
  • Sabi, backed by Khosla, Accel, and OpenAI’s Kevin Weil, emerged from stealth with a non-invasive BCI baseball cap using 70,000-100,000 EEG sensors, targeting 30 words per minute thought-to-text with shipping expected end of 2025.
  • Salk Institute’s Sreekanth Chalasani received up to $41.3 million from ARPA-H to develop sonogenetics clinically: engineering specific cells to express ultrasound-sensitive proteins, enabling targeted cell activation through skin and bone without implants.

Why It Matters

  • Quaise’s gyrotron drilling and Panthalassa’s wave platform both target tens-of-terawatt-scale energy sources previously inaccessible due to depth limits or offshore engineering constraints.
  • Vital Lyfe and Sabi both apply the Starlink decentralization thesis: replace centralized infrastructure (billion-dollar desal plants, brain surgery) with individual-scale hardware.
  • Sonogenetics and Prophetic’s ultrasound lucid dream induction represent non-invasive, non-molecular control of specific biological systems, a distinct category from drugs or implants.

Packy McCormick, Not Boring · 2026-04-17 · Read the original