Conference Presentation, Panel, Fireside Chat, Product Demonstration
Things That Will Blow Your Mind | Global Conference 2025
Milken InstituteRichard Sandler, JC Btaiche, Rowland Illing, Christyl Johnson, Jeb Terry, Crystal Johnson
- Humans are expected to achieve sustainable habitation on the moon by 2040, with future predictions placing human cities on other planetary bodies by 2100, utilizing the moon as a proving ground for Mars missions within the next several years.
- International collaboration involving 53 countries aims to return to the moon to understand planetary history and prepare for habitation, while nontraditional organizations are required to support long-duration travel health needs.
- Technology integration plans include AI and machine learning for off-planet energy management, advanced farming for sustainable food sources, and high-tech medical devices such as robotic heart surgery sensors and digital human twinning to mitigate health issues like cancer.
- Robotic capabilities and inflatable habitats are slated for expansion to facilitate ice scooping from lava tubes for Mars subsistence, supported by digital machinery, drones for farm health data, and real-time video streaming from Mars to global classrooms.
- Immersive holodeck environments with haptic sensors and vitamin D injection are planned to maintain circadian rhythms and provide entertainment during the estimated nine-month journey to Mars.
- Space governance strategies emphasize the need for U.S. partners to establish freedom in space first to prevent adversarial dominance, with a strategic expectation that business cases for missions will take more than a year to close.
- Private investment mechanisms are proposed to supplement insufficient government funding for NASA-like objectives, with a specific "Next Floor 2040 challenge" offering up to $4 million to universities for cross-disciplinary proposals to form new companies.
- Fusion energy is predicted to become a clean, limitless, and on-demand power source to meet exponential growth in energy demand driven by AI, manufacturing, and population increases, potentially replacing 8.7 million liters of oil per liter of hydrogen.
- Commercial fusion plans involve controlled implosion methods that are 10% the size and cost of the National Ignition Facility while being 10 times more efficient, with a goal to become an equivalent to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
- Fusion is expected to disrupt the nuclear security enterprise by providing radiation as a service with software-like margins, mirroring the disruption seen in sectors by companies like SpaceX, Palantir, and Android.
- AWS expects organizations to leverage cloud infrastructure for business continuity with outages less than half those of the next most available cloud provider.
- Multimodal foundation models are projected to explode beyond language to include genetic and imaging data, enabling fully autonomous drug discovery pathways and generative AI that democratizes medical information for diverse languages and literacy levels.
- Agentic workflows in healthcare are anticipated to be transformative, creating team effects where agents interact to achieve desired medical outputs, coinciding with a belief in a golden age of personalized life science discoveries.
- Cosm plans to scale a global network of venues for "shared reality" experiences without headsets, with two additional locations scheduled for Atlanta and Detroit next year following Los Angeles and Dallas openings, aiming to unite audiences via a single cloud-based feed.
- Cosm intends to syndicate feeds globally for live sports and entertainment, driven by the belief that this technology will amplify human interaction, longevity, and the overall human experience.
- Future scenarios envision a world free from existential threats like nuclear war or energy scarcity, where the atomic age is unlocked by fusion and space conflicts are conducted differently, removing the need to shoot missiles.