The future is happening and I still can't sleep

It’s 1am.

I’m on the roof. April. The air is warm enough that I don’t need a jacket but cool enough that I’m aware of every breeze. The stars are out. Orion is setting in the west. Jupiter is bright near the meridian. Somewhere up there, a telescope a million miles from Earth is analyzing light from exoplanet atmospheres.

I can’t sleep. Same as always.

The state of things

The SpaceX Mars transfer window opens later this year. They’ve said they’ll attempt an uncrewed Starship to Mars. The orbital refueling works. The rocket is routine. The path is technically demonstrated. Whether they’ll make this window or the next one, I don’t know. But the Mars ship exists. It flies. It lands. It refuels in orbit. That sentence was science fiction when I started this blog.

Humanoid robots are working in factories. Not as demos. As employees. Figure in BMW plants. Agility Digit in Amazon warehouses. Tesla Optimus in Tesla’s own facilities. The costs are dropping on the same curve as smartphones. A humanoid robot costs $16,000 now. Three years ago, that number would have seemed impossible.

AI models reason through problems I can’t solve. Claude holds a million tokens in context and finds bugs in my code in forty seconds that take me three days. O3 solves math problems with elegant chain-of-thought reasoning. DeepSeek showed you don’t need a billion-dollar budget to build frontier intelligence. The gap between what AI can do and what I can do is narrowing in domains I used to think were safely human.

Self-driving cars are profitable. Waymo makes money. Half a million rides per week. The safety data is better than human drivers. The economics are better than car ownership. The arguments against are gone. The technology isn’t arriving. It’s here.

Chips are 10 atoms wide. The physical limit of silicon is in sight. The successor technologies are in labs. ASML’s $380 million lithography machines are the most complex objects ever built, and there are only a handful in the world.

And somewhere, JWST data might contain evidence of biosignatures in an exoplanet atmosphere. The paper still isn’t out. The rumors persist.

Why I can’t sleep

I started this blog because I couldn’t stop thinking about the future. That was eight years ago. I thought the future was Falcon Heavy landing and TSMC’s 7nm process and self-driving cars in Phoenix.

The future now is robots that learn from YouTube and AI that outthinks me and rockets catching themselves in mid-air and chips at the atomic limit and maybe, possibly, signs of life beyond Earth.

The scale of what’s happening is larger than what I can hold in my mind at once. I try to write about it and I capture pieces. A blog post about chips. A blog post about robots. A blog post about a Waymo ride in the rain. But the pieces are converging into something that I can’t fully describe. A world that’s changing faster than my ability to narrate it.

What I know

I know the stars are the same as when I started. Orion. The Pleiades. The familiar constellations that were old when humans first looked up.

I know the wondering is the same. The questions I asked in 2018 (are we alone? where is this going? what does it mean?) are the same questions I ask now. The answers have changed. The questions haven’t.

I know that I’m one person on a roof, trying to make sense of a moment in history that might be the most important transition since the industrial revolution. Or might just be another Tuesday that felt big at the time. I don’t have the distance to know which.

What I don’t know

Everything else.

Whether AI will be good for us. Whether robots will help or displace. Whether the Mars colony is 10 years away or 50. Whether the JWST biosignatures are real. Whether the future we’re building is the one we’ll want.

I don’t know any of it. Eight years of writing about the future and I’m less certain now than when I started. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I can’t predict.

That should be frustrating. It isn’t. It’s freeing. The future is genuinely uncertain, and genuine uncertainty is the only honest stance when the world is changing this fast.

The right answer

I started this blog because I couldn’t sleep. Because I’d look at the stars and think about AI and robots and Mars and the future of everything, and the thoughts would keep me awake.

Eight years later, I still can’t sleep. The thoughts are bigger now. The robots are real. The AI is real. The Mars ship is real. The future I was imagining is the present I’m living in.

And I’m still on the roof. Still looking up. Still wondering.

I think that’s the right answer. Not knowing. Not predicting. Just wondering. Staying curious. Paying attention.

The stars don’t care about our technology. They burn hydrogen and die and their light travels for millennia and lands on the face of someone sitting on a roof at 1am, unable to sleep, wondering if anyone else is out there.

I don’t know if anyone else is out there. But I know I’m here. Looking up. Thinking about what comes next.

That’s enough. Eight years in, that’s still enough.

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