The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 considers advanced climate technologies including fusion, carbon‑dioxide removal and solar radiation modification in relation to long‑term climate ambitions.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 session “Should We Bet on Climate Moonshots?”, panelists argued that incremental progress alone is not bending the CO2 curve measured since 1958 at Mauna Loa. Meenakshi Wadhwa framed a widening gap between climate ambition and reality, raising whether “moonshots” are now required.
Kimberly Budil explained that Lawrence Livermore’s fusion ignition proves scientific feasibility, but commercial viability demands major advances: “we’re very far from achieving wall plug breakeven,” along with radiation-tolerant materials, a closed deuterium-tritium fuel cycle, and reliable 24/7 operations. Bob Mumgaard said fusion’s moment is driven by better computation, new engineering toolsets, faster iteration, and capital plus geopolitical pull—conditions “we’ve not seen before” in the field.
Noubar Afeyan reframed moonshots as resolving “uncertainty” (not quantifiable risk) through disciplined proof points. He urged governments to fund what markets cannot and to reduce demand uncertainty: create durable price-and-volume commitments, akin to Operation Warp Speed. Mumgaard contrasted predictable returns from deploying more solar with the upside of a new energy platform: “What use is a newborn baby? It’s not what it is today, it’s what it can become.”
The group emphasized roadmaps, skeptical rigor, and treating “failure” as learning, not stigma.
And I'm a planetary scientist and director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. So every single day, a script scientist measure the abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is an observatory in Mauna Loa that does these measurements. And we've done this since 1958. So we have this incredible record. And what we're seeing is that the curve keeps going up. I mean, there's been significant, of course, interventions. In the meantime, we've got the Paris Agreement and, there have been developments like wind and solar, and they're making a difference, but they're not making a big enough difference. We're not seeing the curve bending. It's continuing to rise. And so, you know, the question here, of course, is we there's a huge gap between where we should be headed. And, you know, basically where we are headed. And so, you know, the provocative question or maybe it's not so provocative today is, you know, should we bet on moonshots? Is that is that going to be required to really start bending that curve? And so this afternoon we were joined here by three leaders. And we'll try to have some conversations around whether we should be betting on these moonshots to make climate change to mitigate the impacts of climate change, before it really starts to become devastating for our planet. So we just to introduce our speakers here today, Kimberly Budil is the director of the national, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where in December 22nd, her team achieved what scientists have pursued for 60 years. Fusion ignition, which holds great promise, of course. Bob Mumford leads Commonwealth fusion systems. I'm sorry, Bob Leeds, Commonwealth fusion systems. And that's racing to translate fusion science into commercial reality. And Noubar Afeyan built Flagship Pioneering into a life sciences powerhouse that's launched over 100 companies, including Moderna. So the question that we're going to be asking in this session is, as I said today, is whether we should be betting on these high risk, high reward types of endeavors, technologies and approaches to address climate change in particular, and in thinking about what are the considerations, and what are the checks and balances. So I'm going to start the questions here first with I'll begin with Kim. So in December of 22, your team achieved what you've called one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity. You've now achieved ignition eight times with energy yields going up every time. But you also said that there are significant hurdles at this point still. And so, you know, just what are the critical gaps at this point, between proving ignition works and building a power plant?
Thank you. So what we did was a really important step forward for scientific proof of concept. So we showed that in a laboratory setting, you can initiate a fusion experiment and produce more fusion energy out than was required to initiate that experiment. That's very important. We believed that that was possible. But this is the first time that in that laboratory setting, we were able to achieve that benchmark. As you said, we've seen higher and higher gains. The most energy we've produced, fusion energy we've produced is 8 million joules by this laser driven, indirect drive, inertial confinement fusion approach. Of course, it takes 130 330 million joules off the grid to charge the capacitors, to fire the laser to create the 8 million joules. So we're very far from achieving wall plug breakeven. So one of the most significant gaps is getting to gains that are high enough that we can begin to think about delivering energy to the grid. For all of the approaches to fusion, Bob has a different approach where they're doing magnetic fusion, magnetically confining plasmas in tokamaks, we have to have materials that can survive high radiation environments. We have to be able to have a sustainable and closed fuel cycle. So most concepts use deuterium and tritium fuel heavy isotopes of hydrogen. You need to be able to generate that in your reactor to fuel the reactor over time. And we need to understand the systems impact of operating these machines, not for a science experiment or a few days, but 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 365 how will you sustain, maintain and operate these incredibly complex high tech systems? Now, that said, these are all challenges worth trying to conquer, and there are many companies out there trying to do that today. And so institutions like mine are trying to help with the development of these platform technologies that will enable the whole industry to move forward at the speed that's really needed.
Yeah, indeed. So, Bob, I'm going to bring you into the conversation. Now, you've said that Sparc will demonstrate net energy gain by 2027, and your Virginia plant will deliver commercial fusion power by the early 2030s. Kim's team, of course, at Livermore, has now proven that that's achievable. Ignition is achievable, at least. But the, you know, the the net yield so far is still a little bit low at this at this point. So, you know, critics have always said fusion is basically 30 years away. For 60 years they've said that. So what's changed now at this point where you think that the private sector approach that you're taking that's going to work in a timely, relatively timely fashion?
Yeah. What you're seeing now is you're seeing a confluence of different factors. So and I think fusion is a good reference case for what we see in a lot of other technologies. You have, you know, the science with science has advanced tremendously. The fact that we can use the largest computers in the world to simulate what happens inside these complex machines, that we have never seen that behavior before, and never been able to address it either experimentally or computationally. Now, we can we can do both. Actually, we have platforms that can do both at the same time. You have a set of tools on the engineering front that are new materials, new types of power supplies, new types of magnets, new types of lasers that are oftentimes from adjacent industries that are being applied to a problem that, you know, has not really had a refresh of its technical tool set in like two generations. And so that is coming together at the same time that you have new ways to organize teams. You've got tools in those teams, modern engineering tools, the AI, which is having an effect across the whole stack. You've got people that grew up in places like Tesla and SpaceX on very, very fast, iterative approaches with this, in some ways very complex technology, but equally capable set of of people and tools. That's all happening when we have capital flows into this area that are very significant. We've got the geostrategic need, we've got the market that's very well proven. You build a fusion power plant that's economical. You're going to sell a lot of them. That combination is, an area that we've not seen before in, in this field since basically we discovered how the stars worked 100 years ago.
Yeah. Okay. Well, noubar, I want to ask you a question. Next. You know, flagship model has been what if and basically pursuing, pursuing, you know, seemingly unreasonable, solutions. How are you applying this type of framework to, sustainability and climate? And what is a moderna scale success story look like in this case?
So maybe I'll just kind of go back and look at this moonshot notion. And I think moonshot is basically when you work on something that other people think can't work. And at any given time, there's plenty more things to work on than think. People think can't work than they do. People think they will work. And so the question is, why work on things that seem unreasonable? And the answer is that all you have to do is think back 1015 years and realize most of the breakthroughs today seemed unreasonable 15 years ago. So 38, 39 years into my journey of working on unreasonable things. I just don't know why people work. Unreasonable things. Reasonable things are crowded. If you can do a risk reward analysis, if you can ask an expert whether something is likely going to work, it's too late. What about you uniquely allows you to think you're going to do? And why would that even be a breakthrough? I don't know if too many breakthroughs in really, really crowded spaces. So I would say that a moonshot is when we use a scientist, our imagination to envision what might be. Figure out what you have to believe to believe it could be reduced to practice, and then figure out whether there is a path to ask some critical questions that can point the way, a proof of concept, and if that is doable in a finite amount of time and money, then see if you can attract the resources those resources have to be willing to apply themselves to something that, and I want to just point out to your audience, I think it's a super important concept. At least I have an engineering background, a science background, and I never knew this until a few years ago when I understood the terminology that economists use. There is we talk about risk, and risk implies an estimable probability of success by high risk. What do we mean? We mean a low probability of success. But what about if you're working on something but you cannot estimate the probability of success? Well, that is what in economics is called uncertainty. Not the same physics uncertainty. You know, variance I'm talking about economic uncertainty is you can't estimate the probability of success. So in the way humans operate, the way Wall Street operates, they hate that uncertainty is worse than high risk. It's an unimaginable risk. But the point I want to make is uncertainty, which is what moonshots are all about. Actually, upon resolution will reveal a risk reward distribution that is untarnished until you get there. In other words, the notion that there are low risk, high value opportunities hidden within uncertainty is highly logical to me. It's the only reasonable thing that I count on. In other words, the notion that you go someplace completely new and that there's no low hanging fruit makes no sense. You just have to be able to get there. So I would argue that what especially the governments need to do, the US government has done, but needs to do even more of is to allow scientists and engineers to resolve uncertainty with carefully designed experiments. I think proof of concepts with ignition, with what Bob's doing are all examples of this, which will then motivate the capitalistic system to come in with private money, public money and push it forward. So long way of saying but for moonshots, I think breakthroughs are an act of luck. But with moonshots where you purposefully go out and tackle uncertainty, scientifically reduce it to a point where people can start now applying their technology readiness level approaches that the military kind of pioneered years ago. I think that's a reproducible path to making breakthroughs that will surprise people, but shouldn't, because that's what happens when you prosecute the present from the future backwards. So we're using that just to quickly say in the sustainability area in a few ways. Many, many years ago, we did this to create renewable liquid fuel from photosynthetic bacteria that we engineered. What we realized there is that it's really tough to work on a commodity end product, because if one industry, the oil industry, has $100 billion of infrastructure that's already been put in place, and you have to come in and compete with it economically, it's a fairly useless opportunity until governments really step in. And they didn't ten years ago. But now we're with agriculture. So we reasoned that if you can use agricultural gains, which biologics allow us to give to farmers sufficient to gain in yield, such that you could trade some of that for regenerative farming, which is a known process, but never thought of as a way to keep carbon in the soil. We realized to to convince people that this makes sense from a carbon credit standpoint, we need to measure, model and certify through third parties that that carbon being retained in the soil is there long enough for it to matter. From a carbon capture standpoint, we're not taking fresh carbon and storing it for hundreds of years, but we are retaining carbon that would otherwise be emitted. We've done that through a company called Indigo at some scale over many, many years. And now just last week, we announced with Microsoft, to our knowledge, the largest agricultural carbon retention program, where they agreed at a 60 to $80 a ton for 12 years to essentially buy into several million carbon credits. It's a beginning. Others are now jumping into it. So that would have seemed like a moonshot that now you might say, big deal agriculture. Well, there's a lot of land on the earth that people are just getting by living off of. If you give them, if you double their revenue because they make a harvest, they sell the harvest. Plus they harvest carbon by keeping it in the soil. Their economics gets better, carbon gets retained. And it seems like a reasonable idea now. Completely unreasonable to three years ago.
Yeah. Okay. Well, by the way, you know, if anyone of the other panelists would like to jump in and have a conversation about some of the things that we're talking about, please do feel free to do that.
I just build on that, that, you know, in some sense, this idea of a moonshot being, you know, sort of rare or a question of whether we should do it at all is misguided, that if you look at the history of technology and the history of basically everything that we depend on today, you have some part of it that was a continual evolution compounding, but you have these big jumps, and these jumps happen because humans are really smart and new tools get developed and like they ask unreasonable questions. It was unreasonable to ask like why, you know, could you grow wheat year round in Mexico? Unreasonable question. Green revolution. It feeds the entire world because we understood how to breed crops that did that. That was an unreasonable thing. Big step. Jump in calories for the world like electricity. Completely unreasonable to think that you could run wires and light up houses in New York. Thomas Edison did it. That's all of this steel Bessemer process. Haberbosch make all the nitrogen in the soil for fertilizer. Those were all very unreasonable things that today we would call them moonshots. Someone's like, I'm going to do this thing. And yet they've happened and we've built huge industries on them. And it's to me, it's completely, you know, reasonable to think there's other ways to make energy. There's the the sun. It works. Yeah. There's other ways to grow crops. There's other ways to make materials. There's other ways to have intelligence. And those are all things that the time maybe hasn't come yet. But you could see people working on it and you can see reasonable paths to get there.
Yeah. So, you know, going back to the original moonshot though, and some of the moonshots that you're talking about, government really had to make huge investments in the beginning for many of those, right? Particularly, of course, going back to the moon, it took billions upon billions of dollars to do that. So I'm going to go back to you, Kimberly, here. The National Ignition Facility took decades and billions of dollars of public investment to reach this moment. And so some of what you'd say, you know, some would say that that's exactly what government should be funding. Foundational science can be sometimes too risky for commercial to really sort of provide a lot of support there. So others might ask whether that money could have been deployed more into sort of tried and true types of technologies. And so what would you say? How do you think about the role of public labs at Livermore in the broader sort of portfolio of climate investment?
I think the government has long played the role of patient capital. I mean, there are big things that are technically plausible, that are very difficult to do. And so governments can invest in those things because they can keep their eye on that goal for the long term. So for fusion, that's 60 years of investment, not just at my lab, but at many institutions building big machines, learning, understanding, developing computational models, technology, advancing without that patient, you know, application of patient capital over time. It's not clear how we get to this point. So someone has to lay those foundations. I agree, I think the other thing is it takes a little bit of swagger to do big things. Right. So it's another thing that governments can bring is that ambition and say, we know this is difficult. We know this scale is very large, but the outcome, the potential is so transformational that it's worth taking these risks and moving a long time. And I think the other thing is when we have hard problems and you put resources on the table, great people come to those problems. Yeah, people really want to do meaningful things. They want to do things at scale. They want to make a contribution that's going to stand the test of time. And so governments can invest in a way, on some of these problems that draw the right people to the field to enable you to see that path, that plausible path to get from idea A to outcome B, even though some of the pieces that you need along the way may not exist right now.
Yeah. Noubar what would you say about sort of government investment and the kinds of things that maybe you are looking into?
No, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I just do want to say, though, Kimberly, in thinking about this, because we use the word patient capital a lot, and I want to emphasize that it's not the patients that's important. It's the allowance for something that doesn't look logically proximal today. And the problem is that in science, we essentially use organized skepticism to essentially shoot down everybody's ideas. And and I would say the easiest thing we practice it all the time is to actually shoot down other people's ideas, and we're good at it. The problem is that if your idea is beyond the bounds of what you could prove, how you're going to get there from here, it's even easier. And people kind of then get discouraged. And of course, funders want some consensus that this is a good idea to fund anything that can achieve consensus. That's a good idea to fund again, isn't worth funding. And governments can actually say, you know what, I'm going to do some of each and, and and that's and I was at a, you know, of course you can't be here and not be asked about AI. AI today, especially its application to science, which we're very, very active in, within flagship, very large effort. You know, everybody's skeptical about the application of AI in science, let alone in life science. And I keep telling people like, skepticism is like being a movie critic. Anybody could write a criticism of a movie, making a movie, fixing a movie, making it better very hard, criticizing a movie dime a dozen. So I would say, I told people, we need to all scientists think about being skeptical evangelists. In other words, if you can't finish your sentence by saying, here's why I think it's going to be very hard. But if you could show me this, this and this, that then allows people, I'll say one other crazy thing because we're talking about energy. So my longest standing I've done this for a long time. As I said, my longest standing kind of one liner that I use is that I tell people the second renewable source of a renewable resource on the planet, the first being the sun. You said proof of fusion, but nevertheless the first, the second free, renewable, abundant resource is people's willingness to tell you how stupid your idea is. Free, renewable. It's an extreme sport in the top universities, national labs. So the point for a scientist and engineer is how do you harness that?
Because that is nothing more like selection pressure. All you have to do is coming up with idea after idea after idea. Let people tell you all the ways and then pin them down. Say okay, but if I could show you this, this and this, if I could show you 1/100 of the input energy going to a target, but then coming out three, four, five fold increase, does that do the trick? And I think people would have told you. Yeah. If you could do that. That's beginning begins to make it. You know what my physicist brother usually says. But that's just engineering. So anything he doesn't want to work on. So that's a fun attitude. That's, you know, so but that's a fun attitude because to me, that's what breakthrough moonshot science is, is let's make things engineering. And that's the crossing of the chasm I think government is uniquely obligated to do because private markets can't rationalize it. However patients they want to be. Yeah.
So, Bob, Commonwealth fusion has raised over 2 billion at this point. And, they've signed major deal with Google. And that's capital that could have funded thousands of megawatts of solar or wind power today. So, you know, make the case. Why are we betting on fusion? Why is it not just a hedge but a necessary fair bet?
Yeah. One of my favorite quotes is from Niels Bohr, famous physicist who? Birth of quantum mechanics. He was at a meeting of the Royal Society and someone asked, what use is this quantum mechanics? And he said, what use is a newborn baby? It's not what it is today, it's what it can become. And anytime you have an insight at the level, quantum mechanics, which by the way, underpins basically our entire technical stack that modern civilization runs on, like anytime you have a new idea at that stage, you don't know what it can be, but it has a lot of potential. Whereas I know exactly what investing $3 billion into solar panels is going to get me. It's a drop in the bucket. It is not going to change the future. But $3 billion at National Ignition Facility could lead to an entire new industry. It could reshape the way we think of energy at all. It could lead to an energy system that is ten times more energy intensive than we have today. And so that's the return on investment. And it goes to the uncertainty. I can't guarantee that's going to happen, but I can guarantee you that if you don't do it, it won't.
Yeah. So I'm going to transition now to a question that I'm going to throw out to all of you. And please feel free to comment on that. So moonshots by definition, they carry a high failure rate by definition. I know that you were arguing that it's actually uncertainty. And once you sort of get rid of that uncertainty, it's actually maybe not quite so high risk of failure. But if you're advising government or a major philanthropic funder about their climate portfolio, what percentage should you recommend for proven solutions versus breakthrough technologies? So again, in terms of balancing their portfolio, how would you advise either government or philanthropic funders to distribute their support or fund?
I can comment on government. I think governments should put their money where private support won't. And so to the point that new barmaid, no government should be taking the risk and looking for the areas where there is some pathway. It's very difficult. It either requires infrastructure at some scale, it's very difficult to manage. Hard tech is very hard because you need infrastructure to do that work. Or it needs access to big compute or something. And I think for a government investor, they should really try to find those areas and then enable a situation where the private sector can pick it up down the road.
Okay.
You know, on it's it's really interesting question. And even the premise of a moonshot is like literally the Apollo program. You could write down on a napkin that it was possible and exactly what you'd have to do. And the question wasn't, could you do it theoretically, or did the laws of physics allow it? The question was, could you organize enough people and material and money to do it? And the uncertainty was like a factor of two. It was not a factor of ten. Right. And there's a lot of problems that are like that. But the scale of them is such that if you don't get to the starting point, if all you do is say, I'm going to take 100 bets of $10 million each, you will never have them. But if you say, like, I'm going to do one bet at $1 billion, your odds of getting success go way up. You think about someone like Jeff Bezos and rockets, right? If he took $1 billion and put it into ten rocket companies or 100 rocket companies, he never gets to orbit. How much did blue take to get to orbit? We don't know. But like, it's probably enough to fund several attempts, but because it's concentrated, it punched through. And there's a lot of these technologies. mRNA is one of them. If you don't have the ability to punch it all the way through ten years, $10 billion, you shouldn't even get started. So in portfolio construction, it's not really about like, you know what what how much you spread it around, it's how much you concentrate it. And governments working together with private capital, with different types of private capital, can actually build a stack that can punch it through. Or a tech company can build a stack that can punch it through, or the Chinese government can just punch it through. And like, we need systems like that versus, breadcrumbs.
Okay. Nor did you have any comments?
Well, since since I'm involved in investing in these things, in terms of our own internal research, I would say government and philanthropy should underwrite uncertainty and, and public private markets and public companies should limit themselves to risk. If you can't measure the likelihood of success, even there, you can diversify. But you you can't, it turns out, in the realm of risk, which is unmeasurable probability of success. You can't you can't hedge. There's no signal to hedge. There's no mitigation. All you can do is maintain optionality. Meaning, yes, put enough money to get all the way through. But then don't just do one thing even. And the other thing I want to just add to this discussion is government can come in in two ways. One is input, the other is ensuring the output. The problem with these things, with these kinds of approaches, is that the market isn't clear even if you succeed. So, for example, how much should society pay for fusion? The presumption has been grid parity cost of electricity. I think that's garbage as far as I'm concerned. I think there should be a government induced demand signal at a higher price. We can debate what that is sufficient to prime the pump so that people aren't just getting handouts to do this work, they're actually getting a reward. In the example I'll give you is what Operation Warp Speed did during Covid, what most people think Operation Warp Speed gave money to invent the mRNA technology. It did not. Then people thought it helped us perfect the technology. It did not. What it did is partially fund the scale up. That was important. But what it mostly did is to create no uncertainty as to what several hundred million doses would be bought at by the government. Once that market signal is set, then people speculators, as we're affectionately called, astronomers, let's say from a scientific standpoint. But speculators are essentially saying, okay, I'll underwrite the risk of scaling up and doing the testing, but I don't want to end up at the end of the day. And people go, sorry, you got asked to market how much they're willing to pay for it. I think the same can be done with these types of energy sources. And I think there's this interesting market dynamic that plays out. I keep telling folks in carbon, if you want people to develop carbon mitigation, carbon capture, set a price, create a market and say, you know what, I'll buy the first billion tons at 50 bucks, 75 bucks and then back off that maybe it's not a billion, maybe it's 500 million. I don't care what the volume is. That creates a market certainty that then people can start making their bets on. So I don't think the government needs to actually pay for all this. They need to send a demand signal with certainty. Then they need to not change their mind, and then they need to invite people to bring their ingenuity. That's what I would do.
Okay. Well, as a follow up, when when would you know for a moonshot type of approach, when would you know to cut your losses? When when do you think that it's it's time to basically say, no, this is not something that's ever going to be economically viable.
I think setting that roadmap is really important, that you know what what you have to believe for this to be an important technology in the world and saying, okay, I'm going to structure step by step, the right sequence so that you know you're on the right path and make those quantitative, those quantitative pieces of the roadmap. And we have that actually in fusion pretty well. We know what those those pieces are. And that's facilitated the investment that's gone into the fusion ecosystem today. Like we know what a good experiment is. Lots of experiments at NIF that didn't work right. But they had the right signals on that roadmap that said you should keep going. And then all of a sudden, bang! It goes from impossible to inevitable in a way that the broader public can understand. But the people, the practitioners knew they were on the right, the right steps. So I think that's really important of a sequence, a sequential series of steps that are understandable, broadly understood, consensus of like that. That would be the step that you would need to show. And then that you go and you put resources against and, and hopefully you get through them. And if you don't, you learn something that disproves a really important thing.
Okay.
I think this is a you made this point earlier about the skeptics. This is a really important role for that skeptical voice. It's important to be, you know, maintain your technical humility when you're doing things like this. They're hard. And having people come in and challenge you along the way and force you to answer those difficult questions. So when we turn the National Ignition Facility on, we had a very clear plan. We had a definite success oriented strategy that was going to yield results immediately. And it did not took us 12 years, and we had to change the technical path we were on, with many people helping us shape that next version of the roadmap by asking hard questions. What is it about this first try that didn't work? What are the things that you can control that might make it better? What are different strategies you might take that would make the target geometries, for example, more robust? And so that is an important lesson, I think, on these roadmaps to always be questioning and always be, you know, technically rigorous in the way you're measuring yourself against those milestones.
Yeah. You also asked about failure. I think that's an interesting issue. You know, humans use words very carefully, and it usually has deep consequences if from an evolutionary standpoint, if you think that a lot of competing species in a particular moment ultimately lead to one prevailing and advancing and gaining prominence, were the other species failures? Well, I don't think they think of themselves as failures because they're actually the ancestors of the succeeding species, because but for that competition, but for the predecessor experiments that were done, there's just this continuum. I don't view like a failure is when you have an ill conceived experiment where you don't get the right signal out of it, whether the result was one, one or the opposite of that. You're supposed to, in science, try to falsify hypotheses. You're supposed to kind of like literally set up situations for failure. And then failing to fail should give you the right to go to the next step. We've lost a sense of that. There's some derogatory aspect to failure. So actually, you know, it's an interesting question. It's funny, in the Constitution, the notion of patents exists. And what is what are patents? Patents are deal between inventors and society that they will actually make known their invention so that other people can benefit from the positive signal and improve upon it. In exchange, they get some exclusivity. Imagine a world I've never really thought of this before, but imagine a world in which all experiments, properly designed and properly conducted, are put into an open commons in exchange for a pool of the equity of the ultimate successful one being made available to them. Because the amount of repeated experiments that are completely a waste of money that happen is massive, because everybody hangs on to it. In patents, you don't because you can actually monetize through your IP, because just in case somebody gets it to work and you come back and say, hey, come back a minute here, this was my idea. Patents do it on the positive. I think the negative with AI, with with connectivity. We should think about it because but I really think that all prior attempts are the should be the happy ancestors of the ultimate successes, not failures.
Not think internally. Is are we doing research or are we paying tuition? I don't want to pay tuition. I don't want to learn things that are already learned. I just want to know them. But what I do want to do is research, or I want to be pushing the edge. I want to be going to something that like, we don't know the right answer, but after we do the work, we will know. And that's a key thing about a good design for how to very efficiently get through uncertainty.
That's a.
Great is if you always get the answer you expect, you're not asking very interesting questions. You do have to be a part of the scientific method. I think your point is really well taken that we've sort of lost the understanding of what science is. Science is about learning. Learning is mostly about things not working the way you expected. Yeah. And that's where the interesting things happen. And on this data question, you know, the advent of these AI models is changing by necessity, the way we think about who owns that data and how it can be used. Because if we want to achieve the advantage that these tools may afford us, we're going to have to begin to think about data commons in a different way.
And blockchain can give you some credit for putting your data, even if it's for an experiment that actually succeeded to falsify your hypothesis. That's really valuable.
So I think we are actually coming towards the last minute here. I'm just going to try to close down our discussion by just summarizing just a little bit. I think we want to end on a positive note here. I think, you know, it's a lot of it is a matter of perception and perspective, how you look at failure or success. I think, and all of these so-called moonshots that are now in work and have a lot of potential, they may maybe there's not they're not going to work exactly the way that you predict now, but they're going to yield some positives in terms of what we learn. And, the possibility for actually solving the climate crisis at some point in the future. So thank you again for for joining me. And, look forward to what's going to come from some of your great technologies that you're, that you're approaching.
Thank you.
Thank you.