Compressing my ambition into two items was the least effortful decision I made this year.

First: make the exchange of resources unlimited. Material scarcity is largely a cost of distribution and replication. When the marginal cost of exchange approaches zero, scarcity stops being a physical fact and becomes institutional inertia. The battlefield for this is protocols and circulation, not production.

Second: find a method that makes mass vanish. That is my own definition of fusion. If you can find a way to make the effect of mass on spacetime cancel, a starship stops being a fuel problem and becomes a geometry problem. I want fusion not in order to generate electricity, but in order to make the ship possible.

The two are really one: both take the constants that pin us to the ground — scarcity and gravity — and turn them from constants into adjustable parameters.

Writing a goal as two lines is useful not because the plan becomes clearer, but because refusal becomes easier. Anything that advances neither the circulation of resources nor the zeroing of mass can be declined, however clever it is.