Building the Future: How ‘Civilization Starter Kits’ Could Power Life on Earth — and Beyond

Speaker 1 (00:02):
All right, So what happens when we inevitably go to
Mars ropa Titan, the asteroid series. What happens when we're there?
How do we build connectivity infrastructure? There's no electricity on
these rocks? Folks, Hello future, it's me Kevin. This is
a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The year is twenty
twenty five. The planet is Earth. My name is Kevin Surrilli,
and my guest today is a futurist who thinks of
all of these issues. It's almost like creating a battery
pack civilization starter kit in a box, so that when
we go to these other places off of planet Earth
might even be the Moon, folks, we have an ability
to communicate. There's a lot of talk these days about
artificial intelligence and data centers, a lot of talk about
digital infrastructure or underserved communities, as well as for civilization
as we've become more reliant on artificial intelligence and eventually
quantum computing. My guest today is Scott Salandy de four.
He is the CEO and co founder of liquid Star.
It's a company building what they call civilizations starter kits,
or I might have called it that. Liquid Star's waypoints
is the product. It's a modular system that delivers power,
clean water, and internet connectivity to communities anywhere on Earth.
Think of this. Honestly, it's like SimCity in a box.
It's a shipping sized container hub. Okay literally a box,
a shipping sized container hub that can turn compute heat
into drinking water and bring entire villages online. This is fascinating, folks,
because if you go to parts of the world on Earth, Africa,
for example, where there are no infrastructures built, and it's
out of the short term possibility to be able to
create a Manhattan sized data center like Margu Zuckerberg is
creating to help Americans be powered on artificial intelligence and whatnot,
or remaking three Mile Island like they're doing in my
beloved Pennsylvania in order to create more data centers here
and to power artificial intelligence use. Africa doesn't have that infrastructure.
So Scott, thank you so much for being here. Let's
start with how you came up with this idea to
make a civilization starter kid. It honestly sounds like something
out of Transformers.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, I think.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Well, first of all, thank you for having me appreciate
being here to chat about this. Yeah, Actually, there's a
couple different things that kind of came into the genesis
of the idea. So my co founder Connor likes to think,
what would life be like on Mars or on another planet,
and what would you need?

Speaker 1 (02:56):
You're on the right show, keep going.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Well, you need electricity, water, internet for starters, period, right,
So that's kind of one of the general.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
I need a gym. Personally, I need a gym, and
I need a good kitchen. But that's besides the point.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Well, you know you can with electricity. Now you can
power electric stoves. That's something that people use our batteries
for currently from from the waypoints and charging stations. So
that was kind of the genesis of the idea. And
then it's like, well, on Mars, you're going to need
AI for healthcare, education, if you want to like grow,
grow the colony. And then that's where we started thinking about, Okay,
well then for AI you need to have GPUs right
in order to.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
And for people who don't understand what a GPU is,
a GPU is what.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
A graphic processing unit and all it does is it
basically is more for visual things previously before open AI.
So the example that we always look at is when
we started this. Originally we looked at the GPUs as
a way to generate revenue from three places. And I'll
tie it back to Mars in a second. So the
first place back then when we first kind of had
this idea, was we were looking at GPUs to generate
revenue from the training of computer vision models, right, So
that was like the primary one of the primary uses
of GPUs back in twenty eighteen when we started. The
secondary use that we were looking at is three D rendering.
So one of the examples that I think a lot
of people it actually was going viral on Twitter or
x the other day, is there's a scene in one
of the Transformers movies where there's a certain number of
polygons or there's some record. It's a very short scene,
like a couple of seconds where it's this like sidewinder
wormlike transformer that's like destroying a building I think in
Chicago or somewhere like that. But in that scene, they
and when viral, I believe it took like seventy two
hours or something crazy to render this like three to
six second scene, very very short, short scene. And so
that is another way that GPUs were used for three
D rendering, so our idea.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
So to that point, to interrupt to you, Sean Kelly,
who was the lead animator for Revenge of the Fallen,
which is the Transformers scene. To your point, this scene
was so complex of these Transformers going into the destruction mode,
it actually made a computer catch on fire. Yeah, So
when you talk when he talks about when Scott's talking
to you about GPUs, essentially it's like the brain of
the computer, correct. And so so it's not just enough
anymore to be thinking, oh, we have to have computer capabilities,
whether it's in rural parts of the world or on
rocks that we're going to colonize. You have to have
a brain for the computer, which is where GPUs comes out.
That's a very simple analogy. But to your point, in
the movie Transformers, where they were editing the film, they
were using so much GPUs that they started a fire.
So a fun fact anyway, keep going.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Yeah, and you know a lot of people, especially with
AI now, a lot of people don't realize that the
utilization of GPUs is between like forty and seventy percent.
So then which is just like a lot of power
correct correct, And so what we realized back then obviously
things have changed. Is that Well, when the GPUs aren't
training computer vision models or they aren't doing the three
D rendering, they could also mine ethereum.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
And this again, I'm interrupting you because you're spitting so
much truth right now, and I'm like, I want to
extract it and slow it down.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Perfect.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
So the computer that he's built, or the computers that
he's building in order to power a civilization starter kit
in a box needs a brain called GPUs. So then
he has the brain. And then the other problem is
it will how do we We've got this issue of
monetization and we've got this issue of how to keep
it power. So then Scott and his co founders and
his team, they say, well maybe a good mind bitcoin,
which is wild, So walk us through that.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yeah, So one of the again to go back to
the Mars analogy, So you need electricity, water, internet and
internet is actually what our waypoint to use is starlink
and that'll, to be honest, probably be the Internet on Mars.
I think that's probably why why it was created by Elon.
But you also need money, right, some sort of way
to like exchange value between people outside of like, oh,
I'll do this for you. And so that's kind of like,
again at a very high conceptual level, what we think
of when we say civilization in a box. Right, you
have electricity, water, internet, AI, education, AI health and financial
inclusion on the US but yeah, and an ECONOMERCE commerce. Yeah,
so that's kind of wow, really how how we're thinking
about it and some of the places, like when we're
driving in a rural part of East Africa called Djibouti,
it actually really does look like Mars a little bit,
like there's nothing there, you know, on the way to
some of the villages and things like that. So it's
it's really this like interesting juxtaposition when we're driving to
the site and we see our like waypoint, they're kind
of like coming up over the horizon as we get
to the back of the village where you start to
kind of see how a remote community on Earth isn't
really that much different from a remote community on Mars, right,
or the moon or somewhere else. So really that's kind
of how we thought about the technology, and just as
you do as a startup, it's like, you know, two
am in the morning, you're just chatting about ideas, you know,
when we started this. This was in actually met my
co founder in Hongko. So we're just kind of, yeah,
just shooting the breeze a little bit, and you know,
that's really part of what I love is what.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
I love about this. And Scott is my guest today
and he's the CEO and co founder of liquid Star,
which has these civilizations in a box and they're called
Waypoints and it literally looks like a shipping container and
there's just a bunch of wires and computers inside of it,
but it powers and provided it's like a mini data center.
And so there's so much talk about data centers, but
to be able to go to Africa or a rural
part not just of Africa, ural part of America to
help provide digital infrastructure the parts of our of America
where underserved communities, indigenous tribes we often think, I mean,
America is a lot more than the cities. The planet
is a lot more than than the big cities, and
so to be able to provide opportunity to all humans
is something that I think that what you're solving is
really fascinating because it allows for people to become rel
in on it. We didn't even touch yet on the
disaster portion of this. For a lord forbid there be
a disaster where communications are taken out, you can deploy
a civilization in a box to get back online, which
we just saw recently in New York. Thankfully, the law
enforcement was able to stop that. The government was able
to stop that potential of taking out the telecommunication systems
at the recent UN General Assembly meetings. There's this book
that I love by Michael Faber, and it is a
long book, but it's called The Book of Strange New
Things and it's about a theologian who science fiction who
is tapped by a large space conglomerate to go to
this planet or that they're mining, that they're drilling for resources.
And the reason I love this book for many reasons
is it really is a great depiction of how boring,
for lack of a better word, it could be to
be on a planet with no infrastructure. It is like
living in a desert. And so that was really interesting
to me. And there's a great quote in the book
Michael Faber, the Book of Strange New Things quote, the
world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something
that's always been there, and the next minute it's just
a memory. End quote. You and I were talking before
the episode just about the rate of discoveries that all
of these telescopes are making. How do you power a
civilization in a box? Because you have the box, but
it's not like you can plug it in anywhere when
you go and let's stick with Africa, when you go
to a rural part of Africa, how do you even
think about how to get it online? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (11:49):
I think that's again another place where to be honest,
science fiction comes in the first part. Well, it is
kind of science fiction that essentially what is sand can
turn and sunlight into energy. Right, So, yes, the well
said wavepoints are powered primarily by solar So the solar
panels that are retractable so that if there's a storm,
et cetera, you can kind of move them in. We
didn't do that for one and they got damaged. But
we're learning, right, This is like a work in process.
The other part, which we think is very interesting and
again to be to keep going back to it. It's
very similar to the movie The Martian I.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Love and it's a great book. Go read the book
to by Andy wear It's a great movie. It's not
as good as Interstellar, I know, I'm gonna get a
lot of slack for that. I love Intersteller, Go ahead, Martian.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Well, Matt Damon shows up in both.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
It's a kind of a spoiler for Interstellar if you
haven't seen it, go back in time and erase your memory.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
But no.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
So one of the ways that what we're doing as well,
that we're actually gonna we we kind of did in
uh East Africa, like really off the off the cuff,
is when you go to these communities, you realize that
there is no centralized sewage system either, so a lot
of people are like a lot of the waste is
just done in out house. They're really brutal to use.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Not a fan.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
But what we realize is that human waste, animal waste,
food waste, it can be used to create bio biogas
using a process called anaerobic digestion.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Hold on, no, no, no, you're telling me that your civilization
in a starter kit, just like that Matt Damon flick
the Martian can be powered by poop.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yes, one hundred percent, one hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
You heard it on All the Future first. So that's crazy.
So how do you even how do you even think
of that? I mean, that's wild. So so you go
in where there's no sewage systems that are built in
these remote parts of the world or let alone also
on other planets and whatnot, and you you think, hey,
the Martian there is this crazy idea where you know,
poop was a source and he can grow plants in it.
Why not do that here? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (13:59):
I think it's also just more like you know, one
of the liquid star lores that me and my co
founder talk about a lot. It's like, we actually lived
in the shipping container for about one hundred days combined
for our whole team, and.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
You lived in a shipping contenter.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
Yeah, in one of our waypoints in East Africa and Jibouti,
And well you have what does that mean?

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Like we slept on the.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Floor, show you the photos after, but like slept on
the floor sometimes. I got the hammock that we set
up across like you know, twenty feet is like kind
of perfect. I'm using my hands on.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
It, but that's cool.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Yeah, it's kind of perfect to set up a hammock.
So yeah, so we literally combined between like our team
members probably spent about one hundred days out there living
in the container. Like obviously mixing in like every three
or four days thing in a hotel. But in doing that,
you have to use the bathroom, and we're like, this
can't be very sanitary. And then we're like, well, wait
a minute, there's like camel poop everywhere, there's like human
poop in the outhouse. Like, well, we can use some
of this to create biogas and mix that with like scrubbers,
et cetera, with natural gas, and now we can you know,
reduce the amount of like natural gas, diesel fuel, backup power,
whatever you want to call it for the waypoint by
using that. So again, you're not going to be able
to power the whole thing with only a community of
like two hundred people, but you can probably get up
to like five to ten percent of the total power
consumption over a period of time.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Not nothing. That's not nothing exactly. So apply that to space.
So apply that to colonizing. You know, when I say colonizing,
even just building a base, and I always say the
bases will be very similar to military bases. Yell, we
first build. So apply that to Mars.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
So I think, again it's a very good example on
any brought up. The military base example. One of the
things that people don't realize is that in the US
our military, the thing that they are the best at
is supply chain and logistics and one of the most
the best a lot of.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Things, that's one of them. Yes, they are, and they
are when you go.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
So where our prototype is is actually in Djibouti in
East Africa. It's the biggest military based Actually, like eight
different countries have military bases there. US has like a
five thousand to ten thousand person base called a Camp Lemonae.
But when we talk to people on the base, one
of the challenges is supply chain and the logistics of fuel, right,
the fuel and power because US military base is a
lot like a Mars based et cetera, where they don't
rely on any of the local infrastructure if they're in
an area not the US right or develop world. So
the base has its own like power plant, et cetera,
to power it, to power it and these types of
solutions where I guess the term is like it's very circular.
Where you're you're eating food, you're pooping out that food,
You're using that food to like power and create water
and all this other stuff that it becomes extremely important
because it's very difficult if you're on Mars or if
you're on a military base to ship in fuel. So
even just reducing the amount by five to ten percent,
it makes a significant difference and cost and cost saving.
And also here on Earth at least you're reducing any
kind of like illnesses that are related to sewage and
waste treatment. Wow.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
See I didn't even think of that how so.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
So normally like part of an issue with an outhouse.
Again this is less so on the military, of course,
but is that the waste starts to like seep into
the ground, and then that seeps into like any underwater
like aquaffers.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Or we see that in cities.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
Exactly, it's exactly exactly kind of the same thing, and
there's a lot of like illnesses that come from in
particular human waste, less so less so animal waste. So
that was really part of what we were thinking, is like, well,
if people are doing this anyway, we may as well
use this to reduce some of our costs. Because a
real example is that, especially in emerging markets and especially
as you'll get on Mars and other places, a lot
of times actually the fuel that you get is not
the same quality that you're expecting, So In our case,
we weren't using natural gas at this point in time,
but we were using diesel and the diesel fuel was contaminated.
Another time, the power at the gas station was out
for like four or five days, so we couldn't even
get diesel fuel to bring back. So having these alternative
ways of generating energy is important. And then again like
our viewpoint at liquid Stars, like no electron, no energy wasted.
Another thing that we're doing is the heat that is
produced when you are using a Natch gas generator or biogas.
We're actually using that to do a process called multiple
effect distillation, which is a very nerdy engineering term for essentially,
you evaporate dirty water and then what comes down is
like talking about making your own weather drinkable water. No, no,
just water, just water, just water.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
That's actually that's making it rain. Literally. Yes, are you
an engineer by by study or what are you?

Speaker 3 (19:30):
Unfortunately, I'm an ex management consultant and uh yeah, I
just study like finance and operations management.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Interesting to be because I think we're also living through
a time where people are just able to reinvent their careers.
You know, I know that I'm living for that, but
it's so interesting to be as I'm sitting here listening
to you talk about these civilization starter kits and being
powered by poop and and you know, literally making rain
drinking water. I'm thinking of the Justice League. I mean,
I'm literally thinking. And for those of you who, if
you're not familiar with it, there were these It's like
a von Newman probe, for lack of a better word,
which is a self replicating thing. And that's what you're
talking about, is if you can just show up anywhere,
whether it's you know, whether I know you guys did
a lot of work in the Puerto Rico hurricane when
they got decimated by that hurricane. It's horrible what happened,
such a tragedy. Instead of having to build new electrical
grids and new power plants and whatnot, to be able
to show up with a civilization starter kit awaypoint and
to be able to deploy it like it's something out
of a comic book and action movie, and to be
able to get people communication. You know, I was talking
to a source a couple of weeks ago who said,
the number one thing people want right now as a
human is communication, even above the Maslow hierarchy of needs.
If you can't communicate with your loved ones and a
natural disaster, that's like the worst thing, and so to
be able to have You know, when I was a kid,
I remember the people across the street from my parents' house.
I grew up in Delco, outside of Philly. They had
a generator. I remember the generator. So anytime there was
a thunderstorm and we were out power, we're lighting cannels.
I'm thinking, can't we be like them across the street
they had a generator to be able to have a
civilization starter kit, to be able to get back online,
to be able to do commerce, to be able to
get your community up and going. I don't care what
part of the world you're in, because there's a lot
of parts of America that need this as well. I
think it's awesome what inspires you when you were a kid.
How do you link where you are today with whatever
you were consuming as a kid or influences Like I
remember when when Christmas I got a telescope, and I
remember being on the front lawn with my dad looking
up at and he's like, this is how you use
the telescope and looking at the stuff that is an
imprinted memory that I have when you look at where
you are today, what do you draw on because what
you're doing is really on the future front line.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, I think it's actually a funny thing where it's
just basically a combination of both of my parents' jobs.
So my mom was a VP at Pepco, the power
company here in d C. And my dad worked at
the World Bank. So it's basically a merger of both
of those two, I guess, and just you know, absorbing
what you hear, you know, especially during outages and you like, oh,
this wire's down over here, like this person has a generator,
you know, in outages, for example, if there are people
who they they have like a condition that requires them
to have some sort of electrical medical device, they power
companies needs to know where all of these people are,
like legally and they bring them like generators and other
things to make sure that those devices don't go down.
So I think that was part of the influence. And
then from doing management consulting, one of the last projects
that I did was looking at mapping emerging technologies to
the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. So somewhere between all
of that that's kind of I think we're the idea.
And then also just my co founder Connor, he they
had this idea of creating like a blockchain based solar
bank right where you looked at for certainty on chain
how much electricity was generated, and then you could use
that to generate carbon credits. They built a like prototype
pollution sensor that was also on blockchain. And it's actually
funny because we started this. I kind of started working
with Connor on this in twenty eighteen, but back in
twenty sixteen, Connor and the team Chain of Things that
that we worked with, they were early on the idea
that like blockchain would be used for AI to essentially
pay other AI for data and access. And today I
think like cloud flare and coin base are something they
announced something.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Like that to just today.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
So we can do a whole other episode on this,
and we should, yeah, because there is early reports about
to your point, which is why I think what you're
doing is light years ahead of what other people are doing.
And you came on my radar when I watched your
speech at the UN and the United Nations, which was
people should go watch it's on YouTube. But is okay?
So if we have a colony on Mars. How do
how do we have commerce with people who are on Mars,
or if companies are mining Mars or whatnot. We're doing
science experiments on Mars. How do we mine that? And
it's it's not going to be like you can like
put cash on a space shuttle and get it back
to planet Earth. It's going to probably be on the blockchain.
And so that you're even thinking about that is really interesting.
So Scott Clandy defod CEO and co founder of liquid Star.
Their civilization in a box starter kits are called waypoints. Really,
he and his team they're asking the big question about
what if every community could power itself without relying on
the traditional grid, and what if intelligence itself, advanced AI models,
data cloud access could run off grid in the most
remote places in our solar system. I can't thank you
enough for showing up and saying hello to the future,
and thanks for meeting the future with us, and I
hope to have you and your team back on YEP.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
Thank you so much, appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Of course,