Hello and welcome to Broeconomics. Now, as you will know, if you followed this show, I'm a tiny

bit optimistic about things like AI and robotics and so on. Now, you start to follow through the

logic of what that does. At the moment, most economic activity is constrained, not so much by the

amount of resources, but the, quite literally, it's by the amount of management much by the amount of resources, but quite literally it's by the amount

of management oversight, the amount of intellectual bandwidth can go into something. I've worked

with many companies over the years, and that ultimately tends to be the restraining factor on

a lot of activity. After that, you've got the restraining activity, the restraint of the

number of workers that you can bring in, people who can actually do the job. But with AI

in robotics, it's not impossible that we could actually solve those two problems. If you do

that, then the next logical step is that your constraint becomes the amount of resources available to you.

And if you do that, then logically, the next major industry that we're not talking about at the moment,

but we will be on the other side of AI and robotics is going to be space,

because that gives you access to the quantity of resources that you need to really take

economic growth to an unlimited level. So given that logic chain, I've been wanting to speak

to somebody who knows about space. And I'm delighted to say that I have found just the man. Grant

Donoghue, planetary scientist. Welcome to Brokeonomics. Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.

Good. Can you tell us about yourself? What is a planetary scientist?

So planetary science is a subfield of geology, which is an annoying term because geology specifically refers to the Earth.

But I was trained as a sedimentary petrologist.

Professionally, I've worked as both a petroleum and a environmental geologist.

But more broadly, it means that I study the evolution of systems as the evolution of systems.

We don't tend to say geology and isolation because we've discovered that there's an

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