Today's Wisdom - Orbital Compute, Enlightenment and Insomnia

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. This is our 90th edition! A massive thank you to everyone who reads, replies, and shares this newsletter with friends and on social media. Let’s jump into lessons 268, 269, and 270... Today’s wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

A data center is essentially a vast warehouse packed with computers that store and process the information behind everything from social media apps and streaming services to government databases and artificial intelligence. (You can find our lesson on what a data center is here). The problem is that they are becoming extraordinarily expensive to power and global demand is growing so fast that energy has become one of the key constraints on the expansion of AI infrastructure. Space potentially offers part of a solution. Solar panels in orbit can capture sunlight more continuously than ground-based panels and they do not depend on a terrestrial power grid. In theory, orbital data centers could eventually use that advantage to provide clean power and reduce pressure on land and infrastructure on Earth.

The race to build data centers in space is attracting some of the world's biggest companies, with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Google all announcing or exploring plans for orbital satellite networks designed to support AI computing. Early proof of concept came in November 2025 when Washington-based startup Starcloud successfully trained an artificial intelligence model in orbit for the first time, while Florida-based Lonestar Data Holdings has already tested data storage hardware on the Moon. SpaceX has filed plans for up to one million orbital data center satellites, Blue Origin for 51,600, and Nvidia has posted a job listing for an orbital data-center system architect, signaling that what was once a futurist idea is rapidly becoming a serious commercial pursuit.

Despite the wave of ambitions from firms racing to develop the technology, the gap between the concept and commercial reality remains wide. Google's own researchers have estimated that launch costs need to fall to around $200 per kilogram before orbital data centers can compete economically with facilities on the ground, compared to roughly $3,400 per kilogram on SpaceX's current rockets. Moreover, a space data center requires far more than computing equipment alone. It needs shielding, power systems, and cooling infrastructure, all of which add significant weight. Cooling is a particularly stubborn problem: on Earth, data centers use airflow and liquid systems that rely on convection, neither of which work in a vacuum. Heat generated by chips in space has nowhere to go and simply builds up, meaning it can only be managed by radiating it away, a process that adds further weight to an already complex structure. However, the world's brightest engineers are already diving into solving each of these challenges, making orbital computing one of the most exciting and consequential fields in technology to watch over the coming decade.

Below — a great tool for running the numbers yourself. Check out Andrew McCalip’s interactive tool which allows you to stress-test the economic reality of space-based compute against ground-bound alternatives.

At the start of the 18th century, Scotland was one of the poorest nations in Western Europe. It had been crippled by failed harvests, famine, and a catastrophic colonial venture in Panama that had wiped out a quarter of the nation's liquid capital. The 1707 Act of Union with England, which many Scots bitterly resented, removed Scotland's parliament but left intact its universities, legal system, and church. These institutions would go on to become the unlikely engine of one of the most concentrated intellectual explosions in recorded history. Within fifty years, Scotland was producing thinkers who were reshaping the foundations of economics, philosophy, geology, chemistry, and engineering simultaneously. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789 that no place in the world could compete with Edinburgh in matters of science, a remarkable verdict on a city whose population at the time was around 80,000 people.

Part of what made it possible was a literacy rate that stood far above the European average, the product of a Presbyterian system of parish schools that had been educating children from modest backgrounds for generations. The ideas those educated minds produced were then sharpened through an extraordinary culture of clubs and debating societies where thinkers from different disciplines gathered weekly in Edinburgh's taverns to argue across boundaries that elsewhere kept fields separated. It was in exactly this setting that geologist James Hutton, economist Adam Smith, and chemist Joseph Black met regularly as close friends, each transforming his own field while feeding off the others. Black discovered carbon dioxide and the principles of latent heat. Hutton looked at rock formations at Siccar Point on the Scottish coast and concluded that the Earth was unimaginably older than the Bible suggested, a concept later called "deep time" that gave Charles Darwin the timeline he needed for evolution to work. James Watt, a friend of both men, used the principles Black had discovered about heat to redesign the steam engine, producing the machine that powered the Industrial Revolution.

The philosophical output was equally world-altering. David Hume argued that all human knowledge derives from sensory experience and that reason, far from being the master of human behavior, is the servant of emotion. This was a claim so destabilizing to established thought that Immanuel Kant said it woke him from his "dogmatic slumbers." Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, laid the conceptual foundations for modern capitalism. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, conceived as a direct Scottish response to the French Encyclopédie, was founded in Edinburgh in 1768. The ideas produced in those decades traveled far beyond Scotland through emigration and education, shaping the thinking of the American Founding Fathers and influencing the intellectual culture of Paris, Berlin, and London. A nation that had entered the century in poverty and humiliation ended it having given the modern world some of its most durable frameworks for understanding itself.

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Around one in ten people globally meets the clinical criteria for insomnia disorder, defined as persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep at least three nights a week for a minimum of three months. The number of research papers published on the topic has grown by 142 percent in the last decade, faster than the research growth rate for either anxiety or depression in the same period, reflecting how seriously the medical community has come to treat what was once dismissed as a lifestyle complaint. At its core, the condition involves a state of hyperarousal, where parts of the brain's wake network remain activated even when the body is exhausted. People with insomnia show measurably elevated levels of cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone, lower levels of GABA, the neurotransmitter that quiets neural activity during sleep, and higher sympathetic nervous system activity throughout the night.

A useful way to understand why it develops is the 3P model developed by sleep researcher Arthur Spielman, which breaks the causes into three layers: predisposing factors such as genetic vulnerability and an naturally alert nervous system; precipitating factors such as a stressful life event, illness, or bereavement that first trigger the sleeplessness; and perpetuating factors, the habits and thought patterns that keep it going long after the original trigger has passed. That third category is where insomnia most often becomes chronic, and it is where the psychology becomes particularly interesting. Once a person has experienced a run of bad nights, a secondary layer of anxiety develops around sleep itself. The bed, which should function as a reliable cue for rest, becomes associated through repeated experience with wakefulness, frustration, and clock-watching.

People start compensating in ways that make things worse: spending more time in bed to chase sleep, napping during the day to recover, and reorganizing their lives around their fatigue. Each of these behaviors weakens what sleep scientists call homeostatic sleep pressure, the biological drive that builds throughout the day and makes sleep possible. The most effective treatment the research has produced addresses exactly this cycle. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, known as CBT-I, has been recognized by the American College of Physicians as the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia. A meta-analysis of 20 randomized controlled trials found that CBT-I reduced the time it took patients to fall asleep by an average of 19 minutes and cut the time spent awake after waking in the night by 26 minutes. It works through three core components, each of which can be practiced independently. Sleep restriction sounds counterintuitive but is among the most powerful tools available: pick a fixed wake-up time and stick to it every single day regardless of how little you slept, then go to bed only when genuinely sleepy rather than at a set hour. This gradually rebuilds the homeostatic sleep drive that chronic insomnia erodes. Stimulus control retrains the brain's association between the bed and wakefulness: use the bedroom only for sleep, and if you have been lying awake for more than 20 minutes, get up and do something calm in low light until sleepiness returns. Cognitive restructuring targets the catastrophic thinking that sustains the anxiety loop: when the thought "I'll be useless tomorrow if I don't sleep" appears, the practice involves writing it down, examining the actual evidence for it, and replacing it with something more accurate, such as that anxiety about sleep causes more impairment than the lost sleep itself. Each of these steps works on a different layer of the problem, which is why the combination produces results that medication alone has never been able to replicate.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team