The tree · Energy · Happens to the world · Could be decided within 5 to 20 years
A site on the Moon has a hundred kilowatts of electricity through the lunar night, for a year, from any source
A lunar night lasts two weeks, and mining, refining and a permanent base all need power that keeps running through it. What they need is the power, not any one way of making it: a fission reactor, solar panels on a polar ridge that is almost always in sunlight with storage for the short dark spells, or power sent down from orbit would all serve. This is the function step that lunar material at scale depends on, written so that any route counts (the function-over-route rule, docs/methodology.md). A hundred kilowatts is a few times the first planned reactor, the scale at which a site does industrial work rather than only keeping a small crew alive.
The test: what counts as it having happened
At a single lunar surface site, at least one hundred kilowatts of net electrical power is available to the site's loads for at least ninety percent of a twelve-month period, from any source or mix of sources, confirmed by the operator's record.
Settled by: The site operator's published record (an agency mission record or a company's operating report)
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 90% | 93% | 95% | 97% | 98% |
Each column is a different guess at how long I live, from current trends (baseline) to open-ended. The number is the chance this happens before that deadline, assuming everything it depends on happens first. As of 2026-09-25.
Why these numbers: First estimate, 2026-09-25, proposed by Claude with the node and accepted by John 2026-10-02. Given that one route has already run a forty-kilowatt system through a whole year, the hard part is done; a hundred kilowatts at one site is two or three such units or one larger one, which a programme building toward mining will want anyway. The residual is a site that never needs more than its first unit. This step up was hidden before: lunar material at scale depended on a forty-kilowatt reactor and was estimated given power, so nothing priced the move to industrial scale.
What this one is worth
If this happened tomorrow and nothing else changed, the chance that I live and work off Earth by 2071 goes from 0.5% to 0.5% (too small to tell apart from chance). If it turned out no, the same number goes to 0.0% (−0.5 points).
| Longevity scenario | baseline2071 ± 8 | moderate2080 | strong2095 | radical2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The headline as it stands | 0.5% | 1.2% | 3.8% | 11% | 15% |
| If this settled yes now | 0.5% | 1.1% | 3.8% | 11% | 15% |
| If this settled no now | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
This is what the site says in advance, before the thing happens. When it does, the
ledger entry that records it quotes this figure beside what actually followed, so a
reader can see whether the prediction held. Worked out at the run
2026-10-11-scan by holding this step at each outcome in turn and
playing the whole tree out again, 20,000 times per
scenario. That is a throw of the dice, so a move smaller than about
0.10 points is inside the noise rather than
a finding.
The last check
Once a week the tree is read against the news, node by node, against the test above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every check ever made on this node is on the Radar page.
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2026-10-04 Nothing new
No lunar site with 100 kilowatts through the night was reported. Northrop Grumman's Lunar Infrastructure Demo plans (announced 2026-08-04, before the window) and Astrobotic LunaGrid (operational 2028 target) are plans.
Notes
Added 2026-09-25 under candidate 1 of docs/proposal-function-over-route-2026-09-25.md, approved by John 2026-09-25. Threshold form: each of the three routes is a year-long demonstration at forty kilowatts, and this step is the scale-up at one site by whichever route or mix. The demonstration of power beamed to Earth's ground (M-power-beamed-from-orbit-to-ground-at-kilowatt-scale) is a cousin of the orbital route, not a dependency.
Think this is wrong, missing something it depends on, or badly estimated?
Open an issue about it, or read
how feedback gets folded into the tree.
The record itself is data/E-energy.toml in the public repository.