Over the past yr, Spectrum’s editors have seen an rising via line connecting a number of main tales: the centrality of know-how to geopolitics. Final month, our cowl story, executed in partnership with Overseas Coverage journal, was on the way forward for submarine warfare. And final October, we targeted on how sea drones may bolster Taiwan’s “silicon shield” strategy, which rests on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s domination of high-end chip manufacturing.
So after I requested the curator of this problem, Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, what he noticed as the key theme as we head into 2025, I wasn’t stunned when he stated, with out hesitation, “geopolitics and know-how.”
In truth, the identical day Sam and I spoke, I forwarded to Spectrum’s Glenn Zorpette a information merchandise about China banning the export to america of gallium, germanium and antimony. China’s overwhelming command of uncommon earths like these is on the coronary heart of Zorpette’s story on this problem. “Inside an American Rare Earth Boomtown” paints a vivid image of how america is making an attempt to nurture a home uncommon earth mining and processing business.
China, in the meantime, is itself trying to reduce its personal dependence on imported uranium by constructing a thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert. And tensions between China and Taiwan will undoubtedly be additional careworn with the opening of TSMC’s first advanced wafer fab in the United States this yr.
The mitigation of climate change is one other key space the place politics informs tech advances. In “Startups Begin Geoengineering the Sea”, Senior Affiliate Editor Emily Waltz takes readers aboard a pair of barges anchored close to the Port of Los Angeles. There, two firms, Captura and Equatic, are piloting marine carbon-capture methods to strip CO2 out of ocean water. Whether or not the outcomes will be measured precisely sufficient to assist firms and nations meet their carbon-reduction objectives is an open query.
A method for the worldwide group to check the impacts of those efforts might be Deep’s Sentinel program, the primary a part of which can be accomplished this yr. Our correspondent Liam Critchley, based mostly in England, experiences in “Making Humans Aquatic Again” that Deep, positioned in Bristol, is constructing a modular habitat that can let scientists stay underwater for weeks at a time.
One other geopolitical concern additionally lies at sea: the vulnerability of undersea fiber-optic cables, which carry an ever-growing share of the world’s Web site visitors. The potential of outages on account of assault or accident is so worrying that NATO is funding a project to quickly detect undersea-cable damage and reroute data to satellites.
In a provocative commentary on why know-how will outline the way forward for geopolitics printed in Overseas Affairs in 2023, Eric Schmidt, chair of the Particular Aggressive Research Challenge and the previous CEO and chair of Google, argues that “a rustic’s means to undertaking energy within the worldwide sphere—militarily, economically, and culturally—is dependent upon its means to innovate sooner and higher than its rivals.” On this problem, you’ll get an concept of how varied nations are faring on this regard. Within the coming yr, you may stay up for our persevering with analysis of how the new U.S. administration’s policies on primary analysis, local weather change, regulation, and immigration impression international competitors for the uncooked supplies and human assets that stoke the engines of innovation.