Scott Nolan, early SpaceX engineer and decade-long Founders Fund partner, argues that America's next 250 years hinge on getting a few material decisions right today, specifically around nuclear energy and the fuel supply chain he is building at his new firm General Matter. His thesis starts with a concrete baseline: in 1776, there was no anesthesia, no germ theory, no electricity, no trains. Every assumption about daily life was wrong. The argument is that the same magnitude of change is available again, but only if the infrastructure decisions made now do not foreclose it.
The piece originated from a panel at Utah's Operation Gigawatt Summit, where Nolan sat alongside Oklo CEO Jake DeWitte to discuss scaling nuclear in a regulatory environment that has, for the first time in decades, become permissive. Nolan's answer to the closing question about the next 250 years is worth reading not for its optimism but for its structural logic: he maps what physical and technological preconditions must exist for a specific kind of future to be possible, and names nuclear fuel supply as the binding constraint.
Read the full essay for Nolan's historical accounting of what changed between 1776 and 2025, and how he uses that arc to construct a credible, non-vague picture of 2275. The argument is not about patriotism. It is about energy density, compounding technological capability, and which choices taken in the present are irreversible.
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