Scott Nolan, early SpaceX engineer and Founders Fund partner of over a decade, argues that America's next 250 years hinge on getting energy right now. His case starts with a single, sobering baseline: in 1776, there was no anesthesia, no germ theory, no electricity, no trains. Everything we take for granted was built in 250 years. The question he forces is whether the next 250 can be equally transformative, or whether stagnation becomes the default.
Nolan is not writing as a theorist. He recently launched General Matter specifically to solve nuclear fuel supply, the unglamorous bottleneck quietly throttling the reactor buildout that AI and industrial demand are now forcing into urgency. His frame connects energy abundance to every other civilizational ambition, and he uses the 250-year arc not as nostalgia but as a measurement tool for what compounding progress actually looks like at scale.
The piece is worth reading in full because Nolan does not stop at inspiration. He gets specific about what decisions made today, on regulation, on fuel, on political will, determine whether the optimistic future is available at all. The argument is structural, not sentimental, and it was written for America's 250th birthday with the intent to make that weight felt.
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