The Outernet”

The Outernet

A bite-size think about it bite.

Produced while traveling. I will return to doing the voicing in the next episode.

Remember when finding a phone number meant reaching for the white pages, and finding a good plumber meant flipping through the yellow pages? That world has quietly slipped away. And here is something even harder to wrap our heads around. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Buck Rogers — the shows many of us watched as kids and assumed were pure fantasy — have started to become real. That future is unfolding above us right now, and it is beginning to change the way money moves.

Some people are calling it the "outernet." A growing number of investors, both retail and institutional, are pouring billions of dollars into cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and even blockchain and cryptocurrency. When you look closely at all of these industries, one common thread tends to connect them. That thread is data, and in many ways, data has become the whole ballgame.

Here is a piece that many people seem to be missing. Space companies are often the ones quietly carrying that data from one point to another, or creating it in the first place through satellites that observe the Earth from above. In a growing number of cases, they have become the toll operators on the digital superhighway, collecting value from the traffic that travels across it. Many otherwise sharp investors simply have not looked up long enough to notice. This opportunity may not be something that arrives someday. In many respects, it appears to be here already, hiding in plain sight.

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