Inspired Earth
Science based solutions, cutting edge technology, paradigm shifting organizations, mind-bending discoveries and philosophies; this podcast focuses on the inspirational current events that are frequently overlooked by mainstream media.
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Inspired Earth
Episode 45: 3I/ATLAS Saturn, & Microsoft Fusion in Washington State
A comet from deep space may thread the edge of Jupiter’s gravitational reach while Silicon Valley pours billions into a first-of-its-kind fusion plant. That’s not just good sci‑fi—those are the headlines shaping how power, money, and curiosity collide right now.
We start with 3I Atlas, an interstellar comet modeled to pass startlingly close to Jupiter’s Hill sphere in March 2026. Researchers ran hundreds of orbital clones and flagged non-gravitational forces that might have nudged its path into a razor-thin corridor. Whether the culprit is outgassing or a modeling quirk, the odds look wild enough to ask harder questions.
Then we turn to fusion, where Helion has broken ground in central Washington with plans to deliver electricity to Microsoft by 2028. It’s the clean energy moonshot that data centers crave as AI workloads explode, and it’s arriving with big names, big valuations, and bigger expectations. We unpack how purchase agreements sprint ahead of demonstrations, why some labs still haven’t shown sustained net energy gain in a grid-relevant way, and how governance, permitting, and insider networks shape who gets access to the future. If fusion fulfills even part of its promise—low-cost, reliable, carbon-free baseload—it will remake the energy map. If it falters, communities and ratepayers deserve clarity on the risks they were asked to shoulder.
Along the way, we talk trust: What would real transparency look like for fusion milestones? We close with a grounded human story—a teen found alive by a trained bloodhound after days in a ravine—to remind us that technology is ultimately about outcomes that matter to people.
If this mix of cosmic oddities and energy realities hits your sweet spot, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review. Your feedback helps us push for clarity, cut through hype, and keep the curiosity burning.
https://www.wionews.com/trending/3i-atlas-will-be-thrown-off-course-by-jupiter-as-it-exits-the-solar-system-1764147641279
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/a-remarkable-new-anomaly-of-3i-atlas-420065c2cddf
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/updates-on-the-non-gravitational-acceleration-of-3i-atlas-89ee7220c5d7
https://www.kuow.org/stories/everett-based-helion-breaks-ground-on-world-s-first-fusion-power-plant
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helion-energy-starts-construction-nuclear-fusion-plant-power-microsoft-data-2025-07-30/
https://www.ksdk.com/video/life/heartwarming/a-teen-had-been-missing-for-3-days-and-needed-a-miracle-a-dog-came-to-the-rescue/63-2e8fac44-cad5-4823-9b40-735a7dfcb1b2
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As a like civilian and uh like not rich person, like a regular person like everybody else, it is so hard to find information on fusion that is not a scam or like trying to take your money, and it's just bizarre. It seems like a casino or like a black hole of money, and like they have the technology and it's ready, but they just keep on taking people's money, and they come out and they're like, Oh, we need you to invest, we need you to do this or that, but they'll never actually put it out there. I've got some stuff about the comet uh coming through the solar system, the three eye atlas comet, as well as some news about fusion, and then we're gonna have a rescue. So let's get started. Uh with the this strange comet going through the solar system. WION news, which is like Indian, says Jupiter's strong gravitational force will exert such a push on three eye atlas that it will be moved out of its trajectory as it makes its way out of our solar system. This one last striking encounter will happen around March 16th, 2026. A new preprint preprint paper tried to understand the path the interstellar comet will take while leaving. Where its header and the possible path that it brought it here. The researchers studied the long-term orbital integration of 500 statistical clones of comet 3i for hundreds of years in the past and future, and found that it's probably coming from the Sagittarius constellation and going towards the Gemini constellation. But they're not sure yet. And Dr. Avi Loeb had released a blog post on medium saying, in other words, and this is just a segment of it after he talked about some math, in other words, the non-gravitational acceleration introduced a small course correction of exactly the magnitude needed to bring the minimum distance of three eye atlas from Jupiter to the value of Jupiter's hill radius. Three eye atlas would have missed the edge of the hill sphere otherwise. This suggests that the level of non-gravitational acceleration was finely tuned to result in the hill radius and bring three eye atlas exactly to the radius of Jupiter's gravitational influence. So he was suggesting this five days ago. He then went on to continue fifteen hours ago if the rare coincidence between the perige distance of three eye atlas and the hill radius will materialize, it might flag a technological signature. In that case, three eye atlas could release technological devices as artificial satellites of Jupiter, potentially at Jupiter's Jupiter's Lagrange points, L1 and L2, on the hill sphere where orbital corrections and fuel requirements are minimal. Within the diameter of Jupiter's orbit around the Sun, the coincidence between the perjove distance and the hill radius has a statistical likelihood of smaller than.00004, which is pretty fascinating. So I'll talk about this some more another time, but I just wanted to put this out there for people to be thinking about. And isn't it strange that whenever we were doing the laser um internet story? I think that was literally the first podcast episode I ever did, was on them shooting internet to Jupiter and playing Netflix and cat videos, and that they they had like an amazing bandwidth. Isn't it kind of interesting that they're saying that Avi Loeb here is saying that like there might be something about Jupiter that this uh 3I Atlas might be interested in, and that we were also beaming our internet to that region of space. It seems like kind of a a big coincidence to me personally. But uh so let's move on to fusion, uh fusion power, um, which is like putting atoms together rather than splitting atoms for nuclear energy. Everett-based Helion breaks ground on world's first fusion power plant. This was July 30th, 2025, by KUOW. Uh I guess it's local Washington News. On the banks of Columbia River in the small town of Malaga, Washington, Everett-based Helion has broken ground on what it says is the first fusion power plant. Helion, a nuclear fusion startup backed by Big Tech, said the facility is prepared to begin delivering electricity generated by nuclear fusion by 2028, and Microsoft has already purchased all of it. Isn't it interesting that we had the small startup of the individual guy who had like the car accident, and that's how he was like inspired to like find uh the stuff or or that was like part of his journey, and doesn't look like Department of Energy is playing ball with him or his company, but then we hear we have um Sam Altman and all these crazy people and Microsoft, all these like evil people really that are in charge of fusion and they're just getting to go buck wild with this sort of technology. It's very interesting how like the layman person or the non like ordained by the rich uh don't get to have any sort of power or electricity or technology, and they'll just like cut you out of it. And that that's something that with fusion that's frustrating to me is that for all the rest of us, uh fusion power is like a gimmick or a snake oil salesman, or they're like uh always trying to take your money, trying to like have all these investment opportunities, and it feels like a casino and that it's predatory. It's very, very predatory. And I'll I'll talk about that another time, but I just wanted to point that out that it's like as far as for all everyday people, it's very, very predatory coming after us with for our money and the way like what we're allowed to know about this stuff. Um, and yeah, we'll talk about that another time, but uh and elaborate on the on the snake oil aspect of it in a different article that's very long. I I spent 45 minutes recording it and didn't finish, and so yeah, that's why I tried to do this one a little shorter. But uh, so yeah, like halfway through a different one. But I just wanted to point this out that it's crazy. Big tech can do fusion, but regular people can't. And it's also interesting that it goes to like a banking aspect, which we've kind of already talked about, of these giant investors um picking between loans and like the returns on the loans, and that's what this is all about, and them playing all these games like that. So Helion chose central Washington for the plant because of the cluster of data centers that will call the region home. It's become a hotspot for the massive server farms that underpin everything we do online because of an abundant, cheap hydropower supplied by the Columbia River Dams. And as I'm saying this, also remind yourself the fact that Peter Thiel just sold off his NVIDIA stock. I think maybe Meta stock and like all these other people are thinking of selling off their stocks. Uh so we're like looking at a possible AI bubble, bigger than the dot-com burst, bigger than any of the other depressions or recessions that we've had. They're predicting this massive bubble to pop with artificial intelligence. And I feel like they're this is part of them trying to keep that bubble from from coming down is by like dripping fusion out uh to inflate it even further. Because they valuated fusion even bigger than AI. So anybody like way, way bigger than AI. Like this other article that I'm reading will talk about it, but it's like if you were to add up AI and the internet and all of these other things, like all added together, and like cars, even like they added like all of the major industries in the world, and none of it added up to what fusion is valuated at. So I think that it's gonna this AI fusion bubble speculation that's going on right now nationally, uh, has to do with fusion as well, but people not as many people know that. But as the artificial intelligence boom drives unprecedented demand for even larger, more energy hungry data centers, new sources of power are needed. The tech industry is pinning its hopes on fusion, which promises to be cleaner and cheaper than traditional nuclear power. Fusion works by extremely high heat and pressure to fuse nuclei, which is the same process that happens on our sun. Said Helion CEO, David Curtley. This is the first time that people are talking about and now demonstrating that you can do fusion in a way that is commercially relevant for electricity that is low cost, that is efficient, and that is reliable. That's what we're showing, and that's what we're building right now. I mean, I already read a different company that did it first, but you know, they're not parted big tech, so they didn't get selected. Uh part of the Department of Defense, aka Department of War, and all these people had like a big sell-off of grants uh for uh who got contract who got contracts on all these nuclear facilities. And yeah, it's just it's like a revolving door of nepotism. Like you can only get the contract if you know somebody inside. They're not willing to let like people in, really. Very it's very, very rare. It's like a secret society that controls our electricity, if you really think about it. That's what I'm describing. Like, people might not want to describe it like that, it might make them uncomfortable, but it is basically what we're talking about. And you could ask um uh who was it that was killed uh Silkwood. Was it Karen Silkwood uh that was killed by the energy facility and energy companies for exposing like that the nuclear techniques at the time were not safe? And she was a fellow Texan. So, and I think that that that goes real deep, but that just goes to show how big this energy cabal secret society that has all of this technology locked up in the Department of Energy with all sorts of other technologies, uh, that that's how dirty these people are and their behavior, that they're willing to just uh kill whistleblowers. Helion is leasing land from the Chellen County Public Utilities District that's part of its Rock Island Dam property. The location is just up the road from a new data center. Microsoft is the process is in the process of building in an old Alcoa aluminum plant that's currently being dismantled. It's a stark example of industries of the future moving into a small town, filling the void left behind manufacturing, though neither Helion nor the data center will employ as many people as the old plant did. Helion expects to have about 10 to 50 full-time employees. Its focus is building a scalable renewable power source to meet growing energy needs and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Our goal is to generate power at as as low as a cost as possible. That's really interesting. That's a now that's a good or uh uh a big statement. We'll hold them to that. That's very interesting. I think that that said a lot. And we'll have to connect more dots about that. So this is from Reuters again, still in the same uh thing Helion Energy is startup backed by OpenAI Sam Altman, and SoftBank's Venture Capital Arm has started construction. So this is who's funding it. This is what I was saying that like it has to do with banking and big AI, and Sam Altman's not a good guy. Um, and that's who's in charge of this, that's who gets access to fusion, and they've had it locked away for years, and now all of a sudden they're letting it leak out, and it's right as the AI bubble is about to pop. I'm telling you, it's not a coincidence. It's it's linked together somehow, and people will eventually figure it out. So they're gonna build a nuclear fusion power plant that will supply Microsoft, and remember, Microsoft is also getting the Three Mile Island uh reactor where they had the the the like American Chernobyl type event, or near not as bad, but like it could have been, and that they're gonna turn it back on for Microsoft. Lovely, right? And it says that the startup has to secure final permits from Washington government, and I think they already have by now, I'm not 100%, but it says that they're gonna sell power to Microsoft by 2028. The deal was struck in 2023, and this is what Reuters says, but despite billions of dollars investment, scientists and engineers still have not figured out a way to reliably generate more energy than fusion than it takes to create and sustain the reaction. Which I'm pretty sure that we had done that like 10-15 years ago. Like publicly. So that's kind of interesting. Helion is still working on how to do that with its current prototype called Polaris, which is housed in Everett, Washington, where it plans to build components for the machine to be built at Malaga called Orion. Orion will connect to Washington's primary power delivery networks. David Curtley, Helion's co-founder and CEO Toyed Reuters, will actually be able to connect to the exact same grid just upstream of the Microsoft data center. Microsoft has for years said that nuclear energy should be part of a mix of carbon-free energy sources and has also signed power purchase agreements for convention conventional fission-based nuclear power. Fusion is the longer-term bet. Melanie Nicagua, Microsoft Chief Sustainable Sustainability Officer. Over the last three, four years, you've been seeing across the fusion space different types of milestones being met by other companies and peers, Helion included. There's a lot of optimism that this could be the moment that fusion actually comes forward within the decade or near this decade. And I'll put this in another episode, but uh the Senate House Select Committee, or one of those like select committees on energy uh had an open meeting where they talked for like three hours, and like one of the first things they did was they came out and they jokingly said, Oh, yeah, every ten years they say fusion's gonna come out, and like we just keep on putting money in and nothing happens, and they all just started laughing. Oh ho ho ho ho. And I don't know. I think I know that the DOE has had this technology for longer than they're saying publicly. Do the people in the energy select committee know about what is hidden behind DOE's stuff? I'm not sure. But the fact that they were like making it a joke, it almost seemed like they were laughing at us. And they were just like, Yeah, we take their money for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years. We'll just take their money and we're not gonna release it until we're ready. And I don't know, like the the thing was just kind of creepy. Like, I haven't watched the full thing, but just from the first five minutes I saw it was bizarre. So it's also strange that we have these energy select committees openly talking about the release of fusion right now, and that says a lot too. So we're gonna we're gonna need to go back and look into that as well. Uh, I haven't I haven't watched it, so I don't know what they say other than the first five minutes, but I watched that and had to pause it, and I was like, wow, I'm gonna have to pay attention to this and actually watch it. So uh I haven't played a rescue in a while, so I'm gonna do that. Uh teen has been missing for three days and needed a miracle, a dog came to the rescue. So we'll listen to this real quick and end it out here.
SPEAKER_04:Just hours ago, a St. Francis County teen had the chance to thank the canine who saved his life. 14-year-old Cody Trankel spent more than three days trapped in a ravine this summer before a corrections dog named Daryl tracked him down. Today, Cody got to meet his hero. Five in your sides, Megan Kernan, brings us this exclusive story from Farmington.
SPEAKER_03:A reunion. More than a month in the making. 14-year-old Cody Trankel finally meeting K9 Daryl, the four-legged hero whose nose led rescuers straight to him.
SPEAKER_00:I got to meet the dog to save my life.
SPEAKER_03:Just four weeks ago, Cody was fighting for his life. On July 27th, after a skateboarding accident, he tumbled 240 feet into a ravine near his home by Goose Creek Lake. For nearly 80 hours, Cody's family and volunteers searched for him.
SPEAKER_00:I've been told that if I had to spend a couple more hours down there, I wouldn't have made it.
SPEAKER_03:Then the six-year-old bloodhound from the Farmington Correctional Center was given a pair of Cody's shoes. Within 20 minutes, he put that well-bred nose to work, dragging the scent straight to Cody, lying in a foot of water, badly injured, but alive.
SPEAKER_00:Because of him, 20 minutes, man. I'm impressed.
SPEAKER_03:Seeing Cody get to meet him is pretty amazing. These canines go through years of training to do exactly what Daryl did the day Cody was rescued. Drac sends through water, woods, and steep terrain. It's that training that turned a search into a life-saving mission.
SPEAKER_02:20 minutes on a three-day track, that's almost like unheard of. As a parent myself and 14-year-old, um sorry, a little emotional. So this is best case scenario because he was found still alive.
SPEAKER_03:I had put all my faith knowing that Daryl was gonna find Cody. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Bubboys.
SPEAKER_03:Cody spent 11 days in a coma, a month in the ICU, and is still in rehab. But today, he's back at school and a little closer to being a kid again.
SPEAKER_00:Just gotta get the head healed and then I'm Cody again.
SPEAKER_03:Reporting in Farmington. Megan Kernan, five on your side.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. That is incredible. Definitely a miracle. Uh so yeah, plans. Uh I'm gonna finish up that long episode on fusion uh on a different company. And I guess I can talk just a little bit about that in that um as a like civilian and uh like not rich person, like a regular person like everybody else, it is so hard to find information on fusion that is not a scam or like trying to take your money, and it's just bizarre. It seems like a casino or like a black hole of money, and like they have the technology and it's ready, but they just keep on taking people's money, and they come out and they're like, Oh, we need you to invest, we need you to do this or that, but they'll never actually put it out there. I don't know, it's just extremely frustrating for me to see all of these different fusion companies all coming up at once, and we're still like left in the dark as a public. They're still trying to take our money, and we have Microsoft and and OpenAI and Sam Aldman and banks building fusion power plants, but they still want our money. It just doesn't make any sense, and it's so frustrating. But I am looking forward to making some more uh stuff on that, and I think it's gonna be very interesting and enlightening. I also have some surprises coming uh soon, so yeah, stick around and be looking for more stuff. Uh super busy, but we'll keep on trying to make stuff, especially like shorter ones like this, are a lot easier to put out. I tried to make the other one shorter, and I didn't realize that it was gonna turn into a whole big thing. But alright. Um hope you guys enjoy and be safe out there, safe travels, and I'll be making some more stuff next week. Adios, I'm gonna go to the house.