Astro Teller has watched hundreds of ambitious projects at X, Alphabet's innovation lab, where he is co-founder and "Captain of Moonshots." Salim Ismail, founder of Open ExO, asked which ones he wishes had made it. Teller said he had "a very long list." He then named three problems X has attacked repeatedly without cracking: clean water, energy and education.
The conversation took place on stage at Moonshots Live 2026, recorded on September 25, 2026. It was released as episode 300 of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis on October 5, 2026.
Clean water: a penny a liter, not ten cents
"We've been working on clean water over and over again," Teller said. He described two broad routes: pulling water out of the atmosphere, or desalinating seawater (removing the salt) for a tenth of today's price. X's own description of its prototyping workshop mentions an atmospheric water-harvesting prototype built from off-the-shelf components.
Whatever the method, Teller said, the total cost has to reach "like a penny a liter all in cost for it to really change the world." He described the stakes in human terms. Almost three billion people are water-stressed and lack clean drinking water, he said. In his view that will worsen as climate change picks up, and he expects "hundreds of millions of climate refugees," a displacement that will often begin with a shortage of clean water. "This is one of the biggest problems to solve," he said.
The obstacle, he said, was techno-economics, meaning whether the technology can produce water cheaply enough to matter. X has done "some great work in this space," Teller said, but the numbers came out at about 10 cents a liter, ten times his target. His description of the decision was blunt: "Nope. We'll stop doing that. Try it again." He called water "an example of something to keep coming back to."
The lab is coming back to it. Later in the session, Dave Blundin, founder of Link Ventures, used clean water as an example and asked whether X already had a team on it. "We have had teams on them in the past," Teller said. "Yes, we do have a team on it right now."
Energy: moving power through time and space
Ismail asked for two more examples. Teller's second was the ability to "time shift and location shift energy." He chose those words deliberately: "Because if you say transmission lines and batteries, people tend to narrow their focus in." Time-shifting means holding power from when it is produced until it is needed. Location-shifting means moving it from where it is generated to where it is used.
He said solving this is "absolutely going to change the world." X has "taken a bunch of runs" at it, but "so far, you know, we haven't been super excited with what we've found."
Education: not working anywhere
The third was education. "Education is not working," Teller said. "It's not working in the developed world. It's not working in the developing world." He described no specific X project, but said the lab will "keep coming back to that one until we find something." He called it one of "the most fundamental moonshots that you could do."
Materials: discovery is the first 5%
The gap between a technical breakthrough and a working business came up again when Peter Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE and host of the show, relayed an audience question about promising areas in materials science. Teller said he is "super excited about the new material space." He also said people have not thought through what comes after discovery. Amid the "fervor about the technology," everyone assumes "and then we'll make a business out of it." That, he said, is harder than it sounds.
His example was steel. It took centuries to refine, he said, and it "completely changed the world, but not until it was industrialized in a bunch of ways." He then imagined someone making a single flake of room-temperature superconductor, a material that would carry electricity with no resistance and without extreme cooling. "Nobel Prize, yay," he said. "That is not a business. That's like the first 5% of a business."
The remaining 95%, in Teller's account, is industrial work. How do you make thousands of tons a day? How do you make the material ductile enough to be drawn into wire for windings?
Two of the people on stage, the computer scientist Alexander Wissner-Gross and Diamandis, co-wrote a proposal called Solve Everything. On materials discovery, it envisions AI-guided "inverse design," which starts from a desired property and works back to candidate structures, plus robotic labs that design, make and test samples. The proposal also covers manufacturing and physical deployment. Teller did not discuss the proposal.
His own focus lies elsewhere. "I'm kind of focused on the hill after the one that people are focused on," he said, "which is how would we scale these up as they show up in the world, not just how do we find them in the first place."