Gandalf arrives on rollerblades. It’s morning in the cafeteria at X – formerly Google X – and Astro Teller, X’s Captain of Moonshots, glides over dressed in coarse grey robes and a pointed hat, carrying oatmeal. Jedi stroll past to their desks, gripping coffee. Star Fleet officers queue for breakfast. This, it should be said, is unusual – it’s Halloween. But X is a surreal place. Outside, self-driving cars loop around the block. Sections of stratospheric balloons, designed to broadcast internet to remote places, hang in the lobby. Robots wheel around, sorting the recycling. Teller likens X to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory; it seems only fitting that there be costumes.
Even standing inside X – a cavernous former mall in Mountain View, California – it’s hard to articulate exactly what X is. Within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, it is grouped alongside Deepmind in "Other Bets", although in that metaphor, X is more like the gambler. Its stated aim is to pursue what it calls “moonshots” – to try to solve humanity’s great problems by inventing radical new technologies. To that end, besides the self-driving cars (now a standalone company, Waymo) and internet balloons (Loon), X has built delivery drones (Wing), contact lenses that measure glucose in the tears of diabetics (Verily) and technology to store electricity using molten salt (Malta). It has pursued, but ultimately abandoned, attempts to create carbon neutral fuel from seawater, and replace ocean freight with cargo blimps. It once earnestly debated laying a giant copper ring around the North Pole to generate electricity from the Earth’s magnetic field.