Field Note: 019
The Human Is Still the Experiment
AI is buying wet labs, NASA wants you in a fake Mars base, and a $62,000 Texas treasure just banned the machine
This Week in the Guild
Every story this week lands on the same idea...
The machine is fast, but the human is still the experiment.
The biggest AI companies on earth are buying wet labs because models can’t grow cells. NASA still needs real people to live in fake Mars bases. A Texas treasure hunt bans AI outright. And the most important switch you’ll ever flip happens somewhere no algorithm can see.
Here’s what’s inside:
Frontier Biology: Why the AI race just moved into the wet lab, and why that means a flood of new therapies in the next 5 years.
Frontier Performance: A checklist of 12 space analog sites, from Houston to Antarctica, and exactly how a regular person can apply, work there, or crunch astronaut data from the couch tonight.
Adventure: About $62,000 in gold and cash is hidden somewhere in Texas, and the last people who found it got disqualified.
Mind of Dave: Why you can never see rock bottom while you’re standing on it... and how to catch the climb sooner next time.
Grab a coffee. One of these is going to send you down a rabbit hole!!!
Frontier Biology
The Lab Is the Moat
AI is a tool. It’s never the process. I’ve been saying that for years, and the last month just proved it with real money.
Look at what happened in roughly three weeks.
Anthropic confirmed it runs its own wet lab in the Bay Area.
Danaher announced an autonomous lab that designs antibodies, builds them, tests them, and feeds the results straight back into the model... claiming 8x faster discovery at scale by early 2027.
Biohub and partners committed $1.8 billion to generate enough cell data to build virtual cells.
OpenAI bought Orchestra Bio to run the unglamorous stuff like trial scheduling and finances.
Lila Sciences, built on the bet that the biggest automated lab beats the biggest data center, was reportedly in talks at around an $8.5B valuation.
The pattern is simple. The smartest model doesn’t win anymore. Biology doesn’t hand you the data. You have to grow it, pipette it, fail at it, and measure it. Anthropic’s own head of life sciences said the final test is still real lab work. Whoever closes the loop between model and experiment fastest owns the next decade of medicine.
Here’s my prediction: In the next 5 years we get a flood of new therapies for autoimmune disease, cancer, and rare genetic conditions.
Regulators are not built for that speed. Discovery sprints while approval walks. That gap draws a new line between the haves and the have-nots in healthcare... and the people with resources won’t wait. They’ll fly. Special economic zones like Próspera in Honduras, home of the Vitalia pop-up city, already write their own rules on stem cells and gene therapy. Medical tourism is about to explode.
I’m fired up about this!!! Pair AI-built therapies with a digital health layer that tracks your own biology every day, and we stop treating the average patient and start treating you. Millions of people who heard “there’s nothing more we can do” are about to get a different answer.
Frontier Performance
The Mars Bases Hiding in Plain Sight
On Halloween, four people walked out of a 3D-printed Mars habitat in Houston. They’d been inside for a year. For 365 days they operated as though they were on the Red Planet, growing crops, managing limited resources, and working through communication delays. None of them were astronauts. A Space Force colonel, an aerospace engineer, regular people with unusual nerve. nasa
That’s the part nobody knows. There’s a whole network of places on Earth built to fake space... underwater, on volcanoes, in deserts, sealed under pressure. NASA and the companies racing to build the first private stations need humans to test on, data to analyze, and people to run the operations. Some pay you. Some you can join from your couch tonight. Here’s the checklist.
🚀 Your Space Analog Checklist
☐ NASA HERA — Houston, TX
Focus: A 650-square-foot habitat where four volunteers live isolated and confined for 45 days on simulated Moon missions nasa
☐ NASA Moon and Mars Exploration Analog — Houston, TX
Focus: The big one. Four crew, one year, starting no earlier than August 2027, combining HERA as the transit ship and CHAPEA’s Mars habitat as the surface base nasa
Get in: US citizen or green card holder, deadline ongoing. Fair warning: no dietary restrictions and no history of sleepwalking or sleeping aids. nasamanganiello
☐ NASA CHAPEA / Mars Dune Alpha — Houston, TX
Focus: A 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat simulating resource limits, equipment failures, and communication delays. Printed by ICON, an Austin company. nasa
Get in: Folded into MMEA above. Follow the crew debriefs for now.
☐ Axiom Space + Intuitive Machines — Houston Spaceport, TX
Focus: Building a private space station. Axiom’s Assembly Integration and Test Facility at the Houston Spaceport is where its station modules get final assembly. Intuitive Machines and Collins Aerospace are neighbors. axiomspaceinnovationmap
Get in: Careers. Not every job is rocket science... ops, medical, training, logistics.
☐ Blue Origin Launch Site One — Van Horn, TX
Focus: About 30 miles north of Van Horn, home of suborbital New Shepard launches, plus Blue Moon lunar lander engine test firings. american-spacecraftspaceodysseyhub
Get in: Careers in a town of about 2,000 people. Or drive Highway 54 on launch day.
☐ Vast — Long Beach, CA
Focus: Haven-1, a single-module station, as a stepping stone toward a 100-meter spinning artificial gravity station. lbbusinessjournal
Get in: Careers. They’ve also offered tours of a full-scale Haven-1 walkthrough at their Long Beach facility. monrovia
☐ FIU Aquarius Reef Base — Florida Keys
Get in: Research partnerships and missions through FIU. Divers and marine scientists, this is your door.
☐ Mars Desert Research Station — Utah
Get in: The most accessible crew slot on this list. Apply solo or bring your own team.
☐ HI-SEAS — Mauna Loa, Hawaii
Focus: Home of five long-duration NASA Mars simulations lasting 4 to 12 months. Organizers recently secured NASA funding to resume testing after a hiatus of several years. hi-seashawaiipublicradio
Get in: Open applications through the International MoonBase Alliance.
☐ SAM at Biosphere 2 — Oracle, AZ
Focus: About a dozen analog habitats exist globally, but none others are sealed and pressurized like SAM. Right now they’re testing how many square meters of crops it takes to keep a human breathing. arizona
Get in: Accepted teams of up to four live inside for two weeks to a few months. biosphere2
☐ Concordia Station — Antarctica
☐ NASA Citizen Science — Your Couch
Get in: Tonight. Laptop required.
Adventure
The $62,000 Riddle Hiding in a Texas Crevice
Roughly $62,000 in gold and cash is sitting in a wax-sealed box somewhere in Texas right now... and nobody has claimed it.
It started with a Fort Worth accountant named KC Wright and his 94-year-old mother, Liz, who took their Wheel of Fortune winnings and turned them into a coffee-table book of riddles, photos, and Texas history. Every page hides clues to a 3-inch medallion tucked in a public place. Not buried. Not on private land. The prize is ten one-ounce American Eagle gold coins, a cash vault that grows $5 with every registered book, and a piece of gold pulled straight from Forrest Fenn’s treasure chest.
Last April, a family actually found the box. They couldn’t explain how. They hadn’t solved the final puzzle engraved on the back of the medallion. Wright suspects they fed a photo of the hiding spot, published by Texas Monthly, into an AI tool... and the rules flat out ban AI. No prize. He put a replica back in the same crevice and restarted the hunt. One of the last contests on earth where the machine gets you disqualified and your own brain is the only legal tool!!!
This is Guild of the Wild in its purest form. Puzzle brain at the kitchen table, boots on limestone on Saturday. The clock runs until June 1, 2028, and if nobody solves it, the whole pot goes to the Remember the Alamo Foundation. The link is below. Go find it before I do.
Mind of Dave
You Can Only See the Bottom From Above It
Here’s a thought that rearranged my brain this week. You can’t actually see rock bottom while you’re on it. It only shows up in the rearview mirror.
To call something “the bottom,” you’ve already started climbing.
Somewhere below the surface, before you knew it, part of you already decided to stop going down... and that decision is what gives you the height to look back and name it.
I have so many moments I could go into, so I narrowed it down to one for you. Sitting in the corner of my daughter’s fourth birthday party, feeling absolutely nothing. Teeth cracking. Bones breaking. Eight years of being told my labs were fine. In that moment it didn’t feel like a bottom. It felt like Tuesday. It only became my rock bottom later, after I’d started digging through my own blood work and asking the questions nobody else was asking.
Yours looks different.
Failing out of school. A photo where you don’t recognize your own body. Jeans that won’t button. A comment from a friend that lands a little too hard.
The event isn’t the switch... it’s the moment the switch you already flipped finally gets loud enough to hear.
So this week, look back at your own bottoms. Not to relive them. To learn from them and maybe take action sooner the next time.
Go find your edge. That's where resilience lives.
— Dr. Dave
Guild of the Wild — The frontier of human possibility. Field tested. Truth told.
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