Internet powered by light
Google's Taara hopes to usher in a new era of connectivity. View in browser | Your newsletter preferences 02.28.25 We hope you enjoy this free edition of Plaintext. For access to the full newsletter and all of WIRED's award-winning journalism, become a paying subscriber today . Hi, folks. So the asteroid isn't going to hit us in 2032? So much for an easy out. Alphabet's "moonshot factory," known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon , which aimed to deliver internet via hundreds of high-flying balloons. Loon eventually "graduated" from X as a separate Alphabet division, before its parent company determined that the business model simply didn't work. By the time that balloon popped in 2021, one of the Loon engineers had already left the project to form a team specifically working on the data transmission part of connectivity—namely, delivering high-bandwidth internet via ...