- In Defense of the Marginal BabyThis Father’s Day, I took some notes on parenting and put them together here. The purpose of this post is to strongly advocate for people to increment their child number, ideally recursively. If you have two, go for thr…
Casey Handmer
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
Casey Handmer did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Blog Casey Handmer's blog Long essays on energy, space and manufacturing. Posts every few weeks.
Where he works through the physics and economics of synthetic fuel, solar and space hardware at length -- the writing the rest of his work is argued from.
Open caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
Recent
- In Defense of the Marginal Baby 22 Jun 2026 This Father’s Day, I took some notes on parenting and put them together here. The purpose of this post is to strongly advocate for people to increment their child number, ideally recursively. If you have two, go for thr…
- The enormous size of the oil and gas market drives adoption of synthetic fuel production 18 Jun 2026 Originally posted at the Terraform blog June 16 2026. One of the underrated joys of hardware tech development is having the opportunity to tell and retell the story until it gradually becomes less mysterious. To me, wha…
- How to build a crazy awesome Australian immigration system 10 Jun 2026 The Australian immigration system must exclude dickheads, bullshitters, and bludgers. This post has been inspired by Joe Walker’s recent set of three exemplary interviews (Martin Parkinson (former Treasury, author of 20…
Show 7 more
- How to build a lunar mass driver 8 May 2026 Casey Handmer May 2026 What? Elon has recently (late 2025, early 2026) been talking about building many terawatts of orbital AI compute and launching some components from Moon factories with a mass driver. This is an ol…
- Australian Dynamism 21 Apr 2026 This post has benefited from generous contributions from Austin Vernon, Malcolm Davis, Sam D’Amico, and others who do not necessarily endorse the conclusions of this piece. I will follow Australian spelling conventions…
- Australia will run an overt command economy by 2040 16 Apr 2026 Australia’s Fiscal Point of No Return Last September I wrote about Australian economic stagnation — how taxation past the Laffer curve’s point of peak growth, zero public sector productivity improvement since 2001, and…
- Garmin watch faces 13 Mar 2026 I have recently been using Claude Code (Opus 4.6) to do a variety of software projects. One was the completion of an ill-fated attempt to create a custom watch face for my Garmin Epix Pro 47 mm. MidJourney produced this…
- Notes on the Fermi Paradox 3 Mar 2026 I recently realized I hadn’t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note. The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as “where are they?” is a question…
- Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories now 10 Feb 2026 A quick note collating a list of blogs I’ve written on the topic. I’ll update it with good third party write ups as I become aware of them. Context: SpaceX announced a refocus on lunar development. My best explanation f…
- Direct Current Data Centers 30 Jan 2026 Casey Handmer, Matt Weickert Originally posted at the Terraform Blog. This post explains our current views on how humanity will achieve Kardashev Level 1 status by exploiting the full energy resources of an entire plane…
Link verified 8 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 76 beliefs, 2 changed minds — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
A lunar mass driver cannot pay for itself by cutting launch costs, because launch is already a small part of what an orbital computer costs.
At even $500/kg, launch cost is only 5% of the total satellite deployment cost, so a lunar mass driver is unlikely to drastically improve the economics of space-based AI, by reducing launch costs.
How to build a lunar mass driver Said 8 May 2026
Starship will bring the price of low Earth orbit down to roughly a hundred dollars a kilogram.
Starship promises a near future with launch costs to LEO of perhaps $100/kg.
How to build a lunar mass driver Said 8 May 2026
Data centres in orbit will be a better business than Starlink, because an inference token is worth far more per byte than a video packet.
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories now Said 10 Feb 2026
Show 57 more
Earth-launched hardware can support about a hundred gigawatts in orbit; past that, the satellites have to be built off Earth.
Starship can lift orbital power generation to about 100 GW with perhaps 10,000 launches per year, or about one per hour.
Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories now Said 10 Feb 2026
Data centres will end up net suppliers of power to their communities, because a solar plant big enough to keep the machines running spills most of what it makes.
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
Energy Predictions 2025 Said 8 Dec 2025
Seasonal energy storage is a heat problem rather than a battery problem: electricity is hard to store for months and heat is easy.
Storing electricity for months is economically difficult, but storing heat is easy.
Energy Predictions 2025 Said 8 Dec 2025
Heat pumps are spreading slowly because buying one is a twenty-year bet on the price of electricity that most homeowners will not make.
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
Energy Predictions 2025 Said 8 Dec 2025
The United Kingdom is the one rich industrial country that cannot run on solar alone, and it has to build wind at scale instead.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
Energy Predictions 2025 Said 8 Dec 2025
By 2045 natural gas will be a fuel for aviation, shipping and industrial heat rather than a way of making electricity.
By 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
Energy Predictions 2025 Said 8 Dec 2025
Batteries will replace transmission as the cheapest way to keep the lights on, and the grid will shrink rather than grow.
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
Energy Predictions 2025 Said 8 Dec 2025
Orion is too heavy for any rocket that exists to carry it to low lunar orbit and bring it home.
Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage Said 31 Oct 2025
Orion was designed without reference to any mission it could actually fly.
It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage Said 31 Oct 2025
After fourteen years of redesign, Orion's heat shield performed worse than the one it replaced.
The updated heat shield design, after more than 14 years of development, had performed even worse.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage Said 31 Oct 2025
A Chinese crewed landing on the Moon before America returns would be a defeat for the free world.
I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage Said 31 Oct 2025
Nine tenths of the cost of Mars Sample Return comes from a single planetary-protection requirement.
something like 90% of the complexity and cost of MSR is driven by a requirement that the samples “break the chain” on the way home
How to get samples back from Mars Said 13 Sept 2025
China's real weakness is not its economy but its geography: it imports almost all its oil across an ocean its navy cannot defend.
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Cheap synthetic fuel made from sunlight and air would help China more than America, because it frees China from the oil it has to import.
It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Building a lot of high-speed rail is not a sign that a country is good at building, it is a sign that it is bad at allocating capital.
I would never like hold up a flag saying I'm really good at building highspeed trains. Like that is just a sign that you're really bad at capital allocation.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
China's advantage in solar manufacturing is neither cheap labour nor a friendlier business environment: the first is gone and the second was never true.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
The United States could localise the entire solar supply chain, from dirt to finished module, in two years or less if it started today.
And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
The binding constraint on the AI build-out is chips, not power, which is why not having a solar panel factory will never be on the critical path.
They're focused on the chips, right? Because they understand like the key bottleneck is the chips, not the solar power, right?
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Natural gas can power the first gigawatt of data centres a year but not the fiftieth, because every input behind it runs into a supply limit.
We're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Large captive loads like data centres will go back to building their own power plants, the way aluminium smelters once did.
you're going to have to build your own power plant for them, which is how it used to work. Like if you if you had an aluminum plant back in the day, you would be building your own power plant for it as well.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Ten cents of electricity generates a thousand dollars of economic value in AI, so the price of power barely matters to the labs.
well their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Nobody will finance new gas turbine factories, because paying one off takes twenty years of a market that solar and batteries will already have taken.
You you also don't know like in order to make that money back, you have to then operate that plant at that capacity for 20 years, right? And if I was looking at the same charts as they're looking at right now, I'd say what are the odds that in 25 years time we can produce gas turbines at a price that is relevant in a world where solar is already at its current price and batteries at a price where they're already like you cannot win.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Solar's growth is not merely continuing but accelerating, and the rate of that acceleration is itself still rising.
It is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Within a few years, the majority of newly broken-ground data centres will be mostly solar-powered.
So I think within a few years we'll probably see that like the majority of new DCs that are going in will be mostly solar
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
A solar-powered data centre can cut its power draw a great deal while giving up very little compute, which is how it survives a run of bad weather.
actually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just like you can dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or or um or training.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
An off-grid data centre needs nothing connecting it to the world but an optical fibre — no transmission line, no interconnection, no grid at all.
But then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Tariffs are beside the point in the energy race with China; what is actually costing America is environmental regulation, and Texas is out-deploying California ten to one because of it.
In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Covering desert in solar panels is good for the desert: it shades the ground, holds moisture, and would pay for reversing desertification.
And the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves like soil moisture retention. Um there like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it and that would pay for the process.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
If the industrial stack is not off fossil fuels within ten or twenty years, the country gets poor twice over — the way Britain did when its coal ran out, and again when Florida floods.
the meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way you UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
The average distance an electron travels between where it is generated and where it is consumed is going to fall radically.
So it's just very clear that like the average distance the electron is going to travel between generation and consumption is going to decrease in the future pretty radically.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
The hyperscalers are not sensitive to the cost of power at all; they are sensitive only to whether power is available.
central takeaway is that is that the hyperscalers are not power cost sensitive they are power availability sensitive
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
Every industrial revolution is the same move — routing around a bottleneck — and the bottleneck before ours was the limit of what a human or a horse could digest.
And the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was uh metabolism, right? It's just like how much like oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for you know their their um their peasant overlord or whatever.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
An AI as good as a top researcher will not be priced like one, because it competes against the other labs rather than against humans.
because it's not competing against humans for most of those roles, it would be competing against the other labs, right? And so you'd actually see like the cost pushed down to, you know, a mult a small multiple of whatever the marginal production cost of those tokens is.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
All a thinking machine needs is a big slab of cheap silicon to make the power and a small slab of expensive silicon to do the thinking.
so what you actually need is a big slab of relatively cheap silicon to make the power and then a small slab of relatively expensive silicon to do the thinking.
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
With nearly free solar power, industrial processes optimised for efficiency should be redesigned to use far more power and run faster and cheaper instead.
You can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
The posthuman form is a square metre of silicon the thickness of a sheet of paper, floating in space, carrying one mind.
one square meter of silicon like like the thickness of a sheet of paper floating in space that's a future human form that's that's my final form
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer Said 15 Aug 2025
NASA is worth saving.
I believe NASA is worth saving.
NASA Is Worth Saving Said 12 Jun 2025
Today's NASA is a shadow of the agency it once was.
It is clear, however, that today’s NASA is but a shadow of its former self.
NASA Is Worth Saving Said 12 Jun 2025
Now that Starship flies, we should build the largest space telescope physics allows.
With the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space telescope.
It Is Time To Build The Monster Scope Said 30 Nov 2024
A kilometre-wide telescope assembled in space out of mass-produced mirror satellites would cost about what JWST cost.
The same as JWST, only 150 times wider and 22000 times more sensitive.
It Is Time To Build The Monster Scope Said 30 Nov 2024
NASA has deferred its next great telescope so far that the people who would build it will have retired first.
Current PhD students will be nearing retirement by the time these missions fly.
It Is Time To Build The Monster Scope Said 30 Nov 2024
Below about a thousand dollars a kilowatt of capital cost, the right way to run a plant is intermittently on raw solar with no batteries at all.
For loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.
Solar and batteries for generic use cases Said 9 Nov 2024
Past a point it is cheaper to overbuild solar than to add batteries, because a battery kept for the rare bad day is barely used.
A battery that’s discharging every day gets great utilization, but one that’s only there in case the sun doesn’t come up for two days in a row, barely gets used.
Solar and batteries for generic use cases Said 9 Nov 2024
A solar panel is a manufactured object that produces wealth rather than consuming it, at a hundred times the rate of the best farmland.
Inert glass rectangles that, placed on the ground, print out wealth, at roughly 100x the rate of the best farm land.
Solar and batteries for generic use cases Said 9 Nov 2024
NASA's Space Launch System has consumed more than a hundred billion dollars and delivered almost nothing.
Four years on, the program has consumed another $20b with nothing to show for it.
SLS is still a national disgrace Said 2 Oct 2024
An organisation that compromises its technical integrity on its flagship programme loses the ability to keep it anywhere else.
This is symptomatic of an agency who, compromising their technical integrity on their flagship program, subsequently lost the ability to maintain technical integrity anywhere else.
SLS is still a national disgrace Said 2 Oct 2024
Without SpaceX, neither the United States nor Europe would have adequate access to space of its own.
But for SpaceX, both the US and Europe would lack adequate strategic access to space.
SLS is still a national disgrace Said 2 Oct 2024
NASA's flagship programmes eat the budget of the robotic science missions that actually make the discoveries.
SLS, like JWST before it, eats everything in its path, meanwhile NASA hasn’t sent a single mission to Venus since 1989.
SLS is still a national disgrace Said 2 Oct 2024
Mars Sample Return as designed is too complicated, too slow and too expensive to succeed.
The brief summary is that MSR’s architecture, pictured below, is incredibly complicated, slow, and expensive.
What is going on with Mars Sample Return? Said 26 Nov 2023
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
Permitting Reform Or Death Said 10 Nov 2023
Environmental permitting now causes more environmental harm than it prevents, because what it delays is the clean thing replacing the dirty one.
The primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.
Permitting Reform Or Death Said 10 Nov 2023
Delay in permitting clean energy kills more Americans every year than the September 11 attacks did.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 killed 2996 people in a day of singular horror. Our ongoing indifference to regulatory inefficiency, considering only the area of green energy development, kills more people every year – more than 10 people per day, and that’s only within the US.
Permitting Reform Or Death Said 10 Nov 2023
There is almost no lower-impact use of low-value land than covering it with solar panels.
In summary, it is hard to imagine a lower impact use of low-value land than solar development.
Permitting Reform Or Death Said 10 Nov 2023
Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.
Cheap solar is the unlock that brings human progress and climate action from the realm of fundamental incompatibility to complimentary inevitability.
Radical Energy Abundance Said 11 Oct 2023
Every doubling of the solar built worldwide has cut its price by 30 to 40 per cent, and that learning rate is why the price keeps falling.
Per doubling of production, costs have fallen a consistent 30-40% since 1970, but it’s only in the last few years that this price has become competitive with legacy electricity generation
Radical Energy Abundance Said 11 Oct 2023
Solar has got cheaper faster than even its most optimistic forecasters expected.
A number of commentators have consistently predicted that solar cost improvements will level out “this year” since about 1990, and yet if anything deployment, cost decline, and the learning rate have only improved.
Radical Energy Abundance Said 11 Oct 2023
The end state of the grid is not a fifth solar backed by spinning generation, but twice the demand in solar with days of storage behind it.
The logical end state of this displacement is not some hybrid grid with around 20% solar backed up by spinning generation, but a much more dynamic, versatile grid with around 200% solar generation and hours to days or weeks of battery storage, fully decoupling time of generation and consumption.
Radical Energy Abundance Said 11 Oct 2023
Beliefs others hold too
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money. 3 hold this
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
Permitting Reform Or Death Said 10 Nov 2023
A Chinese crewed landing on the Moon before America returns would be a defeat for the free world. 2 hold this
I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage Said 31 Oct 2025
Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm. 2 hold this
Cheap solar is the unlock that brings human progress and climate action from the realm of fundamental incompatibility to complimentary inevitability.
Radical Energy Abundance Said 11 Oct 2023
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
22 June
18 June
- The enormous size of the oil and gas market drives adoption of synthetic fuel productionOriginally posted at the Terraform blog June 16 2026. One of the underrated joys of hardware tech development is having the opportunity to tell and retell the story until it gradually becomes less mysterious. To me, wha…
10 June
- How to build a crazy awesome Australian immigration systemThe Australian immigration system must exclude dickheads, bullshitters, and bludgers. This post has been inspired by Joe Walker’s recent set of three exemplary interviews (Martin Parkinson (former Treasury, author of 20…
8 May
-
Starship promises a near future with launch costs to LEO of perhaps $100/kg.
-
At even $500/kg, launch cost is only 5% of the total satellite deployment cost, so a lunar mass driver is unlikely to drastically improve the economics of space-based AI, by reducing launch costs.
21 April
- Australian DynamismThis post has benefited from generous contributions from Austin Vernon, Malcolm Davis, Sam D’Amico, and others who do not necessarily endorse the conclusions of this piece. I will follow Australian spelling conventions…
16 April
- Australia will run an overt command economy by 2040Australia’s Fiscal Point of No Return Last September I wrote about Australian economic stagnation — how taxation past the Laffer curve’s point of peak growth, zero public sector productivity improvement since 2001, and…
13 March
- Garmin watch facesI have recently been using Claude Code (Opus 4.6) to do a variety of software projects. One was the completion of an ill-fated attempt to create a custom watch face for my Garmin Epix Pro 47 mm. MidJourney produced this…
3 March
- Notes on the Fermi ParadoxI recently realized I hadn’t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note. The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as “where are they?” is a question…
10 February
-
Was
Furthermore, I believe it’s very unlikely that space-based manufacturing or mining could be lucrative enough to fund the venture.
Now
Today, exploding demand for power-intensive AI applications provides enough of an upside to justify producing components in space, providing the economic engine necessary to justify and fund the trillions of dollars necessary to build and sustain space factories.
-
Starship can lift orbital power generation to about 100 GW with perhaps 10,000 launches per year, or about one per hour.
-
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
30 January
- Direct Current Data CentersCasey Handmer, Matt Weickert Originally posted at the Terraform Blog. This post explains our current views on how humanity will achieve Kardashev Level 1 status by exploiting the full energy resources of an entire plane…
Nothing matches.