- China is building an AI supercomputer network in space
- hermits who became medieval celebrities
- the new rules of subculture (podcast with the author of ANTIMEMETICS, which I’ve pre-ordered)
Tag: space
Assuming progress in industrial automation, humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, and space technology continues as currently envisioned by these industries, we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.
The Moon thus transformed will come to resemble something out of science fiction concepts of planet-sized factories or Factorio—a popular video game among engineers working on these very technologies. This level of compute would effectively turn our Moon into a planet-scale supercomputer and represent a giant leap in Man’s capacity to control our destiny.
That ACCELERANDO point.
“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”
Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
“Very long-term – at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.”
Published 2005, written circa 2001.
CONNECTED:
- I Should Probably Start Off With Something More Cheerful, But:
- The Endless Loop Of The Manfred Macx Media Diet
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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Joshua Rozells captures satellite pollution.
“There were satellite trails visible in almost every single photo,” he wrote on Instagram. “Instead of trying to get rid of them for a star trail, I decided to put the satellite trails together into a single image to show how polluted the night sky is becoming.”
‘The Vision’ is a genuine curiosity and, thanks to the creative talent assembled on both sides of the camera, a beguiling one. It was made for the BBC’s Screen Two strand (1985-98) by David Thompson, Norman Stone and William Nicholson, the producer-director-writer team which cut its teeth on documentaries for the Corporation’s religious broadcasting department before moving into drama with Martin Luther, Heritic (tx. 8/11/1983) and the award-winning Shadowlands (tx. 22/11/1985). In 1986 Thompson thought of a story about rightwing Christian fundamentalists setting up a satellite television network in Europe, with the aim of winning a perceived battle for the hearts, minds and political direction of the continent.
Stars Dirk Bogarde, Lee Remick, Helena Bonham Carter. BBC television. What an amazing thing.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
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Xiao Jiang. I don’t know if there is actually any rain outside that window, but the whole image reminds me of melancholy, disappointed rainy days from childhood.
Alex Robbins’ design process for this cover:
Imagine a Slushee composed of ammonia and water encased in a hard shell of water ice. Now picture these ice-encrusted slushballs, dubbed “mushballs,” raining down like hailstones during a thunderstorm, illuminated by intense flashes of lightning.
Planetary scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, now say that hailstorms of mushballs accompanied by fierce lightning actually exist on Jupiter. In fact, mushball hailstorms may occur on all gaseous planets in the galaxy, including our solar system’s other giant planets, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
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A British startup called Pulsar Fusion has come up with a wild new concept for a nuclear fusion-powered space rocket that, it claims, could significantly cut down the time it takes to travel to Mars in half.
As CNN reports, the UK Space Agency-funded company’s Sunbird rocket harnesses the power of nuclear fusion, the same process that powers stars, as a form of propulsion.
“It’s very unnatural to do fusion on Earth,” Pulsar founder and CEO Richard Dinan told CNN. “Fusion doesn’t want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that’s where it wants to happen anyway.”
It’s important to note that the propulsion device is still almost entirely theoretical.
The important takeaway here is probably “still almost entirely theoretical.” But I take heart that someone is even thinking about it at all. The planet has wasted decades on not thinking about that enough. Everything is too far away for old propulsion methods.
Getting to Mercury on solar sails alone:
Turns out, it’s as tough to drop inward into the inner solar system, as it is to head outward. The problem stems from losing momentum from a launch starting point on Earth. It can take missions several years and planetary flybys before capture and arrival in orbit around Mercury or Venus.
Now, a new proposal would see a mission make the trip, using innovative and fuel-efficient means.
The new proposal comes out of the Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshal Space Flight Center, and was presented at the 56th Lunar & Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) held at the Woodlands, Texas in early March 2025. Mercury Scout would be a Discovery-class mission.
The spacecraft would utilize a traditional launch carrier plus a kick stage booster to get it off the Earth and into a solar heliocentric orbit. The innovative part of the mission, however, is the large solar sail it would unfurl once it’s in space. This would be the spacecraft’s sole means of maneuvering and propulsion to reach and operate around Mercury.
Again, this is probably nowhere near happening. And probably never will, because it’s not the current direction of travel.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
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Daniel Martin Diaz Encodes Cosmic Questions into Geometric Paintings and Prints.
The “music” of starquakes—enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars—can reveal far more information about the stars’ histories and inner workings than scientists thought.
While it was getting ready to power down its Gaia spacecraft, the European Space Agency encountered some unusual resistance.
The spacecraft, which has been creating a highly detailed three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond, proved surprisingly difficult to kill.
“Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job,” said Gaia spacecraft operator Tiago Nogueira in an ESA statement. “But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off.”
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
Comments closedSome years back, Dr. Andrey Geim succeeded in levitating a frog through magnetic fields. Briefly, we lived in a world of hovering frogs. Following that, it was revealed that a parallel line of research has achieved the levitation of other small creatures through ultrasound. From my perspective, that was a strange day. Yesterday, animals were floating on music you cannot hear.
There’s a line in A E Van Vogt’s novel THE SILKIE, where it’s noted that the Silkies of the title, enhanced humans, have music that sounds like monotone drone to ordinary humans, because they can’t hear the ultrasonic variations built into it for superhuman Silkie ears. This connects with the minor cause celebre a while back concerning messaging devices with sonic tones designed to be inaudible to adults. Only young ears could pick up the sounds. It’s probably no coincidence that most people of my generation and beyond have had our hearing wrecked by loud music. I remember Kevin Shields gloating in an interview that all of us who listened to his band My Bloody Valentine’s “Feed Me With Your Kiss” with the volume cranked up have been rendered deaf as posts by the dissonance and feedback. Bastard.
I share a conviction with many that we live in a science fictional world. Not the one everyone expected, of course. But good science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect. Sf has never been about predicting the future. It’s been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition.
People have spoken at length over the years about the death of sf, and even of the death of futurism. This isn’t new. In the 1980s, grand masters of the form such as Robert Silverberg and Robert Sheckley talked of sf losing its way when the common visions of the form were abandoned: Silverberg in particular (author, curiously, of some of sf’s most depressing stories) spoke of the cyberpunk/radical hard sf landscape being one he did not choose to inhabit, and so turned to writing fantasy. Today, sf, like so many arts, is utterly fractured, with several competing movements, none of them gaining much traction, while sales slip, magazines struggle and the written genre slides out of general view, dragged down to Davy Jones’ locker by the bony hands of the Western.
I love science for the fiction in it. Every great scientific innovation has poetry in it. In a BBC TV play about the discovery of the DNA molecule, Jeff Goldblum as James Watson says upon seeing the assembled DNA double helix for the first time; “I knew it’d be pretty.”
The challenge in sf now is, to an extent, the one William Gibson met in PATTERN RECOGNITION by not writing sf. When we live in the science fiction condition, what’s left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer? If we’re living in the science fiction condition, why invent castles in the air? Especially when it turns out that the space elevator technology for reaching them will see you dead of radiation poisoning before you reach the top, as has recently been deduced — you can’t shield the elevator ribbon from the Van Allen belt, and if you shield the car you pay a weight penalty that not even an array of frog-levitators can alleviate…
(originally written 29 December 2006)
CONNECTED:
- LIFE STORY (1987) – the referenced tv play with Jeff Goldblum
- Unknown Physical Mechanisms On The Sun: A Talk At The Science Gallery, Dublin
- AGENCY, William Gibson
- Disappearing Books
“Our research contributes to the fascinating Galactic Center landscape by uncovering these slim filaments as an important part of material circulation,” summarizes Xing Lu, a research professor at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and a corresponding author of the research paper.
“We can envision these as space tornados: they are violent streams of gas, they dissipate quickly, and they distribute materials into the environment efficiently.” It remains unknown how these slim filaments initially arise, but shock processes emerge as a likely explanation, Yang’s team reports.
Space tornadoes in the core of the Milky Way. What the hell else would you want to know today?
Suni Williams and Butch Willmore’s splashdown was attended by dolphins.
Popular in European brothels between 1880 and 1905 – used as a timer, once the wax is consumed, the session ends.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit used a camera with low light and long duration settings to capture this Jan. 29, 2025, image of the Milky Way appearing beyond Earth’s horizon.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });At the time, the International Space Station was orbiting 265 miles above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile just before sunrise.
there’s a light
over at the frankenstein place
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“After six decades of effort, the origin of the mysterious highest-energy particles in the universe may finally have been identified,” says Farrar, a Collegiate Professor of Physics and Julius Silver, Rosalind S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor at NYU. “This insight gives a new tool for understanding the most cataclysmic events of the universe: two neutron stars merging to form a black hole, which is the process responsible for the creation of many precious or exotic elements, including gold, platinum, uranium, iodine, and xenon.”
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
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