Object Zero

Civilisation's Thermodynamic Corridor Below is the full series of articles, very happy to post this on a Friday. There are 5 parts: The Arena The Machine The Trajectory The Viability Problem The Implications This is a framework for how to survive and grow a civilisation living on the thermodynamic gradient between a stellar object and deep space (where we live). It is based on first principle axioms of physics, such as the laws of thermodynamics. It is grounded in geometric algebra and mathematical rigour. This is not sci-fi, this is the actual human condition. It is utterly fascinating when view through this framework. There is also a results register which I will attach below. Executive Summary x.com/Object_Zero_/s… Nomenclature x.com/Object_Zero_/s… Part 1 - The Arena 1.1 The Cosmological Reference Frame x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 1.2 System Boundaries x.com/Object_Zero_/s… Part 2 - The Machine 2.1 Civilisation as Assembled Matter x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 2.2 The Maintenance Requirement x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 2.3 The Waste Heat Ceiling x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 2.4 Information Entropy and the Landauer Floor x.com/Object_Zero_/s… Part 3 - The Trajectory 3.1 Maximum Power and the Evolutionary Ratchet x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 3.2 Inertia and the Integral x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 3.3 The Amplifiers: Money, Debt, and Governance x.com/Object_Zero_/s… Part 4 - The Viability Problem 4.1 The Temporal Hierarchy of Constraints x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 4.2 Viability Theory x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 4.3 Competitive Viability x.com/Object_Zero_/s… Part 5 - Implications 5.1 Fermi's Paradox and the Great Filter x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 5.2 The Problem in Manifold Space x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 5.3 The Choice x.com/Object_Zero_/s… 5.4 Our Corridor Out x.com/Object_Zero_/s…

@ajcdeane British people are poorer as a result of this fake project, and that is what they want. Once you realise that a lot of Brits want to be poor, and want their neighbours to be poor too… then British politics suddenly makes a lot of sense. It’s actually a very effective system.

We have spent £180m on plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge. The project is now scrapped. You can be for a tunnel & think spending is a good idea (even if you think the cost of planning is silly). You can be against a tunnel & think spending is a bad idea. But *nobody* can be for spending on this scale with zero result. And yet that is a peculiarly British outcome. Nobody will be reprimanded. Nobody will see their career affected. But that’s £180m of taxpayer money just wazzed up the wall. Totally without repercussions. Multiply this by airport expansions & train route plans and Thames crossings and power stations and other examples you can think of yourself, and… soon you’re talking serious money.

@MattLoszak Well done Matt.

Today, we unveiled our completed Critical Test Reactor facility. We will be turning this reactor on (a “zero power criticality”) well before July 4th! This is a commercial-scale system with enough fuel to produce 10 MW of electricity, and will someday soon power a co-located data center from one of our partners. Here’s what people saw today at our ribbon cutting: ✅ Reactor vessel ✅ Graphite as moderator ✅ Instrumentation and control ✅ Concrete shielding ✅ Building with crane ✅ Control room All designed and built by Aalo. And the nuclear fuel will be arriving any day now. One last step remains: the final DOE approval to turn the reactor on, which we expect to receive soon. DOE has been an incredible partner in this 2.5 year journey, working hard to support a number of companies pushing to advance US nuclear energy. Follow us to be the first to know when we turn this reactor on!

This means that around 3.5 - 4.0% of the world’s LNG supply was destroyed last night, in a single attack on a single site. It’s not the only site that has been attacked this week, and the attacks are ongoing and in both directions. You can see how just 6 or 7 missile strikes in this part of the world, can cripple the global economy for half a decade.

@quasistable @BenGrahamUK I think £460m is what the entire road cost, not this one bridge.

@Object_Zero_ @BenGrahamUK Ah fair, so this one is expected to still be a 50-100x waste - this makes sense

Britain is spending £460 million building a 60 metre wildlife bridge over the A417 dual carriageway in Gloucestershire, for animals to cross. That’s a £7.6 million per metre deer crossing. It would be funny if it wasn't our tax payer money being wasted, meanwhile real problems remain unfunded.

@quasistable @BenGrahamUK As I say… £5-10m is what it should cost.

Wait, we genuinely think that the damage caused by wildlife crossings on the motorway adds up to £0.5 BILLION over its lifespan? And on top of that, even if it does ‘pay for itself’ we believe that that’s the best use of a marginal £460 million, that there aren’t other uses we could put it to that would return the investment in terms of lives saved etc many more times over? Astonished if that’s actually true.

@1thWorldProblem @BenGrahamUK Yes, it’s corruption. You see it all over the world in other developing and third world countries.

@Object_Zero_ @BenGrahamUK These are money laundering operations.

@Cernovich The world doesn’t even have the steel supplies to rebuild this stuff quickly. It’s not regular steel. It’s all superduplex etc. This isn’t a virus, there’s no V shaped recovery from destroying global energy infrastructure.

Let’s hope this isn’t accurate.

@dlogosxyz @dwarkesh_sp It takes 10 years to create an engineer with 10 years experience. Nine women can’t produce a baby in a month.

@dwarkesh_sp Fewer than a thousand people at Carl Zeiss are a bottleneck for the entire AI industry. Does that feel like a solvable recruiting problem or something structurally different?

EUV machines are the most complicated tools humans make. Their supply chain has over 10,000 individual suppliers, and any one of them not scaling fast enough can bottleneck the entire AI industry. An EUV tool fires lasers at a tiny tin droplet three times in precise sequence, blasting it hard enough to emit EUV light. That light bounces off 18 multilayer mirrors onto the wafer. Meanwhile, the two platforms inside the machine - one holding the stencil, one holding the chip - are flying back and forth at 9Gs in opposite directions. The successive passes have to land on top of each other to within 3 nanometers. If any part of this is off, yield goes to zero. Take just one component. The mirrors are mostly supplied by Carl Zeiss, who have probably fewer than a thousand people working on them. In turn, Carl Zeiss rely on machines from Switzerland to deposit each of the layers, and use a coating process co-developed with a different German company. None of these companies have woken up. They’re gradually increasing production, but nowhere near the levels necessary for what the labs want by the end of the decade. @dylan522p predicts production can't scale beyond about 100 EUV machines per year by 2030, no matter how much money gets thrown at the problem. In the medium term this is the key bottleneck on scaling.

@RokoMijic TLDR, an AI fast take off is severely throttled by the European working time directive.

In a sense, we have nanotechnology. It just isn't Drexlerian. It's precise, wild and mechanical. "An EUV tool fires lasers at a tiny tin droplet three times in precise sequence, blasting it hard enough to emit EUV light. That light bounces off 18 multilayer mirrors onto the wafer. Meanwhile, the two platforms inside the machine - one holding the stencil, one holding the chip - are flying back and forth at 9Gs in opposite directions. The successive passes have to land on top of each other to within 3 nanometers. If any part of this is off, yield goes to zero."

@californiacoms @mmjukic Step 1: Assassinate the top religious leader of a 300 million strong branch of Islam that believes in martyrdom and declarations of jihad. Step 2: Negotiate.

@mmjukic Diplomacy?

There are only three options to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: (1) Sudden inexplicable rapid regime change with no civil war (2) Completely conquering every square inch of Iran with the U.S. military with no years-long insurgency (3) Massive air-naval drone reindustrialization

Naval Construction It’s increasingly likely we’re going to see an increase in naval construction as a means of delivering large swarms to a given theatre. It’s quite possible to build warships with 100,000 tonnes of displacement. It’s easy for such a vehicle to transport 10 million drones. Drones are superior to guns (on precision) and superior to missiles (on economics). Drones combine the economics of shells, with the precision of missiles. The challenge with drones is delivery into range. Naval construction is how this will be solved for many militaries. Someone is going to build the first swarm carrier and it might be a submarine version, an SSND. Increasingly what is going to matter is who has the tightest iteration cycles. Who can incorporate new technologies and platforms the fastest?

Any time you apply continental means (averages) to a strategy as nuanced as selecting industrial winners, you are just super-doomed to fail. You can start a company in the UK via the Companies House website, for £12, and it takes less than 10 minutes. Smart people haven’t stopped doing it. As soon as the government changes in 2029, a tonne of companies are going go from £50m valuations to £1bn valuations within a week. “Oh but I have a theory on ‘Europe-as-whole’, I detect cultural differences from 7,000 miles away.” No. The European scene is just capital starved, because of temporary government idiocy. Voters across the continent are pissed off. It’s a bargain window, and there’s 2 years left. If you think the UK suddenly can’t invent things, and doesn’t have new ideas, then you are just too far away to see the ground. Risk taking is sky high, everyone has their bags packed and their wealth liquid, because they anticipate extreme volatility, this is why everything is capital starved. It’s a tinder box. Whether this is released productively or destructively is yet to be seen, but “low risk culture” is just a total misdiagnosis that belongs in pre-2020.

Jacob Helberg says one of Europe’s biggest challenges to building companies is cultural: they’re just not risk-takers like Americans are. "It's really hard for Europe to put those pieces together because the culture in Europe has not been favorable to encouraging risk-taking, which is necessary—it's the lifeblood of starting a business." "You need to have a risk-taking culture—and then they have the unit economics problem where it's just really expensive to build stuff in Europe because your energy bills are really high. You have to spend a ton of money on legal fees before you even start." "It's not that starting things in Europe will be impossible, but they have major headwinds." "We have invested a lot of effort into having truthful, candid conversations with our friends in Europe to actually share our concerns." "When you actually care about someone, you can actually be candid with them. Clear is kind." "We care about Europe. We want them to be strong, and so we are trying to draw their attention to policy issues that we think are serious headwinds for them." @jacobhelberg with @eriktorenberg

@scievision369 @KersevanRoberto It also explains why HFT trading accesses a higher signal to noise ratio, and thus is more profitable than trading the same strategy at a lower bandwidth. But that’s a secret that a lot of the largest hedge funds depend on staying a secret. So you won’t ever find out about it.

The Shannon-Hartley theorem ✍️ This theory sets a strict limit on how fast we can send information through any noisy channel, like Wi-Fi, phone signals, or radio links. It states that there is a maximum amount of data we can reliably transmit per second without errors, regardless of how advanced our technology becomes. This limit relies on two simple factors: the channel's width, or bandwidth, which is like the size of a pipe carrying the data (a wider pipe allows for faster speeds), and the clarity of the signal compared to background noise, known as the signal-to-noise ratio (a strong signal in a quiet environment lets more data come through without errors). A wider channel directly increases speed; however, enhancing the signal's strength compared to noise is beneficial initially but leads to diminishing returns. This concept, introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948, explains why engineers strive to expand bandwidth and reduce noise in various systems, from 5G networks to satellite communications. It defines how quickly digital data can travel reliably in the real world.

Co-ordination isn’t impossible. It’s not tier 1 (laws of physics and math). The issue is that the mechanics of competition are rooted in Lotka which is tier 2, whereas human co-ordination is tier 3. So it’s not that no coordination is a physical fact, just that it’s extremely difficult to address tier 2 from a tier 3 control. In the defaults conditions of ignorance or apathy, tier 2 will dominate.

@Object_Zero_ feels like A8 + “no coordination between agents” is underpinning most of this? why should gradient access be monotone in Σ under price/queue/regulatory allocation? and what prevents coordination equilibria that leave slack (as we’ve seen in fixing ozone, whaling, acid rain)?

Sea Trials Sea trials, often called "shakedown cruises," are the final, essential testing phase for newly built or refitted watercraft, ranging from boats to submarines. They are conducted on open water to ensure seaworthiness, safety, and performance. They involve rigorous tests on speed, maneuverability, and machinery before final acceptance. What this often means is taking incredibly large vehicles and pushing them to their structural limits. The tests are extreme and impressive. These include full-power runs, emergency stop procedures, emergency steering tests, and stability checks. Yes. Even… a 240,000 hp power slide, with a double nuclear propulsed aircraft carrier. Actual image of CVN 72, during 2017 Atlantic sea trials.

@Brumbrits @chatswithem UK petroleum resources are owned by the Crown and up until 2023 were licensed for exploitation by HMG, to anyone who wanted to drill them.

@Object_Zero_ @chatswithem Who owns those resources?? The Natives of these islands? Uk Government which is an unlawful corrupt Corporation? Oil and Gas Corporations There's an abundance too, as 'fossil fuel' is Rockefeller B.S You don't find fossils past 20k feet Yet they drill at 35k feet

The UK North Sea The Uk government hasn’t issued any new drilling licenses since January 12, 2023. That’s no new licenses for 3 years and 2 months. Not one. When the Labour government took power in July 2024, they implemented a pledge to stop issuing new oil and gas exploration licenses for the North Sea. INEOS who own and operate the Forties Pipeline have said they can no longer make maintenance investments in it, as the government has rendered the industry inoperable. The UK has 280 offshore platforms and 20,000 oil and gas wells. There’s no capital to maintain anything, or reinvest, because the tax is excruciatingly high. This industry is on the brink of collapse, the pipelines are knackered and unmaintained, because of our own policy choices… as the world plunges headlong into a global energy crisis. Truly the most feckless, self-harming policy set in all of Europe, if not the world. I don’t think this is incompetence, nobody is that stupid, it looks more like sabotage. It’s also illegal to complain about the UK government, especially here on the internet. Embarrassing.

@rodolfor It’s just corruption. It’s a couple of billion pounds that will mostly go to a construction firm that someone’s uncle owns. It’s just some people embezzling the taxes of a poorly educated population. It’s quite common throughout the developing world.

The problem is that politicians read this drivel and then they give even more money to quantum computing research

@fakeceleb £500bn profit on £470bn revenue? Someone is deeply gullible.

@Object_Zero_ Oh won’t someone think of those poor, poor oil companies!

@UniofOxford The only energy secure nation is France.

'Staying the course on clean energy would not only save households three times as much money but render the UK truly energy secure for generations to come.' Maximising North Sea production would reduce bills by just £16 to £82 per year, say researchers from the Oxford Smith School ⬇️ theconversation.com/would-more-nor…