Casey Handmer

You can now enjoy a colored relief map render of this dataset streamed through Google Earth. Download the .kml file (drive.google.com/file/d/1bS1R9M…) and open it in your Google Earth Pro client. Enjoy!

@duncancampbell Cool idea!

An opportunity exists to add 75 GWs of additional US inference compute, quickly, affordably, and in a manner local communities will celebrate rather than fight. A terrawatt of solar projects are stuck in the bureaucratic morass contraining our economy known as interconnection queues. A ton of these projects will withdraw from the queue and abandon their plans simply because they can't wait any longer. It costs money to sit there and do nothing. If retooled for 95%+ uptime off-grid AI data centers, these projects could support something like 150 GW of compute. Cut that in half because a bunch of projects are fake or shitty. Still, 75 GW of compute. THAT'S A LOT OF COMPUTE, EXTREMELY FAST, INCREMENTAL TO ALL CURRENT PLANS. Then hook em' up to the grid a few years down the line to trade all of that overbuilt solar and battery capacity (which will lower people's bills) for getting to 99.99% uptime at the data center. The solar resource is there. The land is buildable. The permitting can be done. And the grid is there, just eventually. And these data centers would alievate all of the typical local objections: - they don't raise your electric or gas bill - they actually will lower it in the near future - they don't pollute your local air via a combustion power plant - they don't make a ton of noise via a combustion power plant - they don't need to use abnormal amounts of water - they wont be gigantic 1 GW collosus concrete buildings that upon merely observing you become depressed. it'll be just a bunch of solar farms with modular compute boxes scattered throughout. sheep will graze the glass under the panels. it'll be chil. "But Duncan, there's no way you could build enough storage. It would have to be so expensive." If you design this from first principles rather than copy typical banker-style solar project designs (direct current, dense & minimal solar racking, modular compute, etc.) the LCOE can be < $150/MWh. That's fine. Deals are clearing at that level already. "But Duncan, everyone wants 1 GW sites. A ton of 25 MW compute sites simply wont due." Not for inference. It's only training that needs giant coherent clusters. Historically hyperscalers have wanted all compute to be fungible between traning and inference, but that is quickly changing as they witness the massive wave of inference headed their way. "But Duncan, 95-99% uptime isn't good enough! Inference must be 100% uptime!" Nah. This is all incremental, so 95% is a hell of a lot better than 0%. And its just 95% for a few years while you wait to hook up to the grid. For now if you must get 100%, then dedicated your GW scale traning site to supply the remaining 5% on a handful of winter nights. And inference demand shapes are biased toward the daytime anyway. It'll be fine. "But Duncan, I have no imagination. I can't think beyond what has already been proven. Who will the offtakers be? Will it be bankable? I'm feeling anxious!!" We're already short on inference compute and AI has touched less than 1% of the economy. If you can't see where things are going I can't help you. Solar and batteries are the only massively scalable option we have. The grid bottleneck is here. The gas prime-mover bottleneck is here. The EPC bottleneck is here. We need a new way. And keep in mind, the above only describes retooling existing in-development solar projects for a quick win. There would be many many more GWs of opportunity beyond this if we develop new additional solar projects on top of that.

@robinhanson Economics papers published.

Show me actually-available concrete numerical measure per person that in practice better tracks their value given to others than does wealth.

Creating wealth is one of our key signals that you have given value to others. What other signals do you suggest that we use instead?

@paulg Exactly, or over?

I agreed to get a Phil Foden haircut if 17 yo gets 1550 on the SAT. For people outside the UK, this is the risk I'm taking here:

@joebarnard @thejackbeyer It's your fault

How can I tweet about how excited I am for Artemis II without jinxing it

This paper is a remarkable achievement from @gerardgholland and @JudeBlik. Raises the bar for the discussion of liquid fuels in Australia. It covers everything... from the military contingencies to refinement technologies. 60 pages. A 🧵to explore. 1/

@PalmerLuckey @NathanJRobinson Imagine being praised by this creep.

@NathanJRobinson Hey Nathan, there are quite a few false claims in this piece, but two very easily correctable ones: I was fired in 2017, not 2018, and calling me The Silicon Valley War King is pretty dumb given that I hate Silicon Valley and live 400 miles away from it.

I realize the title of "worst billionaire in America" is highly competitive, but I wrote about why I think Silicon Valley "war king" @PalmerLuckey deserves the prize: currentaffairs.org/news/palmer-lu…

Do any of my friends in New Zealand know Harvey Weake?

@peterrhague I think it's the same.

@CJHandmer I think he means reducing the TLI delta V by using the high earth orbit

Free return trajectories were first used for lunar flight in 1968, 47 years before KSP was released

@nanshisweets Yes, they do!

日本語の投稿がアメリカの人に翻訳なしで届くようになったって本当ですか！？みなさん、サンクスギビングデーに本当にパンプキンパイを食べているのか、日本語で質問できるってことですか！？

@Noahpinion They tried this but it was illegal in Britain.

They should try having Grok automatically translate Australian tweets to English and see what our countries can learn from each other

@patrickc I always just mapped your laces to a Dilbert tie phenomenon. Too much manic energy to remain contained by mere string.

There are two ways of tying a standard shoelace knot, based on the relative handedness of the two half-knots, and the correct one basically never comes undone. I assume everyone else knows this and has been gently pitying me as I ignominiously retie my flailing laces, but sharing here just in case.

You're trying to figure out how to kill astrophage. I'm trying to figure out how to make astrophage. We are not the same.

@nicholasjarboe @DanFriedman81 Gray war. Not just because of the hair color of the boomers pushing it forwards.

@CJHandmer @DanFriedman81 We called the one with the USSR the "Cold War". We don't have names for the current Cold Wars with Russia and China.

The atomic bomb changed the way nations conducted war. Powerful nations held back because they did not want to risk engaging in conflicts where these horrors could occur. The Soviets lost a war to an inferior force in Afghanistan and America lost in Vietnam, because neither superpower was willing to escalate in ways that could risk direct conflict between them. The limits and rules powerful nations placed on themselves — the concept of “war crimes” and the “rules based international order” were created to prevent catastrophic wars and have held up since then. But those rules will not remain the rules if inferior forces start droning Americans. These people mistake our restraint for weakness and literally don’t understand that the only reason a country like Iran can survive a war with with us is our self-imposed limits on the horrors we inflict on our enemies. And if they do something bad enough, those limits won’t be there anymore.

@benschrauwen Do you want to model MTG as well?

100% solar-powered AI datacenters are the unlock for accelerating the roll-out of synthetic fuels. @CJHandmer's recent post terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/dir… made a great economic case for the indisputable fully solar AI datacenter future. This requires massive solar overcapacity to be deployed and can directly feed into low-capex Terraform-style chemical plants. It increases IRR of the project and curbs our reliance on fossil fuels! Added AI compute to the terraform-simulator.com

@erfmufn Glad to see you're still surrounded by machines and wires and stuff.

I’m in the ICU because they had to crack a rib, deflate a lung, remove the cancer region and essentially delete my stomach. On the bright side, I’ll never need Ozempic.

@GhostOfFrederic @danaen803 @TerraformIndies @elonmusk @robert_zubrin Yes

@CJHandmer @danaen803 @TerraformIndies @elonmusk @robert_zubrin Can you also turn it into dimethyl ether...?

I have referred to using ISRU CH4 to jumpstart space manufacturing without the need for Dead Dinosaurs (oil), @CJHandmer @TerraformIndies are doing the hard part to develop systems, but how does this work generally? @elonmusk @robert_zubrin How is synthetic CH4 turned into plastics for manufacturing - @grok grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5…

@beffjezos @elonmusk Antiproton catalyzed fission.

@CJHandmer @elonmusk got any priors?

2035: Ok Solar Grok swarm, design me an antimatter-based interstellar drive to make civilization multi-stellar. Make no mistakes.

@beffjezos @elonmusk The answer won't be subtle.

@elonmusk The solution will likely demand more computation and thought than all of human civilization has cumulatively generated until this day. Something the Kardashev II space-based AI cluster will hopefully figure out for us. It's why we need to build it.