☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

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Cake day: March 30th, 2020

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  • It really is inspiring to see this stuff, and I agree regarding showing failures as well. It gives people a more realistic idea of the challenges involved. China has the opportunity to use space as a big national vision for technological advancement. This is a frontier that we’re just starting to explore, and it’s at the bleeding edge of our technological advancement. There’s just something that calls to us collectively in the idea of establishing a foothold somewhere new.

    There’s a huge opportunity with the moon base China’s planning in 2030s. I imagine it’ll get a huge number of people excited to go into STEM fields and could really kickstart a new space race where we actually start making serious outposts on the moon. When the US did their moon landing, they had no further vision beyond just planting their flag and going home. I really hope China will use the base as a start of a program to create permanent presence on the moon.

    There’s so much that could be done from there. If manufacturing can be set up to mine and process resources on site, then moon could act as the gateway to the rest of the solar system. Launching spacecraft from the moon is way easier than launching from Earth, and eventually it would even be possible to build a space elevator there. Since surface gravity is low, the engineering requirements for constructing a lunar elevator system can be met using materials and technology already available. At that point, sending stuff to orbit becomes extremely cheap. This would facilitate construction of large habitats in space, and space ships that are designed to stay in orbit permanently.



  • Looks like China’s approach is going to be to us a particle accelerator instead. A lot of the complexity in ASML machines comes from the fact that they need them to be portable in order to ship them to clients around the world. Since China’s goal is to produce chips domestically, this isn’t a constraint. The accelerator approach also has several advantages over ASML approach:

    Compared with current ASML EUV technology, SSMB is a more ideal light source. It has a higher average power and higher chip production output with lower unit cost.

    ASML creates an EUV source from laser-produced plasma, where strong laser pulses are projected to liquid microdroplets of tin. The laser crushes the droplets and produces EUV pulse light during the impact. After complex filtering and focusing, an EUV light source with a power of about 250W is produced.

    Before reaching the chip, the EUV beam undergoes reflection from 11 mirrors, each causing about a 30 per cent energy loss. As a result, the power of the beam is less than 5W when reaching the wafer. This can become an issue when manufacturing turns to 3nm or 2nm.

    SSMB technology avoids such concerns. SSMB beams achieve a higher output power of 1000W, and due to its narrow bandwidth, fewer reflecting mirrors are needed, which naturally generates higher terminal power.

    https://archive.ph/NrC6B


  • That’s the most hilarious part of all this. The whole unravelling started when NATO refused to respect Russia’s red lines in Ukraine. Before the war, it was simply taken as a given that NATO was the strongest military force in the world, and that anybody who dared stand against it would be swiftly crushed. Western economic system was considered to be central to the global economy, and any countries that were cut off from it were left in dire straights.

    Nobody, including Russia, wanted to challenge either of these assumptions. Yet, once they were put to the test, it became quickly apparent that neither of these notions held much water. At this point there’s no way to put toothpaste back in the tube because the collapse of western led world order is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. No country actually wanted to be subjugated by the west, they just didn’t have a choice before. Now that this choice materialized in from of BRICS, we see countries rushing to join a new economic bloc. Meanwhile, western military presence is being steadily pushed out of Africa and West Asia.