Charlie Stross
Charlie StrossThis is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.
You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Tb NAS box that costs about £2000 and sucks less electricity than a laptop.
The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511
Charlie Stross"This paper presents implementations that match and, where possible, exceed current quantum factorisation records using a VIC-20 8-bit home computer from 1981, an abacus, and a dog.
We hope that this work will inspire future efforts to match any further quantum factorisation records, should they arise."
https://awful.systems/comment/8338469
Charlie Stross1/ Obviously—and immediately—all trains in and out of Edinburgh, Scotland's capital, are going to be delayed, because the nation's second busiest railway station, Waverley, was built on the drained Nor Loch—"a noxious swamp" where they used to drown witches—in the early 1840s. Obviously they tried to drown more than witches there, and a very peevish (and somewhat moist) undead sorcerer is awakening and will ruin the day of Edinburgh-Glasgow rush hour commuters.
Charlie Stross2/ That eldritch and terrifying thing you can see rising from the waters of Loch Ness is not an antediluvian sea monster: it's a necromancer's palace, complete with necromancer-in-residence.
Presently a company of spectral warriors mounted on nightmares will going to ride forth along the A82, sent to report back to their undead master about what ilk of giants built this uncannily wide, smooth road.
There will be a Range Rover accident …
Charlie StrossDERANGED MORNING URBAN FANTASY HIGH CONCEPT:
What if all of Scotland's lochs were replaced overnight—with liches?
Charlie Stross1/ Obviously—and immediately—all trains in and out of Edinburgh, Scotland's capital, are going to be delayed, because the nation's second busiest railway station, Waverley, was built on the drained Nor Loch—"a noxious swamp" where they used to drown witches—in the early 1840s. Obviously they tried to drown more than witches there, and a very peevish (and somewhat moist) undead sorcerer is awakening and will ruin the day of Edinburgh-Glasgow rush hour commuters.
Charlie StrossDERANGED MORNING URBAN FANTASY HIGH CONCEPT:
What if all of Scotland's lochs were replaced overnight—with liches?
Charlie StrossChina's Lanyue Lunar Module—their equivalent of the Apollo LM—underwent integrated landing and ascent tests this month (successfully): crew landing on the Moon scheduled for 2030:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/china_lunar_lander_test_success/
Charlie Stross#WritersCoffeeClub 11: Have you ever felt overwhelmed by a work of fiction?
No, because before I get overwhelmed I put the book down and walk away from it, never to return.
I'm not a professional critic, reviewer, or teacher: I don't have to put up with stupid shit in my fiction habit.
(EXCEPTION: I regularly feel overwhelmed by stuff I'm trying to write, but that's entirely self-inflicted and by the time it's ready for publication it's fixed.)
Charlie StrossOkay, now thinking we need to collapse the false vacuum and fire up a new universe with a MUCH SMALLER Planck scale in order to accommodate the tiny violin I'm going to be playing within the amended laws of physics
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/114994387563759875
Charlie StrossMuch cake, few baguette crusts, very Bourbon, wow! 🐶
🐶🐶
https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/114994801170567649
Charlie Stross400 years to Proxima Centauri means velocity of roughly 1% of c. To accelerate to that, then decelerate, takes energy on the order of 1-2% of the ship's rest mass.
Ship is 36 miles (50km) long.
So it obviously masses many gigatonnes (1 cubic kilometer of water—0.15 the density of steel—masses 1 billion tonnes). Conservatively this masses 10-100gt.
Fusion bomb yield is about 2% of the payload mass. Our current 10,000 H-bombs probably contain 1000kg of fuel.
/1
https://spacey.space/@nyrath/114992789210759955
Charlie Stross@nyrath@spacey.space Upshot: I think this thing will take 100-1000 years of our current worldwide civilizational energy budget to propel.
And at the other end? Congratulations: a colony of 2400 people is at least 3 orders of magnitude too small to sustain a self-training technology base able to service an autonomous space colony. (Because resupply with finished products is impossible at that range.)
TLDR: magic wands or scientific breakthroughs required.
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