Conor Toolan

25 years in energy, clean tech and various startups.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

This isn't crazy at all, it's just outside of most people's experience.

You just have to supply the relevant information, so people can understand.

Here, I'll do it myself.

(You should pay me more for this.)

Picture a jar. Not a special jar that I have to explain to you. Just an ordinary jar.

Put some gold in it. Just a little bit, ground to the consistency of fine sand.

Now some iron.

And some uranium. Don't worry, it's not very radioactive in this state. You can touch it with your hands. Just pour it in.

Now some tungsten. Surprisingly heavy, huh?

Some platinum.

Then just keep adding other heavy elements. Sticking to the useful ones. Should be pretty easy. They're all useful for something.

Jar about half full? Now pour in some really fine sand. Put a lid on it.

Now shake the jar for 4 billion years. Don't worry, it's just an imaginary jar, and an imaginary 4 billion years, you're not going to get bored or anything.

Now reach your fingers into the jar, and fish out a nugget of gold, or tungsten, or iron.

Oh, wait. You can't. It's all at the bottom. Under a thick layer of sand.

Can you picture it? Are you picturing it clearly? Close your eyes if it helps. Wait, no, open them again so you can read this.

That jar is Earth.

All the heavy stuff has sunk to the core. Where you can't get it.

Now smash the jar on the floor, and pick up the precious metals and the useful ones.... easy, right?

The smashed jar is asteroids.

Right now, your brain is saying "Oh, I see, he's talking about asteroid mining. He's saying we're going to go out and mine asteroids."

No.

I'm saying we already are.

When the Earth was molten, all the heavy stuff sunk to the core. We covered this. So how are we mining heavy stuff on Earth right now?

The answer is that we are mining asteroids.

We are mining asteroids that hit the Earth after it stopped being molten. So the stuff in them stayed on the surface. Pretty much every mine on Earth is an ancient asteroid strike.

Now think of all the asteroids in the solar system. Divide them into two categories.

The first category is the ones that have already hit Earth, sometime in the past.

The second category is the ones that haven't.

I'll save you the trouble of asking an AI. The first category is about .001%. The second is about 99.999%.

Everything you have, everything you own, everything you ever made, everything that your entire civilization is made out of, unless it's made of wood or entirely out of light elements.... it all comes from that .001%.

The 99.999% is out there in the rest of the solar system.

Now do you understand?

You, and I, and Elon Musk, and your sweet old granny, all of us, we grew up under conditions of grinding material poverty. We just don't see it that way because we have nothing else to compare it to.

We're used to it.

Are you starting to get the idea? Good, but we're not done yet. Now we're gonna talk about energy.

Here on Earth, we pull hydrocarbons out of the ground and burn them for energy. We could build fission reactors, but dumbass hippies made some movies, and now the retarded theater kids who run our government won't let us do that. They want us to go back to windmills, because they are retarded.

Windmills suck. Hell, even hydrocarbons suck. Fission is okayish, but the real energy source, the only one that matters in the long run, is hydrogen fusion.

On Earth, we can't really build fusion reactors that actually produce energy, despite the best efforts of engineers. That's not because the engineers are dumbasses like the theater kids. No, engineers are smart. They still can't do it because it's really really hard, unlike running a government.

Perhaps someday they'll succeed, but in the meantime, we're stuck burning hydrocarbons, until we hang all the theater kids and build fission plants instead.

But in space, there's a giant free fusion reactor waiting for us. In fact, we've been using it for millions of years. We call it the "sun".

In space, energy is free.

Oh, you have to invest in some solar panels, and they're only useful close to a star, but that's just nitpicky little details. Basic idea is that there's no power bill.

Build solar panels once, run 'em almost forever. On Earth, solar panels suck, and they're only useful for grid independence.

But in space, with nothing between you and the star but, well, space, then solar panels are awesome. And all the material and energy you need to build them is right there for the taking.

So, cheap material, free energy.

What else does a civilization need?

Computation? Well, guess what you can build a lot of with cheap material and free energy.

What this really all boils down to is that the only thing Earth has going for it is that it's a really nice place to build your house.

It's a crappy place to build a mine or factory.

The total value of everything off Earth — and I'm just talking about the solar system, not the rest of the universe — exceeds the total value of everything on the Earth by eleventy-billion percent.

In the future, most of us will continue to live on Earth, unless we really screw it up by not hanging all the theater kids. But all the mining, all the manufacturing, all the making the stuff, and all the making the stuff that makes the stuff, will happen in space.

And there will be a lot more of it.

All we have to do is get the tools we need from down here where we built them, to up there where we need them. So that we can build more tools out there, more and more and more of them, forever.

There's only one snag.

It's really hard to get things off Earth. We haven't really done much of it until very very recently.

SpaceX is the "very, very recently". SpaceX now owns about 80% of humanity's lift-to-space capacity, and no one else is even close.

That's 80% of the pipeline to infinite wealth. And first dibs on all the real estate out there, too.

In the old West, the railroads were money trees, because they didn't just own the transport, they owned the destination.

And there's about to be a frontier again, except this one's bigger, and it comes with a built-in second industrial revolution.

Make sense now?

[Constantin Gurdgiev @GTCost]

Planning will take EUR5B in legal & consultancy bills & swallow 17 years. Construction will eat up EUR73B & run 28.6 years. Starting the plant will cost EUR12B, require 10 years worth of pensions negotiations for the unions. By which time & spend the new plant will be obsolete.

[Paul Sommerville @PaulSommerville]

Thread re overspending and #HowIrelandWorks
1 A friend, a forensic accountant, was asked by branch of HSE to do a review on a small area of business- he took a year to do it. He asked me to read the report for spelling and make sure it was presented professionally.

[Conor Toolan @ctoolan]

This is a clever idea

[jeffmcmorris @jeffmcmorris]

@unlimited_ls These companies need the same three strikes rule as creators have. File three false claims and you are banned from ever claiming copyright. You also lose all of your revenue and it is given to the people you falsely accused. This would end this abuse.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

This is an excellent report:

- Indemnify developers against judicial review delays so they can keep building while JRs are ongoing.
- Raise the Aarhus cost cap and peg it to crowdfunded amounts, and limit challenges to once instead of thrice.
- Allow nuclear power stations to pay into a nature fund to comply with the Habitats Regulations, instead of the £700m fish disco at Hinkley Point C (£700m!!).
- Approve reactor designs on a once-and-done basis so we can build fleets of reactors instead of doing them one by one.
- Allow nuclear plants to be sited on old coal power plants to take advantage of existing National Grid connections, and re-use old nuclear sites like Hartlepool.
- Scrap regulatory justification.
- Stick to international standards on radiation instead of forcing companies to endlessly re-invest productivity gains in lower and lower levels.

This is basically as good as it gets within the current system. Anyone who cares about British prosperity should get behind it: whether the future is re-industrialisation, AI, or something else entirely, we will need cheap, clean, reliable electricity to succeed.

[Fiona @FionaSmall]

One of the greatest brand name mistakes was the Irish airline carrier being called Aer Lingus when Éireplane was right there

[Nick Foley @nhfoley]

This sentiment always leaves me disappointed at how little people appreciate the wonders of modern engineering & manufacturing.

Yes luggage wheels could have existed earlier (in fact they did, metal wheels could be found on trunks since their inception) but they fundamentally didn't scale because the materials & methods needed to make them not suck were not invented or were expensive.

Small wheels that pivot & roll smoothly, aren't noisy, don't scuff surfaces, have reasonable durability all require cheap precision molding of high strength, low-friction polymers for multiple bearing features /axes per wheel, combined with a reasonably high toughness, low-marking rubber for the exterior tread. Usually these parts are co-molded, as well.

These attributes just didn't exist widely in consumer manufacturing until at least the 80s, and the full diffusion through supply chains probably took 1-2 decades.

You could have made them earlier; people did! But the cost/benefit was bad.

[Scottish Development International @ScotDevInt]

Securing a £9.2 million investment, Dublin-headquartered Subsea Micropiles plans to further develop its anchor technology and build a manufacturing facility in Scotland, unlocking opportunities and cost savings for floating wind developers.
#ScotlandIsNow
https://t.co/2H4sXQsKPA

[Business Post @businessposthq]

Subsea Micropiles, a Dublin-based company that produces more environmentally-friendly foundations and anchors for offshore operators, has secured £9.2 million (€11.15 million) to expand operations in Scotland https://t.co/fGdUA4scrr

[Aubrey Strobel @aubreystrobel]

Microsoft will literally invent a new form of matter instead of fixing Teams

[Conor Toolan @ctoolan]

@QuixoticQuant has done a great job of using (analysing) publicly-available energy sector data to tell a story.

[Aidan Morrison @QuixoticQuant]

I can't keep a lid on this any longer.

Remember @AEMO_Energy released this in response to the 2nd article from @clairlemon?

"reflects whole of system costs".

Right.

So I opened the 60MB zip file, and found the relevant workbook and sheet... 🧵 1/

https://t.co/BzjwX8w9Xk

[Tamás Görbe @TamasGorbe]

The geometric meaning of the inverse trig functions arcsin and arccos

They are actual *arc* lengths.

[Conor Toolan @ctoolan]

Irish tech firm Subsea Micropiles is to provide 5 high-load anchors under this innovative, £20m+ demonstration project being supported by the UK government. Floating wind is going to be a huge driver of offshore wind - and every turbine needs anchors.

https://t.co/aMrNUu9q2O

[sinead @ToolanSinead]

Very disappointing that inclusion doesn’t continue to Leaving Cert. ALL our children have a right to an education. @CityofDublinETB @EducateTogether @Finian_McGrath @_IHREC

[Conor Toolan @ctoolan]

@pliddy Home alone, The Holiday

[Toby Gilbert @DrTobyGilbert]

Exciting milestone for renewable energy in SA!

Solar meets 100 per cent of South Australia demand for first time https://t.co/KWiP9eK5GN via @renew_economy

[Conor Toolan @ctoolan]

@FriedrichHayek The invisible hand. (Too obvious?)

[Conor Toolan @ctoolan]

Fossil fuel as a form of intermittent generation

[Jenny Chase @solar_chase]

Vontobel reckons Vestas' footprint of 2.62 million tons of CO2 in 2018 made wind turbines which will save 235 million tons of CO2 over 20 years.