Casey Handmer

well, you can start solving problems.

It turns out that if you want to chemically reduce silicon, you can do it electrolytically, like with less efficiency and a bunch like under a hydrogen rich atmosphere or something.

And then, so one of the ways that silicon can be refined is by turning into silane, which is a silicon tetrahydride.

I'm not really a chemist, but I think that's right.

So SiH4, which is a gas.

It's actually like methane, but one down on the periodic table.

And don't breathe it though.

And then once it's a gas, you can filter it from all the contaminants, which don't form gases or can be separated by density, much like how uranium is sometimes enriched, but much, much less difficult.

And then heat it up to separate it back into pure silicon, where you can then precipitate out a...

I hadn't thought about that before, but there's this idea that evolution resulted in this continual ramification and complexification of the thermodynamic gradient.

So you start off with very simple RNA-based organisms, and then you get this industrial economy.

But it may be the case, and I don't have a strong reason to suspect one way or the other, that what we're seeing is the beginning stages of a collapse back towards the simplest possible thermodynamic to cognition stack, which is

We have fusion in stars and the inky blackness of space.

And that provides our temperature gradient.

And then the most efficient way to convert that into usable cognition is silicon.

Like literally electrons being pushed across the Fermi gap in a solar array and then taking the return path through some like set of gates, making decisions about things and then like beaming lasers to their friends saying, hey, I just made up a new meme.

creatures and then you might see like this big collapse um should i give you the opportunity to plug why uh why people should work for terraform yeah so actually just to give you introduction terraform is my day job it's a company i founded almost four years ago we are making synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air we are also working on other core primary materials stuff we also have a methanol process methanol and methane together uh

precursors to every hydrocarbon you could possibly want, another chemical with ammonia process, steel, desalination, and we can also make cement and a few other things.

So basically everything that the primary industry does except for glass and paper.

We are hiring.