• Participants shared and discussed Jarzynski’s Santa Fe Institute lecture on “Irreversibility and the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the Nanoscale,” using it as a springboard to explore thermodynamic limits on computation and mind-uploading.

• A wide-ranging debate erupted over the ethics and logistics of mass-liberating pay-walled scientific literature, with proposals ranging from coordinated day-long scraping blitzes using thousands of university IPs to physical theft of publisher servers.

• Technical blueprints were floated for a P2P/browser-plugin hybrid that would transparently proxy paper requests through legitimate university credentials while caching and redistributing PDFs, aiming to replace Elsevier’s interface entirely.

• EZproxy credential leaks—often found on Chinese and Arabic forums via simple Google dorks—were identified as the weakest link in publisher defenses, prompting discussion of headless-browser scraping, VPS chaining, and even innocuous mobile apps that act as campus micro-proxies.

• Participants emphasized the need for real-time metadata capture (DOIs, bibliographic data) during any scrape to avoid past failures that produced unsearchable PDF dumps, and floated long-term curation models such as researcher-curated “best-of” paper lists or migrating peer-review to open platforms like PeerJ.

• Elsevier’s scale (≈2,500 journals, ≈10 million archived articles, 240 million yearly downloads) and its parent company’s former role in arms-trade expos were cited as justification for radical open-access proposals, including a wealthy university simply purchasing the publisher outright.

• Intel’s “sand-to-CPU” visualization and Tesla’s no-moving-parts fluidic diode (Tesla valve) were highlighted as exemplary instances of clear technical storytelling and elegant engineering, respectively.

• Simulation cosmology and the feasibility of “quantum archaeology” were debated, with participants dismissing Tipler’s Omega Point while seriously considering thermodynamic constraints on resurrecting past minds within a simulated universe.