- **Gravitricity vs flywheels**: A 100-kilotonne weight shaft yields only ~24 kWh, so participants judged it best for rapid-cycling demand buffering; fenn suggested co-locating high-speed vacuum flywheels in the same underground shafts for higher energy density.

- **Molecular nanotechnology debate**: MOFs (metal-organic frameworks) and SBUs (secondary building units) were discussed as modular scaffolds; genehacker described stamping-based epitaxial growth and “molecular 3-D printing,” while kanzure argued that assembling 100× larger polyhedral blocks could sidestep atomic-precision tooltips.

- **Open-access activism**: kanzure linked to Finland’s Freedom-of-Information lawsuit against Elsevier for subscription-fee disclosure, France’s decision to “pay twice” for open-access articles, and gwern’s survival analysis of 53 darknet black-markets.

- **Organ-donation economics**: Participants noted a $100 k+ market value for harvested organs and argued for compensating donors’ heirs, observing that multi-way kidney exchanges already require four simultaneous operating rooms.

- **Space habitat engineering**: fenn proposed eliminating windows in O’Neill/McKendree cylinders, piping sunlight via axial telescopes, and integrating flywheel energy storage with orbiting tethers to smooth solar-power delivery.

- **Whole-brain emulation timeline**: maaku’s cost model (k·O(N+S) compute, k≫1) puts real-time WBE in the late-2030s under Moore’s-law assumptions; he judged recursive AGI to arrive sooner, reducing WBE incentive.

- **AGI vs WBE forecasting**: maaku defended a 5–10-year “weak inside-view” timeline for CogPrime-style AGI, mapping Minsky’s Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine to the OpenCog CogPrime architecture (wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview).

- **OpenCog critique & reflective VM**: OpenCog was called “a grab-bag of narrow-AI C++ programs”; maaku advocated re-implementing subsystems inside a reflective virtual machine to enable self-improvement without human “mechanical-turk” intervention.

- **Ethics of uploading**: maaku warned of value drift and untrustworthy superintelligences; kanzure dismissed MIRI-style “FAI” concerns as anti-transhumanist obstruction, suggesting even partial brain simulations could accelerate AGI via “delete parts until it breaks” experiments.

- **Hardware note**: A $200 PCIe card delivering 1 TFLOP (2 T 32-bit multiplies/s, 8 GB on-board, 270 W TDP) was highlighted as potentially useful for large-scale neural simulations.