- Interstellar commerce is argued to be economically implausible without faster-than-light (FTL) travel, because the energy cost of accelerating cargo to 0.1 c is ~US$5 million per kg—200× the current price of platinum—making local mining or asteroid extraction far cheaper.  
- A 50–100 year round-trip latency at 0.1 c implies a 100–10,000× price premium due to compound discounting, effectively pricing interstellar trade out of any realistic market.  
- Participants note that even extreme longevity does not solve the fundamental problem of opportunity cost; capital invested locally will always outgrow the value of goods shipped across interstellar distances.  
- Exceptions might arise if a destination planet is severely depleted in specific siderophile or rare elements, but Earth’s own crustal scarcity of such elements is still cheaper to address via asteroid mining than via interstellar import.  
- Open-source atomic-force-microscopy (AFM) advances were highlighted: a $3 k “Stromlinet Nano” AFM plus a custom MCU upgrade achieves 100× faster image acquisition, with full design files released on OSF.  
- Additional links shared include a low-voltage “buzzer-scanner” AFM, an open-source skin-corneocyte AFM controller, and a DVD-optical-pickup technique for single-cell isolation.  
- MIT News covered new analog deep-learning hardware that uses a proton-electrolyte memristive device, possibly exploiting proton tunneling, offering “million-fold” improvements in an unspecified energy-delay metric.  
- A Gizmodo retrospective on transhumanism in 2022 was discussed, prompting skepticism about its narrative framing of post-9/11 cultural shifts.  
- Brief side threads touched on verifying dark-web links via PGP-signed onion addresses and the economics of high-energy physics funding.