Humans will bring life to lifeless worlds. World's dead for billions of years will hear laughter.

I predict that by the end of this year, a state or county will attempt to use Transferable Development Rights to create a technological version of the Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve that prohibits the use of AI within the zone. It may or may not also include social media.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it: CLD should never have been run by NASA. It should have always been in Commerce. The same goes for commercial cargo and crew.

If you are discussing AI and use the word conscious or consciousness, please define it. Also, please acknowledge that neither neuroscience nor philosophy has been able to define it.

Are all science fiction/fantasy conventions filled with people who listen to and potentially believe every conspiracy theory about the world? I don't remember it being this bad...

To the tech community. 1. We lost the ability to go to the Moon when president LBJ killed funding for the second production batch of Saturn V vehicles in 1968 due to "budget" (as the budget exploded by 45% to fund the Vietnam war and the Great Society programs). 2. We lost the fully reusable two stage to orbit (TSTO) Space Shuttle design in 1972 due to the same fictitious budget problems. 3. We lost the "Project Independence" in 1974, which would have built 1,000 nuclear power plants, taking America off the oil teat entirely as a response to the 1973 oil embargo. It was killed with the ouster of president Nixon and fear generated by nuclear disaster movies. 4. We lost the dual truss Space Station Freedom that would have been a low earth orbit base of operations for sustainable lunar development in 1990 due to the same mythical "budget" problems, only saving the program when it became a political prop in 1993 to keep the Russians from supporting the Iran nuclear program. 5. We lost the Moon (Space Exploration Initiative) in 1993, concurrently with the Space Station redesign as a change in political parties that used the budget again as their excuse. 6. We lost the Moon once again in 2008 after a restart in 2005 as a new administration with different priorities cut the NASA budget by $2 billion a year and replaced it with vague talk of an asteroid visit mission. 7. We are in a fight of our lives today over AI and the urge of government control and the false hope by certain AI captains that government control is a good thing. We in the space and nuclear power community have fought for decades to overcome these setbacks to the future. There is a persistent need of a certain political persuasion to stifle technological development. (a certain politician in a book about balancing the Earth called techno optimists as dangerous to society. We see this same thing with Burnie the old and his regressive bill to halt AI advancement. The only battle we decisively won, was against limits on encryption as it was stupid. The government wanted backdoors to all encryption, not understanding that any state level effort could find the backdoor and have access to our houses. We won that then, we must win this now, as AI is not doom, it is a tool, like a shovel, a gun, or a nuclear weapon. All are useless without the intent of a human behind it. They are waging a war, on the political front now, and as of today engaging a former president. We are on the other side. We must win, for the sake of the future, all of our future, as our adversaries have laughed at every time we have done something stupid like this. Over 500 years ago a regressive Chinese Emperor burned Zheng He's ships of exploration, that had gone as far as the Horn of Africa. This reactionary hobbled China and led to hundreds of years of weakness. If we lose now, what is next? The fears of nuclear power again? Abandon the Moon yet again? This time we are not alone in this. This time our adversary, with a keen sense of history and a 500 year old grudge against the west, knows exactly what to do. Victoria in futurum! @AnaEapllc, @DataRepublican, @TommyHicksGOP @pmarca @PalmerLuckey @infantrydort, @OmarJPimentel

I’m sorry but America did not spend 250 years turning “what’s over there?” into the most powerful civilization on earth just to finally arrive at the most consequential technological frontier in generations and decide actually we’re scared of frontiers now. We ARE the fucking frontier. We cross oceans. We build railroads across continents. We split atoms. We put men on the moon. We turn sand into computers and computers into a global nervous system. Of COURSE AI is terrifying. The frontier is SUPPOSED to scare the shit out of you. That’s how you know you have, in fact, located the fucking frontier. The answer is not recklessness, but it sure as fuck isn’t paralysis either. America’s comparative advantage is an unusually high national tolerance for ambitious weirdos staring at impossible things and saying “Yeah... I think I can build it.” That trait is rarer than oil, harder to manufacture than semiconductors, and responsible for a frankly preposterous amount of the modern world. And you absolutely will not fucking regulate it out of us.

Back in 2012, just before Planetary Resources was announced, I was putting together a company to grab a small NEO and bring it back to the ISS for study. The business model was to lease it to NASA as a laboratory. The current candidates would be 2006 RH120, 2009 BD, 2011 MD, 2007 UN12, or 2008 EA9. I keep hearing rumors that someone else might be trying this...

"not economic in ten years"? Oh, so you don't want that alpha? Mind if I take it then?

While I like the TLDR newsletter, I need to diversify and shorten my morning catchup. What short-form, curated morning update do you use?

This has to be a South Park episode... terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/…

I lay both the data center and the "slow it all down" freak-out at the feet of Hollywood producers who make terrible allegorical movies disguised as science fiction that audiences will incorrectly assume are predictive.

Wow... Who knew there were Luddites in mathematics... terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/…

Oh my... this just made my day! I am going to every competition I can find.

High School Lincoln-Douglas Debate 2026 September/October Topic Resolved: Outer space colonization is a moral imperative.

The Space Race That Will Decide the Future of Freedom -Charles Miller "The nation that masters rapidly reusable launch will shape commerce, military power, and the global political order of the next century." nationalreview.com/2026/09/t…

This thing where people think SpaceX will solve every problem and build everything we need in space so we can stop worrying about a real space economy is a dangerous mistake. We need to be doing some aggressive, very fundamental materials science research and encouraging multiple systems providers with different goals and business models.

If you dig deep enough into patent case law when it comes to modern computing, you eventually see that all IP is based on one single rule: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

You should go read the President's speech last week about the new Space Academy. It covered the Academy but it also included a lot of clear policy statements about space SETTLEMENT: "astronauts will plant a flag to mark the site of the first permanent American settlement on the Moon." The clear focus on permanent human settlement of space has never been said this clearly before.

There is a generally understood budget level for any federal program that makes it politically sustainable. Enough House/Senate members see the benefits for it to survive the yearly budget process. Cuts may happen, but the program and organization can survive. That was another feature of the post-shuttle workforce preservation programs: they kept the top-line budget high enough so the entire agency wasn't gutted.