Space, Travel, Technology, 3D Printing, Energy, Writing
This Father s Day, I took some notes on parenting and put them together here. The purpose of this post is to strongly advocate for people to increment their child number, ideally recursively. If you have two, go for three! Five? Six is barely 16% more. I currently have four children, and I think I m just getting the hang of it. This post indexes on my own experience and is thus most likely to be…
Originally posted at the Terraform blog June 16 2026. One of the underrated joys of hardware tech development is having the opportunity to tell and retell the story until it gradually becomes less mysterious. To me, what Terraform is doing was as obvious as breathing five years ago. To others, even long standing employees and investors, some of the finer points are not yet as obvious as they…
The Australian immigration system must exclude dickheads, bullshitters, and bludgers. This post has been inspired by Joe Walker s recent set of three exemplary interviews (Martin Parkinson (former Treasury, author of 2023 migration review), Mark Cully (historian), Mike Pezzullo (senior border official 2013-2023)) on the subject of immigration policy. This comes against a backdrop of growing…
Casey Handmer May 2026 What? Elon has recently (late 2025, early 2026) been talking about building many terawatts of orbital AI compute and launching some components from Moon factories with a mass driver. This is an old idea, enabled by
This post has benefited from generous contributions from Austin Vernon, Malcolm Davis, Sam D Amico, and others who do not necessarily endorse the conclusions of this piece. I will follow Australian spelling conventions in this piece. [Edit: This piece was quoted
Australia s Fiscal Point of No Return Last September I wrote about Australian economic stagnation — how taxation past the Laffer curve s point of peak growth, zero public sector productivity improvement since 2001, and the systematic eradication of manufacturing and ICT from the economy have combined to produce economic stagnation and flatlining living standards. The NDIS and similar social…
I have recently been using Claude Code (Opus 4.6) to do a variety of software projects. One was the completion of an ill-fated attempt to create a custom watch face for my Garmin Epix Pro 47 mm. MidJourney produced this conceptual image for me, which is what I was trying to capture. I wanted azurite/malachite/copper colors, and hands for astronomical details. This would be almost impossible with a…
I recently realized I hadn t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note. The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as where are they? is a question about the apparent lack of intelligent alien life in the universe. The universe is extreme old relative to the speed of light at galactic scales. Light has been able to cross our…
A quick note collating a list of blogs I ve written on the topic. I ll update it with good third party write ups as I become aware of them. Context: SpaceX announced a refocus on lunar development. My best explanation for this is that SpaceX wants to accelerate human occupation of space which, requiring enormous resources to sustain, means accelerating capitalism in space. Five years ago, building…
Casey Handmer, Matt Weickert Originally posted at the Terraform Blog. This post explains our current views on how humanity will achieve Kardashev Level 1 status by exploiting the full energy resources of an entire planet. More specifically, how pure solar+batteries