I agree with most of this post and think the problems are harder than the proponents are making them seem.

But, 1) literally the smartest people and AI in the world will be working on this and 2) man I want to see us get to a type 2 civilisation bad.

The layout of this blog post is also very interesting, it presents a bunch of very hard items to solve and funny enough the last has been solved recently with starlink. So we can approach this problem, it requires great engineering but it’s possible. Maybe it’s as complicated as CERNs LHC but we have one of those.

Next up then is the strong why? When you’re in space, if you set the cost of electricity to zero, the equation gets massively skewed.

Thermal is the biggest challenge but if you have unlimited electricity, lots of stuff becomes possible. Fluorinert cooling, piezoelectric pumps and dual/multi stage cooling loops with step ups. We can put liquid cooling with piezos on phones now, so that technology is moving in the right direction.

For a thought experiment, if launch costs were $0/kg, would this be possible? If the answers yes, then at some point above $0/kg it becomes uneconomical, the challenge is then to beat that number.